“This sucks.” Finn had no right to complain, but it had popped out.
“Well,” Hollis replied, “Let’s hope this job interview is a step forward.”
Which wasn’t a reassurance Finn wouldn’t be asked to leave. However, a practice interview was a step forward and she had to think about it as such. Practice meant she’d be ready when a more likely job opportunity came up. Something in mopping, perhaps, or pushing loads of laundry from place to place, as she now had experience with both.
Hollis finished her shirt and handed it to her carefully. “You picked dark blue because your lucky rainbow sports bra won’t show through, didn’t you?”
“Abso-freakin’-lutely.” And it looked fantastic with the grey suit, thank you very much.
Hollis laughed again. Finn wondered if she could record it as a ringtone. “Go get dressed. Take a rideshare on my account, okay? Otherwise you’ll get all sweaty on the bus and ruin all my hard work.”
Finn went to protest, but Hollis cut her off.
“Listen up,” he said. “You’re one of my favorite people in the entire world and I am buying you a rideshare to your interview so you can get the job and buy your girlfriend something nice. Now scoot.”
When Finn looked in the mirror as she was buttoning up her shirt over the lucky rainbow sports bra, her face seemed a bit pink. Girlfriend. A word she’d need to get used to again. Well worth it.
Now if only she could arrange things so she had to get used to a paycheck too.
Chapter Twelve
Dr. Choi was unreasonably attractive. Even Finn could tell, and her libido had never so much as twitched in the direction of a dude. He had movie star cheekbones, hair that was either blessed by the gods or that he spent an hour styling each morning, and posture debutantes would kill for.
Finn was super glad Hollis had taken over ironing her shirt. Finn had to do something fantastic for the guy, even aside from paying him back and the daily cake thing. Maybe she’d buy him some dice.
“Dae-hyun Choi,” he said as he shook her hand in the waiting room of his dental practice. “Dustin is fine.”
She was not calling him by his first name, no sir. “Ellen Finnegan. Thanks for this opportunity.”
“You go by Finn, right?” Dr. Choi motioned for her to follow him down a hall. They ended up in his office.
“Uh, yes. I’m a blond white lesbian named Ellen, so...” Was she supposed to have said she was gay? He couldn’t ask, but she could volunteer it, right?
“Everyone thinks they’re the first person to make an Ellen joke.” Dr. Choi nodded briskly. “Got it. Please, sit. Water? Coffee?”
“No thank you.” She didn’t want to end up wearing a beverage.
“Here’s the deal,” he said as Finn took the seat on the other side of his desk. “We hired someone, but her spouse got a job in Taiwan. We usually hire known quantities so we get a fit with our workplace culture, but we went through our personal networks and didn’t come up with anybody who can start right away.”
While Finn struggled to figure out if she was supposed to respond, Dr. Choi took a picture frame off his desk and turned it around. It was a wedding photo, his, with a gorgeous tall Black man, both of them exuberant in dove grey tuxes. Dr. Choi was a totally different person when he smiled. An approachable person.
“I’ll explain it this way,” he said. “I’m a bisexual Korean dentist, second generation immigrant on one side and third on the other. I’m married to a gay Black man who’s a bus driver. That doesn’t mean I know everything, but it does give me a low tolerance for ignorant garbage.
“So, for example, if you think disabled people just need to do yoga, or singular they isn’t correct grammar, or it’s funny when people speak English with with something other than a mainstream U.S. accent, this is not the place for you. Eventually your real attitude will slip out. Then you won’t have a job anymore and I’ll have to start over with hiring and training which is a real pain in the ass. If that’s how it’s going to go, you can save us both some hassle by leaving right now and I can get home to the lunch my husband’s making.”
Dr. Choi folded his hands on his desk and waited. Finn’s mind raced. This was her first job interview in a long time, but she didn’t remember anything like this.
Being truthful on the application hadn’t disqualified her from getting an interview, so maybe she should keep at it? “I’m sure there’s plenty I don’t know, but if I mess something up and hurt somebody I’d want to know so I can stop.” That was true; was the truth good enough?
“Then tell me about stealing from your employer.”
She’d known this topic would come up, but had hoped for a couple of easy questions first. Hollis had helped her practice a professional answer, similar to the copy-and-paste answer she’d used for The Box before the application for this job. The copy-and-paste interview answer said there wasn’t any excuse, which there wasn’t, but there had been a reason. Maybe Dr. Choi would get the distinction.
“The first thing you should know,” Finn said, aware she’d waited a beat too long, “is that if I had a time machine, I’d go back and whack myself on the back of the head the first time I even considered it.”
She thought Dr. Choi’s lip twitched, but his demeanor didn’t change. “We’ll take it as a given for this interview that you know you should act remorseful. Go on.”
Not encouraging. “Okay. So. It was a family-owned nursery, and they also ran a landscaping business from the same location. I’d worked myself up to head cashier at the nursery and I was about to get promoted to assistant manager. However, the family’s oldest son had been fired from three other jobs in a year. In he comes as manager, and the existing manager gets bumped down to assistant. From day one, we can all tell this guy is a problem. A lot of the people working for him are women, Latinx, or both. He doesn’t have much good to say about either of those groups, and he says it loudly on a regular basis. With Human Resources being his aunt, nobody was going to do anything.”
Dr. Choi nodded. “Human Resources usually exists to protect the company anyway. But what about losing that promotion? Must have stung.”
Finn couldn’t deny it. Going from hourly to salaried would have meant sick days instead of either working through as much of a migraine as she could when her meds didn’t cut it, or losing a shift.
“It did suck, yes.” Were you supposed to say suck in an interview? “And yeah, when your new boss is terrible, you should go find another job. It takes time, though, and meanwhile this guy kept running his mouth, and some employees who agreed with him decided it was cool to run their mouths as if they were on Fox News or whatever, and he took over the scheduling so they got more shifts.
“A few of us went out for a drink. One of my coworkers said she’d figured out how to skim money from the POS system and we could redistribute it to staff who were getting screwed. I let myself get talked into it because I was tipsy and angry, which is a terrible way to make a decision about anything.”
“Ah,” Dr. Choi said.
She’d probably said too much. Dr. Choi was a fellow queer, but he was also a potential employer. Practice interview 1, Finn 0. Good to get all the mistakes out early. Right?