My Awful, Stupid, No Good Tendency to Tell the Truth

In which honesty is, against all odds, rewarded

The year I got married, my wife was working for a company in Maryland and they were looking for IT people. I was a newly arrived immigrant and, you know, jobless and poor, and thoroughly apprehensive about my chances of making it in America. As a courtesy to my wife, her workplace invited me to interview with them, which was terrifically nice of them, frankly.

I tried so hard that day. I even put on a suit, something I am never enthusiastic about because, and this is actually embarrassing — I look a little too good in them. No matter the suit’s quality, I somehow look startlingly noticeable, in a way I do not seem to enjoy. They also have a perplexing and rather concerning effect on other people. They start to act strangely. In a suit, I seem to transform into what appears to be the most interesting and informed individual within miles. In a decent three-piece suit, I become unexpectedly credible and convincing. Strangers appear out of nowhere and invite me to have meals with them. It’s stressful, frankly. Also — and this was most unsettling — the instant I put on a suit, everyone immediately assumes that I’m in charge of everything.

Imagine a fire breaks out in your workplace, and you happen to be wearing a suit. Now everyone is staring at you, waiting for you to instruct them to calmly exit the building. Why do they need somebody in a suit to put forth such obvious statements? That’s what I’d like to know. Everyone’s watching you, which is awkward in its own way. It also makes starting random fires around the workplace that much more of a challenge.

Below is the only extant picture of me in a suit, back from when I was a wee lad. I look a bit cross in the photo, on account of all the looks I was receiving from passers-by.

I occasionally erred on the side of being a Bounder.

My particular problem is that, whilst wearing a suit, I seem to transform from a somewhat affable Rapscallion into some sort of interesting Bounder. The trouble is, I never aspired to be anything other than a Rapscallion. Well, no — some days I dabbled with Roguery, and during inclement weather, I have occasionally veered off into Scoundrel territory, but obviously my heart is never in it. But a Bounder? There’s too much climbing out of windows and avoiding aggrieved husbands for my liking. I’m simply more content being a Rapscallion. On the downside, nobody ever quite trusts or believes anything you say. Then again, you can live your life as a functioning introvert, which is something I could never manage as a Bounder.

Now, as I was saying, I went along to that job interview in Maryland and I answered their questions as honestly as I could. And this, of course, is where I go wrong every time.

But job interviews are ridiculous, aren’t they? They expect you to lie so much — it’s an awful procedure! Suddenly, somehow, and ever since early childhood, a person’s deepest and most searing passion, their one true ambition, has been (for instance) to design marketing paraphernalia for the pharmaceutical industry. Yes, suddenly the only thing that gets them out of bed each morning is the thought of building stockholder value for a Fortune 500 company.

Meanwhile, those trusty human resources people, with their ornamental degrees in psychology on their wall, sit and listen, transfixed with delight. This candidate, they think, has a lifelong passion for creating marketing paraphernalia for the pharmaceutical industry! What a unique fit for our organization! What a perfect candidate to help bring a new range of incontinence pills to market. And so on, and so forth.

Are they credulous, or simply mad? Nobody thinks, ‘Goodness, some people will say just about anything to avoid sleeping in a cardboard box and eating discarded hotdogs from the trash bins behind the local Seven-Eleven’. My point, I suppose, is that I don’t know why people believe anything that is said in an interview.

I have this appalling tendency to be honest, which makes the process tricky. Interview me, and ask my opinion of the Microsoft Corporation, for example, and ... well, on a good day I might say something like, ‘Some of their employees seem actually quite nice’.

If it’s raining, however, and I seem to have lost my umbrella somewhere, I might add, ‘Though sadly, their products aren’t ready for Enterprise’.

In the case of seriously inclement weather, I will launch into an involuntary sermon that touches upon the banality of evil. Thank goodness for the weather, I suppose, for giving me something to blame.

Now, that interview I attended for the job in Bethesda, Maryland, completely changed the course of my life. You see, on my way to the interview, I was so nervous about the entire thing that I boarded the wrong train. I realized this only just in time, and promptly leapt from the carriage right as the doors were closing. Then I ran up the nearest flight of escalators, which was traveling in the wrong direction, reached the top of the platform, and bounded down the next escalator. My train, the one I was supposed to have boarded, was just below — I had seconds to get down there and through those doors. But obviously, halfway down, I slipped. I tumbled down the escalator, hurt my arm quite badly, staggered to my feet, and threw myself onto the train as if my entire economic future depended upon it. Fifteen minutes later, I limped into my first American job interview, half blind with pain and questioning every decision that had led me to that moment.

