I can’t remember really how I ended up in genetics. Business studies. Like most of my business studying friends, I expected figure out how it all works, start something smart, make millions, retire early. Ziegler was a stop-gap; do something in marketing till that smart something occurred to me.

Next thing you know I’m in the far side of the U.S. wondering how the hell I ended up spending my time talking food with geeks. Mind you, and I like to think to my credit, I never knew much about genetics. I had a lot of people who knew about that, so I pretty much just had to show up and have them show me stuff. I got pretty good at judging what other people in the room thought about new ideas and basing my go/no-go decisions on that. Most of the time the job was pretty straightforward. Got paid well. Only bit that gave me the willies was reviews, really; trials overseen by VPs with the power of god over your entire division. Good luck finding a new project if you cocked up a couple of quarterlys and they ended up canning you.

Then that Newman showed up and I could delegate the worst of it to him. He really was some kind of a genius in handling those over-promoted, smug bastards. 

Yup — things were bobbing along so smoothly I was beginning to wonder how I’d ever recognize it was time to retire. Fish debacle actually ended up a bit of a blessing. Stevenson enjoyed that. He said he and Donoghue had to take it all very seriously of course, but they hadn’t had so much fun since that whole thing with Drugs and the male pattern baldness trials.

Oh god that really was funny though. No-one knew hair could even grow there. 

My first candidate was Newman, and since I decided to hire him I took the rest of the interview day off and told them to find a new ‘As Appropriate’ for last-says — I would exit on a high note.

They don’t know how to interview, these corporate climbers. They’re lucky I was there to catch the guy. They have all sorts of issues. They don’t want to be upstaged, they want to impress the candidate, would you believe. They have fear; maybe this one will get hired and stuff me. Or expose my crap interview questions. Oh but they don’t want to nix someone everyone else will endorse. Nobody wants to be an outsider.

That’s the irony; nobody wants to stand out, in public at least. They want to be upfront mediocre, and privately — between them, their boss, and HR — rockstars.

I think Newman will be ok.