The Eye of the Storm

Something happens when a recruiter or a manager is perusing a list of names and they see yours. They either:

a) see the text on the paper and the needle in their mind lies still like a basset hound in front of a rocking chair, or

b) they see the name of a person that means SOMETHING to them, they think ‘oh yeah, I recognize this name for this or that‘ and you instantly become a tangible commodity to them.

We should all be able to agree that knowing people gets you through the howling winds of the information hurricane that is applying for a job, to the eye of the storm where things are clearer.

I took a crack at a job recently that — on paper — seemed like something I might enjoy. This job involved the branding/marketing of the products that this company made, and it seemed pretty cool so I took a stab at the application. This was a writing-heavy application that called for all your credentials as a creative, a cover letter, writing samples AND a short essay.

As far as applications go, this is mostly typical. It gives a preview of your voice at a glance, and I see the use for it. But writing samples AND a cover letter AND a short essay about why you want the job? That seemed strange enough for me to read over the listing and think ‘maybe I am reading this incorrectly and they aren’t saying they want all three.’

I submitted my application and watched it float downstream the way a kid sits a leaf on a rushing creek and hopes it continues unscathed out of sight. A week later, I got a call asking to schedule an interview, which is exciting in and of itself. It sends the mind racing and creates some anxiousness, at least for me. Shortly after that I headed in to their offices feeling as though I had prepared myself, so I approached this unknown land with some calm confidence.

When the visit began with a half hour lobby wait past the scheduled interview time, I started to detect signs of anxiety slowly and steadily dripping into my mind. ‘Is someone interviewing ahead of me? Who’s THAT guy? Is he going for the same job. Crap, he looks smart. Might be better dressed than me. I’m an idiot. Why did I wear this shirt? Can’t cross my legs — they will know these are Walmart socks.’

Finally I’m taken upstairs by an HR rep who was probably in the 65-to-70 years-young range and bee-lined directly to a small room with a card table and a Scantron laying on top of it. I knew what was coming next, and it sat in my stomach like sun baked potato salad: a personality inventory. As I sat alone in the fluorescent flood of harsh light, I trudged through the 140 question questionnaire and played conceivably every mind game I could with myself. With an enormous amount of joy, I scratched in my last answer (likely chosen more out of fear that I had answered one way too many times) and handed the Scantron to the HR lady proudly.

“Great! We have just a few more tests to give you,” she vocally ambled like a Radio Flyer in need on a wheel alignment.

I spun my head around to double check the sign and make sure I hadn’t wandered into the local NASA branch or mistakenly applied for US citizenship. I also briefly imagined having to do that shooting test from Men in Black and being scolded by Rip Torn while West Point grads looked at me judgmentally.

She led me back into the small room, and I followed behind her, breathing exasperated breaths against the top button of my collared shirt that began to feel like it was getting tighter. She logged me in to a Dell computer from 2005 and pulled up ANOTHER personality inventory that boldly (to me) displayed the progress marker ‘Question 1 of 175’ at the top of the screen.

“This one takes a little bit,” my guide lamented like acupuncture down my spine and then pulled the door closed to a final click. She could’ve started maniacally laughing in this moment and I likely wouldn’t have batted an eye. I briefly considered the possibility of another final click involving a trigger.

At some point during this second foray into bubblegum psychology, I began to get really amused by what was happening to me, and I realized how absurd it would be for me to continue suffering silently. I began reading the questions out loud to myself and then imagining their discussions about my answers. I sped to the end and darted out of the room to retrieve my reaper again.

This time I was joined for a brief conversation with a girl who appeared to be about my age for what I can only assume was a ‘do I like this guy and could I work with him’ session prolonging the real talk. We chatted for a few minutes and she was very nice. Seemed like a very spirited person and treated me graciously.

Now it was time to approach the throne. (Keep in mind we are approaching 2 1/2 hours already at this place.)

In what felt like a piece of Roman Polanski cinematography brought to life, I stood stoically next to my new liaison and held my breath as the door swung open and a wiry man dressed in Lee’s Dungarees and a denim shirt reclined in one of those office chairs from the 40s with the billowy upholstery that may have been pitched through a window in time and rolled to a stop at his desk. He had his hands on his head, and the edges of his form glowed from the panoramic plate glass window that was wide open and letting in a world of warm light.

He spoke out of the side of his mouth and asked me to have a seat anywhere (I sat directly opposite him on the other side of the room, also the only other chair) in an obviously calculated voice that felt like restrained grandiosity. He was lanky and had a thinly gathered layer of wispy white hair carelessly combed to the side. He sat back down at his desk sideways and folded his hands over his elbows that he rested on his desk, and we got to it. After some introductions, this happened:

Manager: Kyle, I liked your application.
Me: Oh, well thank you! I’m glad you liked it.
Manager: I was excited to get you in here. I want to ask you a question, though.
(Pregnant pause.)
Manager: Do you consider yourself someone that follows directions well?

This seemed like a reasonable question. Taking direction and taking correction are both really important skills to have in a work environment, and in this particular situation a fair amount of creation and revision would be taking place. It seems obvious that I wanted to make the impression that these were skills I possessed, so I answered.