(My arm would ache for more than a year, but as any newly arrived immigrant in the United States knows, who can afford a doctor?!)

So, how did the interview go? Well, it went surprisingly well, right up to the moment when somebody mentioned the Microsoft Corporation. And look, even if I hadn’t recently fallen halfway down a flight of escalators, I doubt I could have managed to say anything nice about Microsoft. To my credit, I was honest. But the pain, I think, helped me speak with more feeling and conviction than I probably felt.

Needless to say, I did not get the job. I was supposed to say, “Oh, I love Microsoft”, but, again, dishonesty has always been a bit tricky for me.

I don’t like to even mention this, but when I was a child, I had a stutter, and I somehow feel that my mad aversion to dishonesty is related to it. What is also strange is that, since my return to Australia, my stutter has worsened considerably. It’s a daily occurrence, now, though in the US, it had all but vanished. The matter perplexes me. Lately, I have wondered if I have a deep-seated, irrational belief that telling the truth will prevent me stuttering. Not that it matters at this point, because it’s the habitual honesty that trips me up. One time, a colleague told me she was dating a man who played the banjo. My (nervous) response was: ‘Well, never-mind, I’m sure he’s a decent person, nonetheless’. I hate stuttering; I was mocked mercilessly about it, as a small child. But perhaps there is no underlying cause behind any of this, and this is all simply the hand I’ve been dealt. I doubt I’ll ever understand it.

So, as I was saying, I didn’t get the job. The following week, my wife (who you will remember was working for that company at the time) received a generous raise. A compassionate gesture, I think, stemming from the fact she had recently married someone who seemed to be a prize lunatic.

It was a setback in my life, though in retrospect I have realized that if they had hired me, I would not, the following year, have applied as a temp at Harvard University. Which was a far better outcome, because I absolutely loved working there.

Now, at Harvard, I was lucky. I didn’t even need an interview; I merely turned up at the temp agency wearing a suit. They took one look at me and sent me over to Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, to work the Help Desk.

Now, despite my various social ineptitudes, I did fairly well. I was tasked with assisting all the students, staff and faculty — everyone in the building, in fact — with whatever random computer problem they happened to have that day. And there were a lot of problems indeed, because, back then, if you let an unpatched version of Windows XP connect to the network, then that machine would be infected with a virus in less than a minute. No, really, this is all true. My first job at Harvard was to run around, patching student-owned laptops. I still think it was a silly situation, but say what you like about Microsoft, they’re good at creating jobs out of thin air.

Those three months at the Graduate School of Design, which were mostly spent removing malware and viruses, turned me into a Linux user. I’d been using Linux since 2003, but only cautiously, out of concern that an open source operating system might lead me to wanting to grow a beard. You see, I cannot abide beards, for a very good reason, as you’re about to learn.

In August of 2001, I grew a goatee. I no longer remember why and I urge you to overlook the incident because, after all, which among us is perfect? Then one morning, I happened to glance in a bathroom mirror and realized, at last, that the goatee made me look a bit like a traveling hypnotist. I stared a little longer at my reflection. No, I decided, I looked like an agent of the Underworld who has been sent upon Earth to make supernatural bargains in exchange for people’s souls.

In a state bordering on panic, I shaved that goatee off. When I exited the bathroom, I learned that a plane had crashed into a building in New York. Yes, it was the morning of September 11, 2001 and, needless to say, I no longer feel I can risk growing any sort of facial hair ever again, for fear for what might happen should I ever shave it off.

My point, of course, is that when my three-month stint at the Graduate School of Design came to an end, I disliked Microsoft even more than I had the previous year, when I blew that job interview in Maryland. But my (new) employers were happy with me and I was sent over to Harvard Medical School, which is across the river, in Longwood. But what happened next was so thoroughly unusual and complicated that it would require an entire book to explain it properly, and that’s not hyperbole: I actually wrote an entire book about it which, for legal reasons, I had to publish as fiction. Nonetheless, I would encourage you to regard the book as a faithful retelling of true events. Even the bit with the ghost.

At some point during my second month of temping at Harvard Medical School, I was summoned to an office on the fifth floor of the Countway Medical Library, ostensibly to fix a computer, though I later suspected that that was merely a pretext. While I was in that office, someone entered the room, sat down in a chair across from me and started asking me a lot of rather strange questions. Of course, me being me, I did my best to answer each question with that same open-hearted honesty that has, throughout my life, always brought such trouble and grief down upon my head.

