My life since Sept. 29

When last we left our intrepid hero, he just entered the hallowed halls of Nintendo of America in Redmond, Washington, for a 3 p.m. interview last Friday. He stepped through the tinted double-glass doors and walked up to the receptionist. Trying to retain his meditative calm, he did his best not to panic when he noticed his breath started to curdle. "Receptionist first, " he thought to himself, "then a water fountain."

We now rejoin our hero's quest, already in progress.

---

The kind Japanese receptionist, decked out in high-end casual wear, gave me a clipboard and a three-page application to fill out. The woman from HR who gave a phone the Thursday told me the application would be a bear, but I came prepared. Like a good, little worker bee, I brought a pair of pens (black ink, of course), a legal pad for notes and a menagerie of paperwork, including a copy of my resume, a list of references and another sheet of names and phone numbers.

A note about applying at Nintendo: Should you ever get in the door and fill out an application, the Nintendo icon Mario helps walk you through the application.

Of course, filling out the application isn't the hard part. No, the hard part comes when you are sitting in the foyer of a multimillion dollar, international gaming goliath, filling out the application as one of 700 people applying for just one job. You could be a Zen Buddhist who spent his life in a mountaintop retreat contemplating the nature of serenity until you can find calm in the blink of an eye, but you still aren't prepared for the enormity of it. You are seriously in the hunt now, and you don't know if you have 7 people or 700 against you. What you are filling out here is going to be one of the few allies that will speak up for you after you did the interview and are gone. You try to write clearly, hoping your lack of penmanship doesn't signal something...well...abnormal about you that the Nintendo Handwriting Experts, who will pore over your application, will decipher.

So many things could go wrong at this point.

Deep breath. Just fill out the fucking application.

And don't pay attention to the Gamecube kiosk in the corner showing off demo versions of "Star Fox Adventures," "Super Mario Sunshine" and that hotly anticipated gem, "Metroid Prime." No, just follow the paper Mario on the application.

Oh, Jaysus, that HR woman was right: This application is a bear. But it's only three pages! How can this be?

And then it hits you. It's all questions you answered before. That, or it's asking for things already on your resume. You groan, rewriting history is so demoralizing, telling the same damn story over and over again. You were so good on the phone, bobbing and weaving between different jobs, highlighting past and current skills, tying them all back into one pretty bow. The HR woman loved you on the phone, but here...with Mario staring you in the face and the bleeping from the corner, it's all sterile. Your charm and inflection is wasted on a clipboard, and the receptionist as seen an army of guys just like you come in, hoping for fame and glory. With this economy, the numbers have doubled, maybe tripled. You may not see it, but there is some serious heat in the room. You know you got skills, and the HR lady loved the salary you quoted her, but there's always someone better...that mythical someone who has ungodly talent and will work for Cambodian wages.

Write clearly on the application, damnit.

Okay, mostly done. Last page. Home stretch. Let's see. List three professional references who are not listed previously on this form.

Huh. Okay. Well, hmm. Hopefully, a few of past bosses won't mind a random phone call. Yeah..yeah, they'd always said that they'll give me a good recommendation in the future. Okay, no sweat there. Settled. Okay, next.

Name three personal references who are not related to you.

Oh fuck. This is what I get for being a social introvert all my life. How does Nintendo expect gamers to have personal references? What, the guy at Circuit City? The clerk at the video store who I rent games from? Sheesh.

Okay, I have my poet friend Cori. Oh, damnit. I don't have her number. I mean, I think I do. Oh damn.

I grab my cell phone can call my wife. She gives me the number of our friend Josh, who sells fine wood furniture. My wife grew up with him and I met him at his wedding at the beer stand. We've been friends since.

I use Josh's name and number.

I'm frantic with my wife, snapping and being short with her. I'm not good either frustrated or in a crisis, which really burns me hot and hard. I always thought of myself as cool and sharp, but I suppose I don't like feeling like I'm backed into a corner. I'm starting at two white columns under Josh's name.

