I Didn’t Know There Were People Like That

Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

by John Bruce

Once I answered a help-wanted ad for a network engineer.

They had an extra requirement: the candidate should have strong writing skills, since they wanted a lot of documentation. Well, I’d done a lot of network engineering, I’d also written network manuals, and I’d majored in English. I sent in my resume – like any good player in the job market, I had several versions. I sent them the one with the English major listed on it.

A few days later, the hiring manager gave me a call. We talked about my network experience, and we talked about majoring in English. That seemed good enough; he asked me to come in for an interview. “It’s really interesting,” the manager said to me when I came in. “Not many people major in English and wind up in this kind of work.” The guy gave me a technical question-and-answer on what I knew about networks, and he realized that yes, I knew network engineering. And I could write.

”Have you done much with writing outside the technical field?” he asked after a while.

”I’ve had a few things in the local alternative press,” I said. “But it’s just a hobby.”

”It’s really interesting that you’ve kept it up.” We chatted a little more about that. I told him I actually kept reading, too, reading the same writers they had you read as an English major.

”There’s no money in it,” I said. “For most people, it really can’t be anything but a hobby.”

”I should be up front with you about one thing,” the guy told me. “We’ve already made an offer on this job. The guy hasn’t accepted it yet, but he could, so since we’ve already got the offer out, you need to understand that the guy could take it, and he’d be the one we hire.”

”Sure,” I said. The guy had just told me he’d wasted my time, of course.

”I really wanted to talk to you, though,” he said. “I really wanted to meet someone who’d kept up his interest in English and writing after he’d graduated. It’s really been interesting talking to you. In fact, that was why I called you in. I didn't know there were people like that.”

Thanks.

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John Bruce’s writing has appeared, or will appear, in The Los Angeles Reader, The Dartmouth Review, serious-lit press, Fiction on the Web, Cantaraville, Bartleby Snopes, Diddledog, Eunoia Review, Fiction at Work, The Journal of Truth and Consequence, Long Story Short, The Toucan, Lyrical Ballads, Pear Noir!, Lowestoft Chronicle, Underground Voices, and Word Riot. He has degrees in English from Dartmouth College and the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles.