The day Geoffrey and Georgia Gamble took the elevator down twenty-three floors and passed out the revolving glass doors at the bottom of their exempire, an unassuming Caucasian male American by the name of Jonathan B. Tweep pushed his way through those very same tinted-glass doors.
The human resources department of GGG was on the first floor. It was largely a waiting room with clipboards and forms and sign-up sheets. In the old days, before GGG had bought the building, the human resources department had been a temporary placement agency for secretaries and word processors. GGG didn’t have to do a thing. It simply bought out the temp agency, changed the nameplates and replaced the pink carpets with a more executive tan. All the temps were immediately given permanent placement on one of the twenty-three floors of GGG.
J.B. examined the clipboards with unusual scrutiny. He collected clipboards or, more broadly speaking, paper clips. (J.B. defined anything that held paper together as a paper clip.) He sat in the waiting room of GGG and filled out the information on one of the clipboards offered to him. Then he flipped through his personal file folder and found a résumé which he had coded “SCWP” (secretarial, clerical, word processor) and pulled it out. It seemed to have the qualifications that matched the requirements for GGG’s latest job posting. He had résumés that presented him with the qualifications for every sort of job imaginable, but he read the SCWP-coded résumé again to make sure it did not include any extraneous skills like “supervisor” or “manager.”
J.B. turned in his résumé and application and thumbed through GGG’s pamphlets on health benefits, group tours, and aerobics. He also read GGG’s newsletter, which still sported a photograph of Geoffrey and Georgia and Georgia’s “Letter from the President.” He looked at Geoffrey and Georgia’s photograph with simplistic awe and thought that it might be even possible to apply for their jobs, little knowing that he had in fact passed them on the way in. J.B. slipped the newsletter into a clipboard and surreptitiously stuffed it all into his briefcase folder.
J.B. had handed his résumé to a short, curly-red-haired receptionist with long red nails that matched the color of her hair and a voice like a Dallas telephone operator. The exact same voice, a pitch higher, called out his name, “Mr. Tweep, please come in.”
J.B. jumped up and followed this second woman who looked strangely like the receptionist but was not. This curly-red-haired woman also had red nails but was a tad heavier and older. She smiled sweetly and managed to talk about the weather, how busy they were at GGG, where she was going for her vacation, and her dental appointment, all before they got to the office of the personnel interviewer. The red-haired woman who was a tad heavier nodded to a seat for J.B., left a folder on the desk of the personnel interviewer, and closed the door behind her.
J.B. looked up at the personnel interviewer in some confusion because she too was a curly redhead with matching red nails and a Dallas telephone operator’s voice yet another notch higher. She flipped through the papers in the folder and smiled sweetly.
“Mr. Tweep, can I call you Jonathan?”
“Sure,” J.B. nodded.
“Marvelous. We’re great believers in making people comfortable. An interview shouldn’t be such an ordeal, now should it, Jonathan?”
“No, it should be a straightforward conversation in which the job applicant and the prospective employer converse openly and equally to obtain information to assess whether either, in fact, desires to work with the other.” J.B. had once been a personnel interviewer. In fact, J.B. had been many things over the employable years of his life. The résumé the interviewer now reviewed was only one of many résumés, the sum total of which still did not completely describe the man sitting before her.
J.B. was the sort of person who had gone through life trying everything and being second-best at everything. Life was a great elective divvied up into a series of smaller electives. There was nothing he had not tried, but for some reason, there was nothing in particular he wanted to do all the time and forever. If J.B. could have afforded the title, he might have been called a dilettante. But although he was second-best in everything he happened to pursue, no one seemed to really notice. Perhaps it was because he found all tasks so easy and, therefore, boring that J.B. himself was an unassuming projection of boredom. He was what might be called second-best in obscurity or unrecognized talent, but more often, he was stamped “overqualified.”