I admitted, for example, precisely what I thought of President George W. Bush. I said something like, ‘You ever notice how your presidents go to war against random countries? Say, some Saudis stage a terrorist attack on American soil. Well, the next thing you know, your president has declared war on Iraq, whom the Saudis rather dislike. Make it make sense!’

Mind you, if I was having that conversation today, I would have said, ‘Say your President is snubbed by the Nobel Prize Committee, so he writes a letter to the Norwegian Prime Minister, who has nothing to do with the Nobel Committee, threatening to make war on their neighbor, the Kingdom of Denmark, to secure some mineral reserves in Greenland. Make it make sense!’

But American presidents are never chosen for their grasp of geography, geopolitics, or their ability to understand maps. It’s one of the so-called timeless traditions of the office, I suppose. In any case, my (profoundly unwise and reckless) observations about the American president had amused my interviewer.

Then, in an almost irrevocable way, they asked me how I felt about the Microsoft Corporation.

As I had now, obviously learned, it was expected of me to say something neutral or positive. I wanted to, I really did. This is what I said:

“People like to praise Windows to me. It’s like being a trauma surgeon, listening to folks praise semi-automatic weapons.”

I went on to explain how astonishing it was that Windows was so wildly popular, despite all the trouble and strife it had brought into the world. I described it as something of a global security emergency that nobody seemed to care about.

Mind you, it was funny to me, then and now, how so many people manifest such a fanatical loyalty to that company, or indeed any company. I don’t know why anybody would champion the cause of a multi-billion dollar corporation. It’s as if they think it’s a god that loves them.

In my opinion, Microsoft Corporation’s primary expertise (and this is what I said that day, in that office in the library) was navigating the sales and compliance maze. They dabble a little in product development — Enterprise Solutions for Masochists, chiefly — but it’s not their specialization. Their real expertise is taking simple user interfaces and making them harder and more onerous to use.

“I don’t know why they do it,” I said, wondering about it out loud. “It’s like their product managers are the sort of people who’d be drilling people’s teeth if they were not, somehow, legally prevented from practicing dentistry. I suspect they are very strange people indeed — perhaps the sort who giggle fatuously and uncontrollably at odd, disconcerting intervals, for no reason whatsoever. I imagine they like to lurk behind doors and hiss at people as they pass by.”

Mind you, this conversation happened years before Microsoft started to insert advertising into their menu. Or before they started insisting you use their AI, or store all your personal data on their cloud.

“Their design philosophy,” I continued, “seems to be, ‘What If Malware was an Operating System?’ It’s like ordering tea in a cafe. You know what happens next.”

Evidently, they did not know what happens next, so I was obliged to explain it.

“Well, the waiter brings over your tea and places the cup and saucer gently down upon the table. It will be fine until you reach for it and jostle the table. Liquid sloshes over the rim of the cup and forms a small lake at the bottom of its saucer.

“Then you realize the table is wobbly for some odd reason. You look under the table. You rock it gently with your fingertips. One of its legs seems slightly too short. That’s when the déjà vu hits and you realize you’ve had this experience a hundred times or more.

“Why are all cafe tables a bit wonky? Surely it’s not hard to ensure every table leg is the same exact length? It’s almost as if somebody incredibly rich and diabolical is making them this way on purpose!

“I know that sounds bizarre and paranoid. And honestly I would never even suspect such an absurd idea was true … that is, if I hadn’t used a Microsoft product. But I have, and consequently, I have no idea what to think, anymore. Anything is possible.”

Then the darkness faded and I was on the fifth floor of the Countway Library of Medicine once more. My interlocutor, a senior librarian, was staring at me, nodding slowly. I felt a sinking in the pit of my stomach.

I’ve done it again, I thought. What is wrong with me? Am I mad? Why couldn’t I keep these thoughts to myself? And the other thing I thought was: This is exactly what happened at that job interview in Maryland. My poor wife, how am I going to explain it when they drag me out of this building for being a lunatic?

At last, the librarian spoke. “It’s a funny thing,” they said. “The IT Staff in our library do not technically work for us. They work for another department altogether. And we don’t particularly care for that. Or them, actually. But the odd thing is, we are allowed to choose who they hire to work in our library, and that presents us with interesting possibilities.”

They paused and studied me carefully. “If you were to come and work here full-time, would you promise to share all these thoughts of yours concerning Microsoft with your bosses in IT? You know, once a week perhaps?”

Still thinking of my wife, I nodded dumbly. And that, by the way, is how I wound up working at Harvard Medical School.

With Chaste Affection,

Kris St.Gabriel

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