Obviously another Rhymer hypothetical. Again longer than I meant, but hey, I’ve got to do SOMETHING at lunch. 
Here’s the sitch:
Jonathan Spenser, the star of today’s story, is an unhappily single straight man in his early fifties. He works in the business-to-business sales department of a famous national corporation I’ll call Parthenon Industries because that’s the kind of geek I am. He is one of six regional sales directors. Under him work a dozen district sales managers, each, each of whom has a team of fifteen to twenty sales executives (the folks who actually deal with clients on a daily basis). Add on support staff, and there’s about two hundred fifty people working under his patch of the sky.
Jonathan takes pains to be ethical. Being a fraternity brother or cousin may get someone a referral for an interview, but only if they’re qualified in the first place, and if they get the job he’s going to treat them exactly like everyone else in his hierarchy; and, unlike some sales managers and directors he could name, he absolutely refuses to trade advancement for personal or sexual favors. He frequently emphasizes to his staff the necessity of avoiding any appearance of impropriety. Technically, all hires, promotions, and fires require him to sign off; but practically speaking, when it comes to the people two levels down from him, he tends to defer to his managers’ recommendations unless he has a really good reason to intervene.
Parthenon is hiring. In Jonathan’s region, there are fifteen open sales positions and two administrative jobs. Jonathan’s personal assistant job is one of hte latter, but he doesn’t plan to hire outside the company for that; he’s pretty much decided he wants that job to go to Leslie, admin for one fo the sales groups and best of the bunch, though he hasn’t promised her the promotion. There’s maybe three hundred applicants for the sales jobs and forty for the admins. Looking over the list of sales applicants, Jonathan sees the name Amy Winters. This immediately gets his attention, because five years earlier, while on a boat tour, he had an accident, fell overboard, and nearly drowned. Another vacationer–a beautiful recent college grad hight Amy Winters-- leapt in after him, pulled him to safety, and resuscitated him, getting injured herself in the process. Jonathan thanked Amy at the time but she got no other reward.
A little research verifies that the two Amys are one, and that she’s still hot. But for several reasons she was not on the track to get a job. For one thing, her resume was amateurish (who puts a photo on it, for god’s sake!) The application process involves some standardized testing, and Amy’s scores were less than impressive; she passed, but there’s sixty people who performed better. Nor did she wow her interviewer, who notes that Amy positively stank of desperation, even mentioning that she’s in danger of losing her house; that’s not something he wants in a sales person. She’s been out of work two years, has exhausted her unemployment benefits, and is deeply in debt – all red flags at Parthenon. It’s an accident that Jonathan saw Amy’s résumé at all; it was misfiled, as she wasn’t supposed to be among the final group of candidates.
It is within Jonathan’s authority to intervene here without being gainsaid. Should he? If so, what shape should that intervention take? If not, why not?
