Breastly tells us that I will be interviewed first. So, while Alice waits in the Corinthian Room, Breastly directs me to follow her out of the room. We then go through a door in the back, down the hall, and into the hotel’s kitchen where, by the dishwasher, is the service elevator. Breastly pushes the down button and, a few seconds later, the door opens and we step inside. The elevator car drops to the basement, the sub-basement, and then touches bottom. We step out into a gray concrete subterranean hallway lit by flickering blue fluorescent overhead lights. Breastly and I go left down the hall past several door before we stop at one marked “23” and walk inside.
It’s a small dingy room lit by one bare overhead lightbulb. In the center, there’s rickety old table with two chairs. There’s also what looks like a closet door on the left side of the room. Joan tells me to be seated and walks to a charcoal gray file cabinet in the back left corner. She pulls out a file (mine, I assume) and sits down across from me at the table.
“Now Mr. _____,” she begins, “if you don’t mind our Spartan accomodations, I would like to begin our interview. Are you ready?”
“Definitely,” I answer. “Let’s start.”
“I like your eagerness,” Joan replies and she proceeds to ask me a series of standard job-interview questions (i.e., my education, my previous jobs, etc.). After that, however, our interview heads into some rather strange territory.
“Mr. ______,” she begins, “have you ever been to Astoria, Oregon?”
“Yes,” I answer, “I visited there once as a child with my family.”
“Do you know about the Astoria Column?”
“Yes.”
“Did you go there?”
“Yes, we did. We went to the top but really couldn’t see much of anything because of all the thick clouds and rain.”
“Did you ever go back?”
“No, but Alice and I were thinking of taking a trip there.”
“Business or pleasure?”
“Both.”
“Well, be sure to tell us when you’re going. Anyway, do you know who holds career record for grand slams in the major leagues?”
“Excuse me?”
“What baseball player hold the career record for grand slams?”
“Oh … uh … Lou Gehrig?” (I’m very good with baseball trivia.)
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, it’s Lou Gehrig.”
“And how many did he have?”
“23.”
“What is vanadium?”
“It’s a soft silver gray metal that’s often used as an alloy.”
“What is its atomic number?”
“Uh … 23?”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes … it’s 23.”
“What is a deus ex machina?”
“It’s a literary term referring to when a problem in a story is suddenly solved by an unexpected plot development. Like, for example, a poor family that’s about to be evicted being saved at the last minute by news of an inheritance from an unknown rich relative. It comes from the practice in Greek drama where a crisis would be solved by suddenly having a god dropped on stage to intervene. (Do these questions have anything to do with this position?)”
“Don’t worry Mr. ______,” Joan assures. “They do. You’ll understand eventually.”
She writes down some notes on her pad and gets up from the table and tells me to stand up. She then opens the door.
“Mr._____,” Joan says, “do you see that blue stripe painted in the center of the hallway.”
“Yes.”
“I want you to go to your left and follow it while I stay here.”
“Do you want me to run?”
“Oh no, just follow it at your own pace. You’re not being timed.”
I start to follow the blue line down the hall. Aside from the line, there’s not much to see and, after passing about fifteen doors, I begin to walk briskly even though I was told my speed wasn’t important. I get farther and farther away from Room 23 until I notice the room numbers are well into the three digits. In fact, the higher room numbers are the only indication that I’m not going around in circles since everything else in the hallway–the lights, floor, ceiling, and blue stripe–are all the same. Finally, after what seems like an hour, the hallway comes to an end–but the blue stripe doesn’t. It curves to the right and goes underneath what looks like a door to a utility room.
Expecting the door to be locked, I nonetheless turn the knob. It opens and reveals about three gray metal shelves with the blue painted stripe running beneath it. Seeing the bottom shelf is up about three feet, I get down on my hands and knees and crawl underneath it so I can follow the stripe. Once I clear the shelves, I get back up on my feet and, after feeling around in the dim light, find a latch to a sliding door. After opening it, I step into a dark enclosed space with dimensions of about 4’ by 3’. I feel around and, after bumping into some mostly-empty cardboard boxes, notice there’s yet another door on the other side. I turn the knob and open the door a crack only to be hit by a dim ray of light. I look down and see that the blue stripe ends in a dot at the foot of the doorway. I then open the door all the way and stumble out into–
Room 23!
Without showing the slightest bit of surprise, Joan Breastly looks at me and says…