Those who did not know J.B. personally made the assumption that his unassuming manner and obscurity were the protective wall behind which he hid what they believed to be a defect or a freak of nature: J.B.’s third arm. But J.B. was far from ashamed of his extra appendage and only kept it out of sight to prevent hysterical reactions from observers on drugs or those prone to wild hallucinations. He accepted his third arm as another might accept ESP, an addition of 128K to their random access, or the invention of the wheel. As far as J.B. was concerned, he had entered a new genetic plane in the species. He even speculated that he was the result of Nobel prize-winning sperm. He was a better model, the wave of the future.
J.B. not only thought his third arm was advantageous, he knew it was. He might have been an acclaimed pianist. He could float three consecutive runs up the keyboard or bang out three octaves, all at the same time, but J.B. lost interest in the piano because there was nothing written for his particular expertise. Chopin and Beethoven were no longer a challenge. In baseball, J.B. was asked to leave the team because there were no rules for a two-mitt player, and besides, no one could get a ball past him. In a factory production line, J.B. was so fast, he threw his fellow workers down the line, who were unable to keep up with such a pace, into chaos. Once he had juggled balls in a circus. The other clowns were jealous, and people laughed every time they dumped water on J.B. during an act. In the matter of love making, well, the advantages were obvious.
Obscurity and an unassuming manner, then, were just part of J.B.’s personality. Maybe it ran in the family. Few people ever suspected his multitude of talents or his additional endowment. But J.B., in his quiet way of sampling everything, was in fact motivated by a simmering enthusiasm for collecting paper clips and the exercise of finding a job. If anyone were to ask him what he was doing in life or what his personal goals were, he would simply answer, “To find a job.”
Before entering GGG Enterprises, J.B. had tried an enormous variety of jobs, everything from being a pickpocket to shoveling MacDonald’s hamburgers, three at a time, on a grill. Somehow, J.B. had a feeling, a sensation felt in his third arm, that GGG had something to offer him that no other company before had been able to and that he, of course, had something unique to offer GGG.
The interviewer smiled with engaging Southern enthusiasm. They could have been on a front porch, fanning the tepid humidity and drinking mint juleps. She went on, “It says here that you can type 120 words a minute on a typewriter and process 240 words a minute on a word processor. Now, is that possible?”
J.B. said sincerely, “Actually, I’m faster by thirty words on a typewriter and another fifty on the word processor, but you know how it is when you take the tests; you always make more mistakes when you’re under pressure.”
The interviewer nodded sweetly and even asked the right question, “Jonathan, that’s an incredible speed! What’s your secret?”
J.B. matter-of-factly pushed the hidden sleeve through his jacket and produced his third arm.
The personnel interviewer blanched slightly but maintained her sweetness. “Oh well, Jonathan, of course,” she sputtered. “We are an equal opportunity employer. We employ our personnel regardless of color, creed, or handicap.” She was about to say that only last week, they had hired a Vietnam veteran who had lost his arm during action in the Mekong Delta, and that J.B. could actually even things up, but she remembered her position as a personnel interviewer. She wouldn’t give any indication of their interest in hiring J.B until a decision was made. It was not wise to encourage an applicant’s hopes.
When the interview was over, J.B. shook her hand with one of his three hands and gestured amiably with another; this was a clever distraction allowing him to snatch an irresistible handful of heart-shaped paper clips from an acrylic tray on her desk. Then, he walked out with the correct balance of confidence and humility he knew personnel interviewers looked for. He could hear the interviewer pick up her phone and buzz her supervisor, “Can I come and talk with you,” she said. “I have a special situation . . .”
Before reentering the waiting room, J.B. could see through an open door into a larger office. Once again, another curly red-haired woman with long red nails in a suit sitting at a large desk picked up her comline.
J.B. felt his throat itch and tighten. The supervisor’s voice answered in the same Dallas telephone operator’s voice, yet another notch higher in this scale of voices, “Honey, I have my weekly corporate culture meeting in about fifteen minutes, but come on in.” J.B. jimmied one of his little fingers into an ear. He could hear the notes in his inner ear rise with every position. Receptionist, secretary, coordinator, supervisor, manager, director, vice president, president. Dropping the heart-shaped paper clips into a pocket, the thumb and index finger of the third hand stretched an entire octave.