No I didn’t. I guess it was just a Random thing, Corwin! 
Well, as long as it wasn’t an Eric thing. . .
This story is about my dad, but I still think it qualifies:
My dad was right out of high school and working at Woolworth’s. One day, one of his coworkers was complaining that she needed more money but getting a new job was hard (it was during the Carter years, I believe). So my dad said, “Getting a new job would be easy, in fact, I’ll bet you a date* that I can get a new job making more money than this within a week.”
He applied to several places and two of them called back. Both offered more money than his current job and were ready to hire immediately. He interviewed with both and was offered both jobs. One paid $1 more an hour than the other.
He took the lower paying job because they were going to fly him to Pennsylvania for a week of training and he had never been on an airplane before. He started as a clerk (a glorified secretary) and now, 27 or 28 years later, he’s the vice-president of the company.
*I don’t think he actually took that date, because he met my mother shortly after.
Here is the best I’ve got …
It’s my current job at the corporate headquarters of a major retailer (I’ll call it Company X). I used to work for an advertising agency. In late 2004, I was given a sample analysis to do for Company X. The idea was that we would show them our mad skills and they would hire us for their full time ad placement. I did the analysis and it got savaged by my boss. He hated it. He thought I did a terrible job and that I should know better. From that point on, he made it a point to antagonize me about pretty much everything I did. I was demoted.
Well, apparently, the analysis was pretty good because Company X signed on for our services. A friend of mine at work was disgusted with how I was being treated so when he met with people from Company X for a meeting, he welcomed a job interview. He was later hired at Company X.
He then got me a job at Company X and my 3 year anniversary is the day after tomorrow.
Many years ago, I was working as a bike messenger in San Francisco. Walked into an office and the manager was covering the reception desk while the receptionist was on break. I wouldn’t have known him from Adam, but he immediately recognized me from ten years ago, when he had been running the Greenpeace office next to my college apartment and would hang out after work and buy beer for me and my underage buddies. Based on this connection, he offered me a job doing legal research and process serving, with the company paying for training, which immediately doubled my income. The moral of the story? Don’t be afraid to ask hippies to buy you beer, kids!
I was interviewing for a engineering job in a small town in Mississippi, a state that I had never been in before. They picked me up in the airport, went through most of the formalities and the typical process in the morning and then we went out to lunch. Pizza Hut. It was the Plant Manager, the HR Manager, and the Engineering manager and me, four men.
The HR Manager and Plant manager were seated across from and I could tell pre-occupied with a woman seated behind me. The woman got up with her party and went by our table and I thought to myself “hmmm, that butt looks familiar.” After she paid her bill, she came back to our table and said “Aren’t you ‘notfrommensa’” And I said “Liz Anne?”
Did I mentioned that I had never been within 150 miles of this town before in my life and a beautiful girl comes up to me and recognizes me by name. The Plant Manager and HR Manager are flabbergasted.
FTR, I used to work with Liz Anne, she had left that job and was working for the Red Cross and was on a blood drive in that particular town. I did get the job offer, but it was a job that I hated.
This isn’t my story, but it is definitely a good one. My wife and I were talking to one of the dudes chauffering people to and from the hotel when we were on Mauii. He was maybe in his late twenties, only three or four years younger than me.
A good friend of his was a poolboy at the Four Seasons next door. Apparently he had gotten fairly friendly with a guy who used to vacation there all the time. So this one day the poolboy was chatting with the customer by the pool, of all places. This unsupervised kid came along with a supersoaker and was making to shoot people. The poolboy warned him. The kid starting firing, and unloaded the contents of the supersoaker on the poolboy’s acquaintance and thought he was king of the world.
The poolboy showered enough invective on this kid that he started to cry. It wasn’t vulgarity, necessarily. He told the kid that he was a sonofabitch, that his parents weren’t supervising him because they did not love him, and that he was a worthless piece of human waste.
The regular thought this was the funniest thing in the world, and on the spot, offered the poolboy a job. A job heading up one of his new investment ventures in NY. As it turned out, the regular customer was Lew Ranieri, the father of the mortgage bond market. He believed in taking kids he liked, showering them in cash and responsibility, and seeing how they performed.
So this poolboy, a 27 year old former computer science student, ended up in NYC living the high life. All because he told some shithead kid that his parents don’t love him.