If you are not a faint-hearted "Pollyanna" you may
appreciate this social science fiction from one of my
previous reincarnations:
A large multi-national corporation wanted to hire the
perfect candidate for their fast-track career ladder to
top marketing management. The search agency reviewed each
applicant in the usual thorough detail, including all the
appropriate checking of family background, personal and
experience references, and colleges attended, followed at
last by the customary drug screening.
The best description of the favored candidate was a
"walking disease" comparable to Dorian Gray, the main
character in Oscar Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian Gray".
He was a long-time drug addict and compulsive liar with
pedophile tendencies, and a con artist who preyed on inept
female associates, gullible customer staff, and naive
students. During the pre-employment process he:
*** fabricated his past education history,
*** padded his earned income history with his wife's
income,
*** bluffed through every probing question,
*** used an emergency to stall the drug screening test,
and
*** chemically altered the test sample.
He was hired! Of course he was delighted! To him this
was his ultimate victory as a liar and con artist. He
never realized that the recruiters were "on to him",
almost from the start of the game. They had their orders.
In the eyes of his new management, he had passed all
obstacles with flying colors!
What were his strange talents that swayed the decision?
Well, the decision-makers noted he was young, appeared
energetic, lied as fast as he talked, and was a shrewd
observer of human nature, a "quick study". To top it off,
he had a most amazing talent for being able to keep his
fictions straight without notes across completely separate
scenarios, not only over the course of many years, but
also down to minute by minute changes with each change of
listener!
Somewhere early on in life he had absorbed the lesson that
unwary interviewers really "wanted to believe" him. They
did not really "listen" to his responses to their
questions, and THEY DID NOT CROSS-CHECK his answers. To
him every person in his environment was an "enemy", every
confrontation was "war". Words, especially false ones,
were his inexhaustible supply of expendable weapons. It
was ridiculously easy for him to "blind-side" an opponent
with extraneous tragic "sob stories" (about family members
for whom he cared nothing) by which he deftly shifted the
focus of attention away from facts and toward sympathetic
emotions.
His new company management had great things in mind for
him, and planned to keep him happy and content with "team
player" ego massages and many pay raises to support his
drug habit. He would become a delayed action "mole",
waiting until that time when he would be called upon to
exercise his unique talents to the fullest in court or
Congressional hearings or whatever. Depending on the
circumstances, he might then be discarded with the trash,
if he was exposed or otherwise deemed no longer useful...
"FAR FETCHED", you say.
Not at all. Of course this tale is an allegory. But,
probably most of us retired ("wannabe", but too chicken)
"whistle blowers" observed many, many, inexplicable
business decisions during our working careers. We did not
have access to the most sensitive personnel records, so we
could only guess, based on observation of performance, or
from hearing "cat out of the bag" confessions while
walking across the parking lot with a fellow management
employee, or just plain "putting two and two together".
Another story would have been cute, except that the idiot
ended up working for me! He had taken a (non-binding)
Civil Service exam for the job. Out of 44 applicants he
scored DEAD LAST. I asked my boss why he hired the guy.
His reply: "HE WON'T QUIT!"