I call my co-worker Heather, one of two people at my job who knows I'm doing this. I know Cori will vouch for me and I get Heather's approval to use her, too. She also tracks down Cori's home number in Idaho. I had it right before, but I don't want to develop number dyslexia on my application right now. Heather asked me to call her back after the interview. She's excited and concerned for me, seeing how I was nervous before I took off for the interview. Of course, I write her number on the application, but forget to write it down somewhere else.

Some friend I am.

I finish. It's about 3:40 p.m. I used nearly 40 minutes on the application and I'm spent. I return the application and clipboard to the receptionist's replacement (the casual-styling Japanese receptionist vanished for a moment). She, in turn, gives me a visitor’s badge. I get some water and begin to do some open-eyed mediation, a nice trick that allows a calm state without the socially uncomfortable aspect of having your eyes closed in public.

I look on a wall for a fixed point and I see a chaotic mural of famous Nintendo characters, from Mario to Pikachu to Joanna Dark, who sadly is a property of Xbox now. She's been retrofitted into some teenage riot-grrl gunner punk with the vacant expression and gaping maw of a blow-up doll. But the image before me is how I will remember that dashing, sexy, futuristic corporate spy from the game "Perfect Dark." She's tall, sleek, confident and lightly armed. She's the 21st century love child of James Bond and Lara Croft who, after their respective adventures, retired into seclusion after finding and falling in love with each other. In order to enjoy their quiet new life together, they shed their old identities for something obscure and mysterious, adopting the surname Dark. Shortly after marriage, Mr. and Mrs. Dark give birth to a bright-eyed little girl whom they name Joanna, a mutation of James and Lara. She's the apple of their eye and one who has her mother's lust for adventure and her father's handiwork with weapons, wild gadgets and wit.

When Joanna grew up, she started working for a company belonging to a nice Mr. Carrington, a friend of her father's who liked to joke about "the old days" with dad, just before her suave father would nudge Carrington in the ribs to be quiet. It turns out Carrington was the head of a rare breed of global corporation, one that wanted to improve the personal welfare of the world through the promise and potential of new technology. But underneath the goody-goody image, Mr. Carrington operated an intelligence network which aimed to thwart the mysterious and possibly evil corporation known as DataDyne. Joanna joined Carrington's group as a fledgling agent, unknowingly following in her father's footsteps.

Her first assignment: Investigate the claims of a certain Dr. Carroll, who wishes to defect from DataDyne with serious information about first contact with some very special guests.

Yeah, the good ol’ days, before Joanna was turned into a kung fu sex kitten. I think that, for my mere passion for a pixilated spy alone, I should get this job. But I know it's not over yet.

A few minutes later, the woman who gave me Thursday's phone interview comes down the steps to meet me. I know who she is before she introduced herself. HR people have that certain air about them, a cautious friendliness mixed with a clinical efficiency. It's the kind of manner you find in therapists and very good waitstaff. The woman, whom I'll call Lena, introduced herself and we chatted amicably in that certain frequency of bullshit common when you meet new people whom you want to like you. Lena asks if I found the application a bear. I smile suavely, of course not.

I'm a rock star, I tell myself. Nothing fazes me. Internally, I just mud wrestled a wild boar.

Lena takes me up a set of stairs to the second floor. I can barely believe my eyes. As I step onto the second floor, I see spread out before me games.

No, wait. Not just games. That's too simple.

It's a gaming floor with gleaming white walkways and red neon piping coming off thin steel pillars. Mushrooming out of the white tile on the floor are gaming stations saddles on all four sides of an imaginary square. Here, you can play games form Nintendo's glorious past and titles just hitting the market. To the left is a mini-museum of Nintendo's video game history, including original stand-up arcade games "Donkey Kong" and "Super Mario Bros." Situated on pedestals are every Nintendo gaming system ever made. On the walls are pictures and awards and more murals of Nintendo characters. Television screen everywhere flicker footage of older games or snatches of newer ones. A couple co-workers amble between gaming stations, searching for rivals in a sort of video pick-up game.

In the middle of the room, I slow a little and try to test my peripheral vision. My whole vision is saturated with Nintendo lore and the people who brought it to life...a group of children in adult bodies serious about fun.