Me: Yeah, sure, unless I have a question first that would hinder me from continuing, I think I do pretty well at sticking to what is asked of me.

He spoke so immediately following this sentence that you couldn’t have slid a piece of loose leaf paper between what I said and what came next.

Manager: You didn’t provide an essay with your application when it specifically said that it was required — and yet — (another pregnant pause) here you sit.

Imagine someone drawing back with and oar from a canoe and verbally slapping you across the face with it. That’s how stunned I was by this. Did he think I was an idiot and out of charity decide to bring me in? Did he think I was some kind of risk-taking genius that omitted the essay on purpose out of brash arrogance? I began to laugh to myself quietly imagining the amount of credit this guy was likely giving me based on something simple: I SCREWED UP!

Manager: Is there a reason why you didn’t follow the directions?

I replayed the last two (almost three now) hours of waiting and being analyzed by vague psychoanalytic quizzes from the 90s in my head. In what felt like bullet time, I looked up at my interrogator and briefly scanned the whiteboards that covered the walls and saw all the lingo written in short hand from the floor to nearly the ceiling. I looked at his wispy hair, and in a calm moment where relief crept upon the shore of my mind I realized that I did not want to work here (at least not now), and suddenly the entire situation changed.

I let my guard down entirely. I gave honest, uninhibited answers that in all likelihood might have prevented me from getting the job. He asked me exactly who I was and what I thought I excelled at and I answered. Good and bad. It was actually sort of nice to just be honest and not primp my professional qualifications to try and satisfy whatever he wanted on any given question.

On an episode of a podcast I love I once heard a comedian compare severe moments of frustration to a great episode of a TV show. It’s a nice way to turn something on its head that has been, by all accounts, frustrating. I’ve been trying to do this, myself. I file this under ‘Good Episode.’

I almost created a religion.

When I was 21-years-old I almost created a religion.

It’s 2006, and I’m a student at Morehead State University. I’m home on summer break.

On one inspired night during this summer, myself and two of my friends decided that we would get together at my parents’ house and watch a movie. We were not unique in the fact that we had a pack of four or five that hung out with great regularity. One of the places we frequented was a movie store owned by our friend Zach’s parents; the kind of place that has now died off. It was tremendous: we had access to movies and video games (all levels of quality and obscurity) any time we wanted. 

Zach decided that this would be a great night for us to watch the movie Congo, which as I’m sure you know was a “blockbuster” film in the mid-90s that united Laura Linney on screen (at last) with Tim Curry and a host of men in really ridiculous gorilla suits. I had never seen this movie, but I knew that when I was a kid they had promoted the shit out of it. Just the trailer for the film made pre-teen me get hyped up and ready to spend my parent’s money.

I could sit here and summarize this movie’s absurdity, but I could never top what Paul Scheer, June Diane Raphael and Jason Mantzoukas did on the How Did this Get Made? podcast. They nailed it. This is a bad movie. It’s very bad. There are tons and tons of scenes that make little to no sense, but the thing that I would like to focus on is one scene in particular that was pointed out by Paul on the podcast.

Near the middle of the film, this happens:

This got a huge laugh in the room, at the time. Zach intentionally had withheld from us the fact that this movie fucking sucks, so the surprise factor was really doing some heavy lifting. I had no idea it was so bad! The only memories I had were of the promotional materials, which clearly trick children and are most likely designed to do as much.

When that snake slithered down that branch, I (in an extremely asinine, high-pitched voice) yelled ‘SNAKE TIME!’ only to have my hyping of the scene cut short by the solider immediately chopping the snake in half with a machete. We lost our minds, laughing, because the timing was something that we just couldn’t have foreseen. I know this is all extremely strange, but stay with me.

‘SNAKE TIME’ quickly became a phrase that would infect our group of friends more or less immediately. It soon evolved into ‘SNAKE TIME, Y’ALL!’ and we applied it to situations where it obviously had nothing to do with snakes or really any change in what time it was, chronologically or figuratively.

When I returned to school (two hours away) I kept saying it and told the moment with some friends, and quickly this became something that a separate, unconnected group of friends started to laugh about together. ‘SNAKE TIME!’ was like a virus.

After really sitting down and thinking about it, this is where I think things started to get bizarre. You read that correctly. It gets dumber and more bizarre.

I lived in the basement of a student center during college. I served as a resident janitor there for a while and “cleaned” the building in exchange for free rent. In that building was an office, and in that office there was an enormous dry-erase master calendar. You know the type. A friend of mine, Thomas Stevens, decided that he would take that calendar and write several fictional birthdays and holidays on it. He did this to be funny, I guess. I didn’t know that he had done this, and I found out about it by walking by and seeing that someone had penned ‘SNAKE TIME’ in all caps on the date of January 29th, 2007.

As bored college kids, we decided that the best thing for us to do would be to watch Congo on January 29th and do our best to recreate what had happened that night during the previous summer. 

So we did. We got together with friends (roughly eight of us if I remember correctly), watched the movie, had some snake-related snacks (no actual items containing real snakes to my knowledge), I yelled ‘SNAKE TIME!’ at the same spot in the movie and we had a great time. That was that.

