What are your weaknesses?

We have a high turnover at my day job because we work for fascists. It’s not really obvious, on the surface, that we work for fascists. It’s this sort of creeping, passive-aggressive thing. After a few years you find yourself in a watchtower at a concentration camp and your supervisor asks you to rape and then dismember an eight year old girl and you go, “Oh. Wait a minute… Where am I?”

Most of us make peace with this because, at the end of it all, we’re all sitting in darkened offices watching Netflix and running our own companies. I have a publishing company, a co-worker is a dispatcher for an electrician company, another one knits quilts, another is a wedding planner, and so on… Sometimes, when you think about health insurance and retirement benefits, life looks pretty good from up in that watchtower. I get a month vacation each year and I watch six hours of TV a day. What do you want me to do with the eight year old when I’m done, massa?

Because this is the environment we all live in, a few of us look for challenges. This usually involves drug dealing, hosting drinking parties in the executive lounge, having sex in the transgender bathroom, smoking pot on the roof, or any number of wicked things. My poison is to apply for every single job opening, whether I’m qualified or not, and then heckle the HR lady who handles the preliminary interviews.

When something opens up at my day job, the first step, after you fill out the application, is to receive an ominous call from HR asking you to come down as soon as possible. This is the preliminary interview, where you sit down at a table and some vapid creature with dog-like eyes asks you a battery of questions that are all lifted from the textbook we all know so well. What are your weaknesses? What are your strengths? Where do you see yourself in five years? If a train leaves Chicago at 80MPH…

I struggle with these questions. I know there are power answers that are also lifted from some textbook somewhere, but I just can’t bring myself to use them. What are my weaknesses? I’ve survived massive emotional abuse, family tragedy of epic proportions, and 12 years of extreme, seemingly incurable nerve pain. I have no weaknesses. If I did, I’d be dead.

I fail to understand the purpose of jumping through the hoops. I used to try and answer properly. You know – my weakness is that I’m too dedicated to sucking my boss’s cock. In some cases, it makes sense to play the game. What dispelled any respect I have for HR at my day job, though, came in 2002 when I first started applying for internal openings. I asked for more information on the job. I asked if they could describe what I would be doing (this is before we had nice, clean-cut job description forms). The HR person had no idea. They didn’t even know what the job was. The same problem came up six months ago when I applied for a social media job. The HR person said “it has to do with Facebook…or something” and, when I asked for the title (which I knew already from the posting), she replied, “Um…posting 1305.” The requirements? The supervisor? She didn’t know. Yet…there are the questions. What are your weaknesses? What makes you qualified for *click* *whir* *computer voice* POSTING 1-3-0-5?

Well, some years ago, I started playing with the weaknesses question. My answers have always been honest:

(1) Women with too much baggage. I have always struggled to understand my near crippling attraction to broken women. I don’t want to help them, or save them, or fix them. I just want to hang out with them. I think they’re fun, until they aren’t. Until the weepy 2am revelations, the knife fights, and the dramatic public displays of fear and loathing. I’ve always been terribly bored by women. I find normal, functional women to be about as interesting as watching paint dry. In relationships, I look more for adventure than anything else. Anything – dear god – that’ll break up the sad, horrific rhythm of my humdrum days. So I embrace women who have known suffering. I’ve known suffering. Plenty of it. I’m strangely comforted when I tell my terrible life story and they’re able to trump it. I (sometimes mistakenly) assume that this means they understand that we’re all doomed. They get it. They won’t try to help, save, or fix me. Because I fucking hate that. Look, bitch, let’s you and I just take our baggage and drive down to New Orleans and open a faux antique shop and have sex all the time and not fucking talk about any of this horrible shit. Let’s talk about Abita seasonal brews instead. Mmm…ain’t that yummy. Yes, I’ll have another. Don’t sneak up on me, I’m armed today.

(2) Vodka. I wasn’t always about vodka. I started drinking at 21, and had a beer thing going. Well…that’s not true. I started drinking when I was in my mom’s belly. And whenever I cried for too long. Or got a cold. But I didn’t drink seriously till I was 21. By 24, I moved into the hard liquors because my Cherokee friend told me that all writers should have a signature brand of scotch. When in doubt, I should open my desk drawer and have a bottle roll towards me. Tip back my fedora and pour myself a tall drink in a stained mug. It was a dark and stormy night when she walked into my office… A bad episode with a friend in college got me off of brown liquor and I moved into rum. Rum got me going till about 2002 or so when I went to a vodka tasting at a French restaurant. It was a date with a woman who had too much baggage, and she ended up fucking the bartender in the bathroom. He felt bad, so he gave me a shot each of their designer vodkas. He taught me how to recognize and appreciate good vodka. Of course, more often than not, it’s Absolut or some other shit in my freezer. As we approach the ten year mark of having vodka as my liquor of choice, I’m prepared to go ahead and acknowledge it as a weakness.

(3) Fear of Heights. I have an odd fear of heights. I can go way up – like at the Empire State Building or the World Trade Center – and it’s no problem. But I get sweaty and shaky going down escalators, or even walking down the five marble steps at my day job’s front lobby. I’ve often heard people say that the real fear is not being able to stop yourself from jumping, but I think my fear revolves around the knowledge that I can very easily crack my skull on slippery marble steps and drown in a pool of my own blood. Drowning in a pool of my own blood is also a fear. Are these fears weaknesses? Yes. Because I should always be prepared to drown in a pool of my own blood after falling out the front door of a bus and braining myself on a telephone pole. As a Team Member, I will seek daily to overcome these fears.

(4) Life-like latex sex dolls. Remember that movie about the guy who falls in love with the Real Doll? That really creeped me out. Like, more than Hopkins sniffing the air for a hint of Jodi Foster’s cunt. I just can’t take the life-like sex dolls. I don’t mind dolls and shit like that as long as they’re innocent children’s toys. It’s when you get down to catering to the truly despicable and demented elements of the human psyche where you cross a line. Why would I want to fuck a doll? You will not believe how many women I have in my account at the spank bank. I can close my eyes and summon any of them, put them in any situation. But, then, I’ve always been most attracted to flawed women. It’s the problems I embrace, both mental and physical. The things that make you think the girls should be returned to the factory. Ooh, something wrong there. Is there a lemon law in this relationship? You can’t get that with a doll. So…I guess my weakness here is that I don’t enjoy fucking dolls.

(5) Work. My greatest weakness is that I have to work. It’s dragging me down, getting in the way of my dreams, and betraying everything that is good about life. At work, I have to face simpletons from HR, co-workers who should be in prison, and customers who make me come out in favor of genocide. The mere fact that I have to sit and try to think up some stupid go-getter answer to “what are my weaknesses” is something that makes me weak. The absurd, day-to-day salary serfdom sickens me to the core. This insane belief that we should destroy our lives for a few pennies a day and be grateful for it should be sending us out onto the streets with pitchforks and torches…but, no. It doesn’t. And why not? Because we are weak. Because you’ve destroyed us. You, HR shitheel, are my weakness. So…what do we do about that? And when do you expect I’ll hear about the job? Also, I torched your car 30 minutes ago.