WHEN OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS

Given that this is the week of Comic-Con, where hundreds — perhaps thousands! — of artists go to find work or to break in with their first jobs, I thought this would be the right time to recount the ways I’ve seen some people deal with opportunities — in a way that isn’t necessarily in their own best interests.

A young man I’d known for a long time stopped by the office to visit.  In the course of our conversation, I told  him about a person who had poorly handled her “office job” interview at GHG a few days before.  Later on, I mentioned a home for sale up the road that appealed to me because it had a separate residence in the back that would’ve made a wonderful home office or guest house.  We chatted about various other things, too, including a barbecue and what he’d been up to lately in his life and work.

Several days later, he called me to say, “I accept the assistant’s job you offered me.”  All I could think of was, “WHAT assistant’s job did I offer to you?  And why wasn’t I in the room when I offered it?”  I remembered that, years ago, this same young man had wanted to make a few bucks, and I’d paid him to help me steam off some old wallpaper in my house during a remodeling, and he got angry very easily back then.  His screaming at my wife for imagined slights was still indelibly etched in my mind.

A few hours after his call to accept a job I hadn’t offered, a member of his household told me he had been bragging that he would be training to take over MY job and run GHG, and that I’d supposedly offered to buy him a house near GHG’s office.  Clearly something was amiss.

So I picked him up so he could join me for lunch the next day at a Perkins, where I tried to clear up his misunderstanding.  I recounted the conversation to him.  “WHERE did I say anything about actually offering you a job or buying you a house?  In the 17 years I’ve run GHG, you’ve never shown me the slightest interest in working there for me.  Besides, our couple of days of wallpaper adventures didn’t turn out well a few years back, as I recall.”  He looked genuinely confused. 

“Listen,” I said, “if you’re serious enough about this, I could TRY you.  Don’t quit your current part-time job.  Come in to the office every Thursday, 11 to 7.  I’ll start you by having you do odds and ends around the office — and we’ll have you learn to update and manage our online store.  Spend some time this week before then, check out our store, do a little research of how similar online stores are run, maybe order something off it so you can understand the process, and we’ll try this.  If you master it and do a great job, we can expand from there.”

As I spoke, his knuckles grew white.  Finally he said, “I’ve got to get out of here.”  He bolted outside.  After I paid the tab, I found him in the parking lot, sobbing into his hands.  “Life is so hard!  I need to change my life.  This wasn’t what I was expecting, this doesn’t solve anything.” 

“But it’s a beginning,” I said to him.  “You have no office experience, no business experience, no training, and you need to start somewhere.”  We sat in the parking lot for a good hour and a half, with him talking about his life.  I emphasized that if he had real hope of making this opportunity turn out well for him, he’d need to learn  to modulate his anger and deal kindly, and well, with people, because ours is a people business. 

We ended with him telling me, “I’ll prove to you I can do this.  I’ll show you how much I want this.”

That Thursday, he didn’t show up at 11.  At 2:30 or so — about three-and-a-half hours into what was supposed to be his first day — he phoned me to say he had to be somewhere else.  He never followed up to reschedule his first day.  The next Thursday he failed to show up.  And the next.  And the next.

I finally saw him for a moment when I was out and about, and I asked him what happened.  He snapped that I had “withdrawn the job offer” because my wife was afraid of him — and we were ruining his life.   He exploded with anger, repeatedly smashing his right fist into his left hand, breaking blood vessels.  It was a chilling sight.

“I don’t understand,” I told him.  “You GOT what you wanted!  I hired you for the job so you could learn and grow into it.  You didn’t show up!”

“I don’t care, whatever,” he said, and he walked away.

He showed me how much he wanted it, all right.