We leave the gaming floor and head down a tiny hallway filled with smaller offices. I'm lead into a small room by Lena. I sit in the small office with your pre-requisite phone, two chairs and circle table. A stand up set of shelves, the size of a coffin and colored that pre-fab Ikea tan, holding three-ring binders and a boatload of what looks like the most boring documents on earth. After seeing the Santa's Workshop of the gaming floor, I deduce that this must be the place where Nintendo employees go for a time out when they've been bad.

Lena, still all smiles for miles at 4 p.m. on a Friday, produces a manila folder. It's the editing test. I know this not from some superpower, but thick marker-made words on the tab titled "Editing test."

So, this is it, I think to myself. I tense a bit, just like I do when I go to the doctor's office, knowing they'll draw some blood at some point. Once the doctor produces the needle, I tense and my heart races a little. Strangely, the tenseness passes. After all, it's for real now. It's time to see what I'm up against.

Lena lays down the test and I try not to grin like an idiot. Two items: an 11" by 17" four-color galley from a magazine layout and an 8.5" by 11" sheet of paper. I'm gobsmacked, expecting a several-page booklet to appear. When I took the editing test at the paper I work at, it was about five sections long and nearly double the amount of pages.

I have about 30 minutes. Lena writes down her extension on a piece of paper and asks me (they never "tell" you...it's all proper and pliant) to call her when I'm done. The office phone in front of me displays the time with the colon between the hour and minute numbers blinking once a second. I watch the blinking in a hypnotic trance. Sixty beats a second. At rest, athletes have that heart rate. I don't bother to check mine.

I flip over the pages to make sure that is everything I have to edit. It's an embarrassment of minuscularity. I start with the galley. First thing that gets my eye is the title of a game in some body copy doesn't match the art head of the game title above the body copy. I spot a couple words in need of a separating space in the photo caption.

I march through the galley with little problem. The 8.5" by 11" sheet is more of a delicate beast. It was obviously written to be a minefield of errors, so I scan it slowly. The story deals with a couple of video game characters out on an adventure. Like in the galley, I immediately circle name of characters I don't recognize and make a note to check against an official registry somewhere. In any editing test, it's kinda safe to assume that there's going to be at least one error per line of text. Sometimes, though, there's going to be two on one line and zero on the next. HR managers love to throw a curve now and then. If I was an HR manager developing the test, I would be cruel: No errors in one graph, or if a multipage test, no errors on one whole page.

But I'm not in charge. I make more marks on the galley to verify names and cheat codes. As a copy editor, I'm a cold, vicious bastard. I trust nothing in front of me. Every name, every code, every screenshot could be a mistake. I verify everything. I do this for two reasons: to know without a doubt what's going in and to get a better understanding of the gaming library. I may be a fanatic gamer, but I don't know every piece of software out there.

Thirty minutes vanish from me and I make a couple more checks. I catch a misspelling at the bottom of the page, the product's name by the page number. It's something a less experienced editor would take for granted and develop a blind spot to. I circle a couple more items for future verification. I want Lena and whomever else to know that I call items into rigorous question. Call me paranoid, but I assume the text is lying to me, written in haste by a slacker staff writer who releases the copy minutes before deadline. I've seen it before. I see it everyday.

I make some final marks and I call Lena. I put the test down and wait. I tell myself I'm done, and I’m not going to have a last-second panic over the test. I've slain this beast, damnit.

The stress from the test fades and I can drift for a second. I'm tempted to wander around my tight quarters to find out what's in those binders, but Lena comes back in. She collects the test and has a few more questions for me. Open-ended stuff. How do you handle criticism? How do you organize yourself?

I answer automatically, trying to tie my responses to the job requirements, syncing my abilities with what the job calls for. I make Lena happy with my answers and only stumble once, forgetting that the official line why this job is opening is because the guy that has it is leaving for school. I tried to press for a date when they want to hire by, thinking I could figure out when they could be making a decision. That way if the date on the calendar passes and I don't hear anything, I'll know for sure I'm out of the running and I won’t have to pin hopes into the void, thinking I still make have a chance when there isn't one to be had.

