Today I went for my first ever job interview. When I was 16 I had a job at a Jungle Gym, but my mum knew the owner, so I was a shoe in. It was my first experience of nepotism, and I've never since been able to wash the stain from my name-badge. Four years later I was determined to put things right. So I handed my CV in to Monster, sat back, and waited. A day later the first phone call came through.
"Hello, it's Ashi here from the recruitment agency, we like your CV. Would you like a job?"
Two days later I realised my mistake, but by then it was too late. And so I waited longer. Three days, four, five weeks. Nothing. Six months later, just when I was thinking of giving up and handing my CV in somewhere else instead, my phone began to buzz.
"Hello, this time it's Louise here from a different recruitment agency. Would you like a slightly better job?"
This time I'd done it! I'd nailed it! Pitch perfect. But there was a caveat, a catch 22, a Faustian pact, a job interview. Hoisted! But I was not deterred. I brushed the crumbs from my lap into a sandwich bag to be re-compressed later, crammed my shoes on, and went to put on some clothes.
The theme I settled on after much thought was 'blood opulence'. Dark, soaked-red shirt, inky purple trousers which sparkle in the moonlight, and salmon-pink suede, knee-high boots. The impression I was aiming for was of royalty and of bloodlust. I wanted to show that I wasn't afraid to tread on toes, or even stamp on heads and commit other petty crimes to get to the top. I could see in my mind's eye my name etched into an opaque glass door in gold-pen. 'Samuel Nicoresti, Call Centre Operative, 2013-' and then a gap, just in case I died.
So I donned my battle-garb. But there was a problem; one fatal flaw in my perfect plan. My beautiful red shirt was missing a button! And not just any button, the middle button. The lynch pin of the entire operation! The belly button, if you would. I had to think fast. The interview was on Monday, and all these clothes needed to be pressed. I, or my girlfriend, I forget which, suggested I wear a tie. I scoffed at her/myself.
'A tie? Fuck off!' I said/imagined.
'No, it'd look good' She/I said/re-imagined. Eventually I conceded. My house-mate was away, and I knew for a fact he had a wardrobe full of ties because I'd once hidden in there for twenty hours on his birthday. So I stomped upstairs and flung open his doors, and by boy was I surprised!
I had opened a gateway to Narnia, a treasure chest from another world. I had never understood until that moment just how beautiful a tie could be. My experience with ties is limited. When I was at school I was forced to wear one to demonstrate conformity. Sometimes I'd wear one round my head. Occasionally I'd asphyxiate myself with one erotically. A tie was an oppressive instrument. A tagging system to demonstrate to neighbouring schools that you were bullyable, and to flag up to newsagents that you were too young to smoke. I hated ties. But when I flung open those wardrobe doors and stepped inside the small plywood box, mistaking it for one of those fancy wardrobes off the adverts, I felt decades of anger melt away.
What met my eyes was not the horizontal stripes and dual-colours I had become accustomed to in my youth, but a world of fabric and surrealism that felt like the byproduct of Dali getting off with a silk worm. There was sleek oriental silk delicately balanced with a creamy inside. Dark, broody kaleidoscopic flowers bursting from out a muddy pond; purple lining. One stretched out to a wide lagoon at its base, adorned with opals containing bridled horses, flowers, and for some reason the Telenor logo. The wider the tie, the more I stared at it. These thick wedges were not mere clothing attire, they were a peacock's plumage. They were great swords, and clan tartans, and wild crowns. Honorific sashes of business royalty. I tried to imagine Alfred the Great wearing a tie with little paintings of pigs on it. It fitted him like a glove. Or a tie. A tie, I realised, was not a signifier of conformity. It was a splash of audacity. The boldest statement a working man could make. I stood there, in the jet-blackness of the wardrobe, breathing in the musty air, letting the silk strips brush against my cheeks, and fondling the exquisite lining with my toes. Heaven. Pure bliss.
I sent my girlfriend packing (literally, she was going home/away for a year), ran a bubble bath, laid each tie out on my housemate's bed, and googled 'sensual spanish music'. Redemption - Al Marconi. Perfect. Having bathed, I slunk upstairs, whacked on a shirt, and began the dance. Tie after tie whirled about my head, caressing the folds of my shirt, sliding down my mid-front. Hours passed in a haze. I was delirious with ties. This was insane. Each one brought a whole new meaning to my existence, to who I was as a person. By the time the morning came I realised I was no closer to choosing the perfect tie. I imagined it would be a bit like in Harry Potter. I expected sparks to fly when I found 'the one', or gusts of Savannah wind to blow through my Sheffield flat, but if I'm being honest that's how all of them made me feel. The job interview was in 3 hours. What to do… What to do…
Three hours later I was sat in the interviewing room, bold as brass, fifty ties draped casually around my neck. I felt good. I felt confident. The lady was still interviewing another candidate. I'd arrived quite early and hadn't bothered to stop at reception. Why would I? I had fifty ties on. The lady was asking all sorts of questions. Sometimes I would help out by interjecting with my own answers, other times I would talk under the conversation, offering the interviewee feedback like,
'Twat', and 'Where's your tie, you twat?' Honestly, where was this girl's shitting tie? The girl couldn't handle this stressful environment very well, and I made a note of telling the lady this loudly whilst the girl was still rattling on about GCSEs, or degrees. What a goner.
'What a shitting shame', I whispered.
Another two interviews and finally it was my turn. I took the hot seat and made some quip about Mastermind which didn't quite work because someone slammed a door at a pivotal word. I made sure the lady could see my fifty ties proudly poking out from beneath my sweater. The dance began again, though this time, no Redemption - Al Marconi. No bother.
'What transferable skills do you feel you have?'
I smiled. Gently, I shifted my body weight from one side of the swivel chair to the other. My ties caught the light. Her eyes were drawn irresistibly to them for the twentieth time that hour. I felt like Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct, only my vagina was made out of ties, unlike Stone's, which had just been a normal one.
The lady seemed uncomfortable. No doubt she was. The floor was porcelain tiled, I'd been sweating profusely from my neck for the last three hours, and it had created quite a pool for the swivel chair to slip around in violently. Luckily the ties were quite absorbent. But all the same they were becoming increasingly heavy around my neck, like fifty albatrosses, or albatroi, flapping about in the breeze of the floor fan. Five minutes later and the interview was over. Spent, I headed home. I collapsed into bed, exhausted. My knee-high suede boots were ruined by the moisture, and my trousers no longer glittered, but the ties still shone with their own transcendent light, like Jesus in Renaissance art. I vowed never to wear anything but ties ever again, and set about weaving a thick suit out of my housemate's tie rack.
In the end I got the job. Of course I did. My credentials were impeccable. I had to abandon the tie suit after a verbal warning, but I still wear at least fifty ties every day, discreetly, between a false 'outer' shirt and an inner 'true-shirt' layer.
So next time you're at home and you get a call from a company trying to mis-sell you PPI, before you hang up the phone and go about your day, just take a second to ask how many ties they're wearing. You may just be pleasantly alarmed.
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