What I did NOT know was that Snake Time 2008 had inspired some underclassmen who had heard the story and found the entire idea so compelling that they had decided to hold the event again, without my knowledge. I had graduated by this point.

[Fast forward to 2011 for the purposes of this story.]

I’m sitting in my apartment in Louisville and it’s a cold, January night. Megan (my wife) was away on a trip and I was killing time on my computer, likely accomplishing nothing.

The phone rings. I see that it’s Luke Day, one of my college roommates from my senior year. It’s about 6:45PM. The conversation unfolded very close to this:

Luke: Hey, what are you doing?
Me: Not much. Sitting at home. Why?
Luke: Snake Time is tonight. We should go.
Me: THEY ARE STILL DOING SNAKE TIME?!
Luke: Yes, and it starts at 9. We should go.
Me: Man, I don’t know. Let me think about it.
Luke: Alright man. I’m going.

At this point I am living a touch over two hours away from Morehead, KY, where this event is taking place. For me to leave Louisville and make it on time to Snake Time, I would have to make a decision in the next ten minutes, if not sooner. I quickly decided that I was going to attend whatever Snake Time had become, because this was just too much to pass up. You can imagine how bizarre this was for me: thoughts swirling around in my mind, wondering how in the hell something so trivial and stupid could have become an event that still existed after I had left the equation.

I arrive in Morehead in record time. As I pull into the back parking lot of the student center I look up and see that the top floor (the whole floor one huge room where all the events were held) is OBVIOUSLY in party mode. From the street I can see that there are intense strobe lights thrashing and thumping beats that could also be heard easily from 100 yards away, which is roughly how far away I was. I’m becoming restless with anticipation. My friend Luke almost immediately pulls in behind me, and after some quick pleasantries we are going inside, in no way prepared for what we’re about to see.

I get inside the ground floor of the building and it is standing room only in the lobby area outside the stairwell that leads to the top floor. It is PACKED. This is the type of crowd that you barely are only able to shimmy through. More astonishing to me is the fact that I have never seen most of these faces in my life. Anyone who has left college and visited in the two to three year period post-graduation can tell you that you immediately feel out of place and old when you visit the places you frequented. This was the case. There was a very light dusting of people that were like babies when I had left Morehead, and past that this was a sardined group of strangers.

Some of the familiars from my time there had caught wind that I was coming, so for once in my life I was a VIP. I was rushed through the crowd and led to the upstairs area, where the organizers of the event had stationed stoic pairs of dudes to create an official, serious vibe and the floor was riddled with rubber snakes, as if a farce version of Raiders of the Lost Ark was about to be filmed. I’m not kidding — rubber snakes.

They explain to me that they have something special planned for me. I am obviously really wide-eyed and slack jawed, just attempting process this sensory overload, and I agree to follow their instructions as they let all these buzzing people into the main auditorium and begin a ceremony. The ceremony did not disappoint.

The music slowly faded out and the lights came up on the stage. Up the center aisle strode Matt Stevenson (nickname: Sticky Stevenson) in a robe and carrying what appeared to be a knit sleeve of some kind. Positioning himself center stage in front of the whispering crowd, Sticky slides a DVD case out from the knit sleeve and presents it to the crowd like Rafiki presented Simba for the first time. It’s Congo on DVD. Of course it is.

The crowd cheered. THEY CHEERED.

I’m just non-stop doing that coping laughter of disbelief. It’s something past surreal. After the presentation of the Congo DVD, I am brought on stage as an honored guest and dubbed (what I am dubbed as I am not sure) with a rubber king cobra. As homoerotic as this sounds I found a way to stay faithful to my wife.

Now the lights go down. The crowd is still buzzing. Believe it or not, we actually watch the first forty six minutes of this film. I can tell you with some certainty: even as a joke, this is a hard film to sit through without becoming restless. I had begun to deduct what would happen next. As the infamous scene showed on the screen, the lights began to flash and 25 boys, ages 18 to 22, began to jump around the room and scream ‘SNAKE TIME!’ at the top of their lungs. Streamers were thrown. Chairs were flipped. New Year’s Eve party poppers were set off. It was pandemonium for about twenty seconds, and then it stopped, as did the movie.

Sticky appeared on the stage one more time and thanked everyone for attending, and just like that, one of the most bizarre nights of my life had come to an end.

I would spend the next few days reeling from what had happened. The sheer enthusiasm that they’d shown in executing this ridiculous idea had left me completely baffled and amazed. I told countless people the story to almost universal disbelief. The following year the event was held at the same place and a band I’m in actually played afterwards.

Tracing the timeline back to the beginning, I still have a hard time believing that one impromptu viewing of Congo in 2006 would grow into a campus event without me even knowing about it. If I tried to act like there was a moral to this story, I would go ahead just assume that I deserved to be kicked in the face by some bikers. There is no moral and honestly there is no profound purpose for Snake Time to exist… but it does.

I can’t claim to know what the future holds for Snake Time. At the very least, what we have seen from Snake Time thus far suggests that it could slither in any direction at any time. Let’s hope next January 29th it sheds its skin and surprises us again.