An Interview In Fractals
by Emma Erlanger
Polly sat down in the plastic chair that faced the solid mahogany desk of Mr. J.D. Peters. She refrained from tapping her toes on the floor or chewing on her fingernails out of nerves. Bright-eyed confidence was the look she was going for today.
“Thank you for coming in,” Mr. Peters began, “I’m sure you know we’ve been seeing a great many candidates this week. So. What makes you think that we should select you?”
Polly blinked once then stopped herself from becoming a flutter of flustered eyelashes. He had gone right for the jugular and straight down to the heart of the matter. She would meet him on his level, or at least she would try.
“I am the man for the job,” Polly said. “Or rather, the woman. I am the person for the job and I can bring a sense of nitty-gritty work ethic to the table and to your team. By work ethic, I mean an urgency to complete the tasks at hand paired with an attention to detail and a real sense of efficiency, which will aid my fellow team members in that I will highlight the specificity of their individual talents and assign them carefully to speed the workload in the most beneficial way possible, so as to motivate the team with a strong hand of leadership and confident morale boosting by attending to the needs of the project via the usefulness, or utility, of the team members to meet deadlines with end-results of the highest quality which has become synonymous with Peters’ Marketing Group, a company now famed for completely turning around dead-end and drowning products into images which are worthy of the high price tags that can follow the success of a Peters’ Marketing Group campaign because the customers and consumers know that if the folks at Peters believe in a product then they can trust it too, with such a long track-record of honesty and directly marketed goods that have done the job time and time again…”
Mr. J.D. Peters’ eyes were glistening at this point, lost in the shimmering kaleidoscopic web of words and ideas that had sprung forth from Polly’s lips to bloom ever onward and outward, branching, branching, branching until every corner of the majestically furnished office was filled and the windows were broken and the building had crumbled and the entirety of the universe was available within these spiraling strings of jargon, here before his eyes as complete and beautiful as if he’d been floating in space.
He looked back down from the heavens and interrupted her from her still-continuing flow.
“You’re hired.”
***
Emma Erlanger is an artist and writer who lives in Los Angeles with four cats and one comedian. Her previous work has mainly been seen in one-off blackbox theater shows in Hollywood. She is very fortunate to have a shared yard, which is the claimed territory of a further six stray cats.