The summer after my Freshman year
of college, I took a part time job at an Office Depot in Nashville, Tennessee.
It wasn’t my first choice for summer work, but I had already signed on for my
second summer working part-time as a student runner at Vanderbilt University on
weekday afternoons. Given that I didn’t have a car of my own, it was either
find a job in the area to occupy my morning hours or spend 5 hours every day
wandering the campus of a university where I was not a student. Vanderbilt has
a beautiful campus, but since my job there already required me to walk around
it for up to 2 hours every day, I felt I’d grow tired of it quickly.
As part of the Office Depot application
process, I had to take a drug test. Let me point out that this is the only
job—out of about ten I’ve had throughout my life—for which I had to take a drug
test. For three years in college I tutored seven-year-olds; no drug test
required. I did not—and do not—use drugs, so I expected it to be a breeze—I’d
walk into the clinic, pee in a cup, and have them declare me coke-free and
employable. It ended up being a two-hour ordeal that I will not explain here
because this is not a story about that test. I passed that test, despite almost
fainting in the shower that morning, vomiting, and being forced to chug black
coffee to induce peeing. Oh yes. I passed that test and took a job as a cashier
at the Office Depot on West End Avenue for the Summer of 2004.
It ended up being a pretty okay
job. Nashville summers are hot and sticky and largely miserable, but the store
was well air conditioned, and since most people don’t like thinking of office
supplies in the summer, we had few customers. We were actually open on the
Fourth of July. Guess what people don’t buy on the Fourth of July? Printer paper and
binder clips. We did have a few customers come in that day, including one
up-and-coming country music star who I accidentally offended by not recognizing
him. But that, too, is another story.
I have a good work ethic, and I
don’t like it when people yell at me. I was the perfect part-time, hourly
retail employee. I got paid minimum wage, but some innate drive to please
people—a trait Darwinism really should have stamped out of the population by
now—coupled with an equally destructive addiction to stress drove me to be
attentive, courteous, and efficient. Looking back, I’m surprised they didn’t
promote me to manager by August.
At the end of the summer, I left
Nashville to go back to school. The following June, I returned, eager to pick
up extra cash. First stop: my old Office Depot. I expected they’d welcome me
back with open arms. Unfortunately, I was met by a staff that had been turned
over by about 90%, so I had to start from scratch. I dutifully filled out an application,
citing my demonstrated excellence at the job.
“Thanks,” the manager—a different
one from the one I’d had—said as I handed him the application. “Now you need to
take the personality test.”
You see, after I’d started the job
the previous summer, corporate had augmented their application process by
requiring all prospective employees to take a short, Myers-Briggs-like test to
see if they were fit to join the esteemed ranks of Office Depot’s frontline
employees. I thought I’d get a pass since the company should have some sort of
file on me that showed I hadn’t engaged in any deviant or troubling behavior
while on the job. I was wrong.
I took the test on a computer
located smack-dab in the middle of the entryway to the store. Why they put it
there, I’ll never know. Maybe so customers walk in and think “Oh wow. The
employees at Office Depot must be the cream of the crop if they can pass a
computerized personality test while standing next to a checkout line! I will
spend money here!”
The questions were pretty
straightforward, designed to test my ethics (“If you saw a customer stealing,
what would you do?”) and people skills (“Is the following statement true or
false: ‘I like to be around people all of the time’”?)
Looking back, I can see it was
questions like this last one that tripped me up. I am a smart person but a
terrible test taker. I’m too literal. So if a question is phrased at all
ambiguously, I will answer it as written, which is often the opposite of how it
was intended. I almost failed my written driver’s test this way. But, again, I
passed that test.
I finished the test, left the
store, and waited patiently for a phone call telling me I was, once again,
gainfully employed by one of the biggest office supply store chains in America.
A few days passed. The call didn’t
come. Meanwhile, I started an internship—my first one ever!—at a local
magazine. The magazine didn’t have a formal internship program. I’d gotten the
position by cold calling the editor and asking if he needed cheap—or even
free—help over the summer. It was a pretty easy process. I was bright-eyed and
eager and what respectable media enterprise turned down cheap labor?
But the part-time, minimum wage
internship wasn’t helping me rake in the dough I was hoping to make. It also
wasn’t keeping me occupied most days of the week, and I was restless.
During my lunch break one day, I
called Office Depot again to see the status of my application. Perhaps the
manager had been extraordinarily busy that week. Perhaps there had been an
accident involving an Office Depot freight truck that had left the store out of
stock of toner or highlighters. What if there were thousands of paper clips
lining the freeway somewhere and dozens of angry customers waving sheaths of uncollated
documents around the store demanding attention? No wonder she hadn’t looked at
my resume.
The phone rang. A man answered.
“Hello.”
For a second I thought I’d dialed
the wrong number and inadvertently woken this poor person. Office Depot employees
don’t answer the store phone with a drawling, tired “Hello.” They answer with a
perky, “Office Depot, how can I help you?” At least, that’s how I used to
answer the phone when I worked there.
“Uhhh…is this the Office Depot on
West End?”
“Yeah.”
“Can I speak to a manager about an
application I filled out last week.”
“Uh yeah. One second.”
I listened to some hold music until
a manager picked up.
“Hello.”
“Hi, yes. My name is Brooke Carey.
I worked for your store last summer and just applied for my old job but haven’t
heard anything. Can you tell me the status of my application?”
“Oh yes,” he said after a pause
during which he retrieved my application. “We reviewed your application but
unfortunately we can’t ask you in for an interview because you didn’t pass the
personality test.”
“Excuse me.”
The manager went on to explain
that, under the new employment policy, applicants had to score high enough on
the personality test in order to even be brought in for an interview. The fact
that I had worked there for three months the previous summer and had never had
a complaint did not matter—I know this because I asked. I asked if he could tell
me what my score was or why it didn’t meet Office Depot’s clearly rigorous
criteria.
“I can’t tell you that.”
“Why not.”
“Corporate policy.”
Figuring that if I continued to
argue my case, the manager would simply throw “corporate policy” out as his
default response to my questions, I hung up, defeated. This was the first test
I’d ever failed.
I called my mom, furious, but also
a little amused. She was, as usual, indignant on my behalf.
“That’s ridiculous.”
“I know.”
Later that day when I picked my mom
up from work, I found her in the back office on the phone. She mouthed to me
excitedly, “Brooke, I’m on the phone with the district manager of Office Depot!”
I had not asked her to do this.
“Here,” she said into the phone. “My
daughter is here, why don’t you talk to her.”
I protested. As irritating as the
Office Depot reapplication process had been, and as pissed as I was that a
corporation wouldn’t look past a clearly phony personality test in order to
actually evaluate its job candidates, I didn’t relish the idea of making a fool
of myself, with my mother’s help, to a man I didn’t know who, most likely had
better things to do and already resented me and my mother for preventing him
from going home to his family.
“Hello,” I said after my mom shoved
the phone into my hand.
The manager introduced himself and
told me he could tell me my score on the test since I’d asked directly. “We don’t
normally do this, though.” Boy, did I feel special.
“It looks like you scored just fine
on three of the four categories we test for, but, unfortunately, you didn’t
score high enough in the energy category.”
The energy category. “What about
that guy who answered the phone at the store when I called today? The one who
sounded like he’d just woken up from a long night of drinking? How high did he
score in the energy category?” I wanted to ask this, but I refrained.
“Unfortunately, despite your
previous employment with us, our corporate policy dictates that we cannot
consider any applicant who fails to score high enough in all four categories.”
Thus ended my career at Office
Depot. Later that week, I went and got a job at Staples.
