Yada Yada Yada Won't Get VP Job

S. and I watched Charles Gibson interview Sarah Palin last night. I was standing behind the high backed recliner S. was sitting in, watching Gibson look down his nose at Palin while he spoke, when he asked her a question about the right to make cross border attacks from Afghanistan from Pakistan. As Palin rambled on, searching for an answer underneath – well, maybe it was underneath the next participle – or behind the next prepositional phrase – nope, not there, lets try to verbally circle back around the question and just see if we can figure out what he did ask – I felt as if I was watching a job interview.

S. reached her arm up, hand bent back, palm open – I slapped her five. "Lost in a blizzard of words?" S. said, repeating what Charles Gibson had said seconds ago. "She was just rambling all over the place."

As I watched Palin dig in her heels, go on the attack, back off, circle around questions, and proffer standard political jargon instead of direct answers, I thought of my own recent job interviews. Making a transition at middle age from industry to industry meant that, unlike Palin, I didn’t get to start at the top. My interviews have been similar, though, as I have attempted to convince one interviewer after another that there are skills I’ve picked up in the mortgage business that are transferable to their field, and that I am ready to take on the job.

The thing I noticed Palin exhibiting, though, was a sense of combativeness she was trying to hold in check – waiting, like a hitter in baseball waits on the right pitch, for the right opening from Charles Gibson so she could let him have it, could let her indignation and sanctimony come to the rescue, a natural move for a woman who is a learned practitioner in the arts of obfuscation.

She reminded me of one of my old co-workers, a jittery little woman of Pennsylvania Dutch extraction we used to call Yada Yada Yada, who was ready to square off at a moment’s provocation. If she didn’t know something, she would talk faster. She would talk louder. She would ridicule the question. She would try to change the subject.

Yada Yada Yada had already made a transition of sorts several months earlier when she had to go back to being a loan officer. She had been a wholesale account executive for a mortgage company for years, and was well versed in the mechanics of getting a loan closed. But listening to her talk on the phone to some of our high end borrowers, who were usually pretty well-informed people, was a comedy show in itself, with my co-worker often working the hold button like a video gamer as she yelled out for help. "So what index is that margin calculated off of again?"

It didn’t matter if she got someone to answer her, or shoot her a quick email – after about ten seconds of trying to lay out the details to her customer, she would launch into a new language – "well, with these ARM’s, you see, they take the LIBOR, they take the LIBOR, you see, and, and, then its just yada yada yada, ba ding bang boom, ya know, something like that. That’s how it works."

The thing about making a transition, especially when it affects a whole office, is the amount of self evaluation that has to go on in order to point yourself in the right direction. Yada Yada Yada came to my desk one day and slapped a sheet of paper down on my desk like she had the winning hand in a game of spades. “You’re good with words. Look at that for me. Tell me, you think a hundred dollars was too much for this?”

It was her resume, a chronological listing of her life’s work, a format that seemed to reduce all the years, all the struggles and triumphs of our lives down to a simple line item, to be scribbled on or circled by human resources staffers and hiring managers, collated by file clerks, uploaded onto hard drives, your entire life boiled down to a couple of pieces of paper.

According to her resume, Yada Yada Yada had graduated high school thirty years ago, which was the sum total of her educational experience. The words on her resume disappeared as my eyes lost focus, the rudimentary introductions to sociology and psychology coming back to me as I looked at the woman standing beside me with both admiration and disgust. I admired her for her ability to work around her shortcomings, for her ability to refuse to let the lack of an education stop her from finding a career, buying a home, and saving for retirement.

But I was disgusted because of the women I knew like her, verbally agile high school graduates with enough moxie to bullshit their way around the things they didn’t know, brown skinned women with the same work ethic who would never get the chance to "yada yada yada" their way into a job.

Standing behind S., I watched as Sarah Palin, a woman with a resume not much heftier than the one Yada Yada Yada slapped on my desk, dance around questions to which she didn’t know the answers, her jaw cocked, her body arched forward, her eyes fierce.

I thought of Palin, and Yada Yada Yada, and all the women like them, women who had learned to exploit the maxim “a man should never hit a woman” to the fullest, taking advantage of the fact that we weren’t going to hit back with a vengeance.

I thought of S., sitting in the chair before me, a woman with three times as many college degrees as Yada Yada Yada and Sarah Palin combined, who had to suffer the indignity of working with women just like these two - overpaid and undertrained, over opinionated and under informed, the kind of women who could be found in middle management in any enterprise in the country, passing the buck, avoiding decisions, and letting the shit roll down hill.

I wish making a transition was as easy for me as looking an interviewer in the eye and saying, "yes, I am ready," without blinking.

Something tells me, though, that those 8 million volunteers out there working on behalf of the Obama campaign are not going to let "yada yada yada" buy Sarah Palin a free pass this time.