(This column ran August 7th, 2002)

Dear Reader,

Sometimes real life is stranger than fiction.

Most of the people that work for me part-time do their work from their homes. So whenever I'm hiring a part-timer, I always do the job interview in their home, because I want to see what kind of environment they're going to be working in. Before the interview I've already talked with the candidate extensively over the phone, so I'm usually pretty sure that the person will be a good match for the job. But every once-and-a-while I'm caught off guard--way off guard.

In the middle of one particular interview when I was asking my--"Tell me something you don't like about yourself and what you're doing to change it"--question, a blue and white parakeet came swooping over the top of my head. It flew up to the top of the curtains, but just before landing, a plop of parakeet poop went sailing to the floor. And that's when I saw it--the floor--it was covered with it. Round little circles of black and white parakeet poop.

I don't mean a few droppings--not that it would have made it any more acceptable. Parakeet poop was layered on top of the carpeting.
There were mountains and valleys of parakeet poop. By this time I wasn't even listening to the job applicant's confession of what she didn't like about herself and needed to change.

Who cared? The heck with the usual interview routine. It was time to break into these regularly scheduled interview questions, with a special urgent-live-news-flash:

'What's up with this parakeet poop?'

I'm usually pretty direct, but I just couldn't find a way to ask about the poop, and truthfully I was more concerned about the "aim" of that parakeet. He kept flying over my head. No amount of job interview training had prepared me for this. By now, I had no intention of hiring this person, so I just asked a couple more questions to be polite, and I was out of there.

The next day when I was telling a friend of mine that I had the all-time best hiring story, she challenged me, "Go ahead and tell me, but I bet I can top it." And she was right, she did.

Early in her career she used to hire people to sell Tupperware and she'd also conduct the job interviews in their homes. In the middle of one of the interviews the applicant took off her shoe, started picking her toes and was going for the "toe jam" in between them.

Yes, she was right. Toe-jam topped parakeet poop! Life is definitely stranger than fiction.

Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.

Suzanne Beecher