We talk about job-related travel, and I parry to remind her that I have a freshly minted U.S. passport. I also slip in that I'm learning French and I will be learning Japanese starting in 2003. While my lingua franca for the job would be English, I want to impress on the lovely Lena that I'm the kind of guy who always seeks out challenges and that I'm all into self-improvement. I'm hoping that the fact of me learning a foreign language is impressive in some way ... something and anything to help me stand out. At this point, that's what it's all about.

Lena told me during the phone interview that after 700 resumes flowed in for the copy editor job they had to shut the gate. I figure it like this: Most companies can afford to interview maybe, what, one to two percent of such a large base pool. So, assuming from the base 700 figure, you have about 10 jokers in for the serious look-at. Out of that group, maybe two will stand out for a final round. I need every edge I can get. My friend Josh tells me, speaking as a manager and as someone who does hiring, that already having a job when you apply is a definite plus. With the state of the economy, I can't imagine that there are a lot of folks taking a risk of changing jobs right now. That leaves me in the pool with jobless, yet hungry, applicants. I have years of experience editing. I have a master's in journalism. I have recent experience as a copy editor for the second-largest newspaper in the Pacific Northwest. I can do this job backwards and forwards and with my eyes closed.

And I do my diplomatic best to explain this to Lena. I try to balance the irrational joy as a gamer with the professional grit of a details-oriented person. But at this point, I'm starting to repeat myself so I answer with short, smart answers. Friendly tone, always.

We stop with the fencing duel of open-ended questions and she hands me benefits information, and I take this as nothing but a good sign. Companies don't show wannabes their benefits, and Nintendo has the most delicious basket of bennies I ever saw. Buddy programs, Hawaiian vacation houses, product discounts, massively subsidized health care, matching 401(k), masseuse, free parking and more. Lena then takes me on a tour of the editorial/marketing wing of this building on the Nintendo campus. We wander through the main arteries which branch off into cubicle capillaries, where mostly men mostly in their late-20/early-30s are plugging away into keyboards. We enter the on-site cafeteria, named Cafe Mario, and get to see an endless stretch of grills and niche-food stations, everything from vegetarian to barbeque. We stroll out of the cafe and back to the gaming floor, where a young man and woman are seriously intent on whipping each other in a game of "Tetris."

The pressure is completely off now as Lena and I make our why back to the staircase leading down to receptionist. My time here is Happy Fun Go-Go Electric Pixel Land is nearly done, the energy and tension fade and some part of my brain tells me the ride is coming to a close. As we stand between conference rooms Link and Zelda, Lena points out the window to the different buildings on Nintendo's campus and we joke about the people who call Nintendo's consumer line all confused about just why their Game Boy fails to work after they drop in the bath tub. She talks about the customer service people who speak different languages and who are on duty 24 hours a day, helping gamers with dumb questions like the bath tub and puzzlers about how to get through a certain dungeon or a boss.

She then points to a squat, inconspicuous building to the left.

"You need supreme badge access to get in there," she says.

"Why?" I'm intrigued at this point.

It's Nintendo's covert operations lab, she says, in words even more super-secret-spy than that. That building houses products in development for 2003 and beyond. Crack that shell and you'll find out what a transnational gaming company is up to. You'd probably also get shot, or more realistically thrown in jail for corporate spying in the guise of trespassing. But you'd be a legend in the gaming world, maybe get a few free meals from the guys at IGN.com. I like to think she's telling me this to impress some outsider, but maybe it's a piece of advice to all potential hires: That's the Garden of Eden over there, buddy boy. Keep far away and you'll get to play in paradise forever.

The interview train pulls into the station and I thank Lena again for letting me play hooky from work on a nice day like this. Okay, I didn't say that, but I let her know how much fun I had. As she walks away, I take on last look at the gaming floor before I vanish down the steps. Serious fun, and fun being serious.

I hand over my badge to the receptionist and she wishes me luck. I want to be cocky and say, "I look forward to seeing you every morning" but I smile, nod and say, "Let's hope so." I push open the door and slip on my shades.

I wait a few seconds, until I'm out of the receptionist's frame of vision, to start laughing out loud.

Holy Jaysus, I just interviewed at Nintendo.

And Double Holy Jaysus with cheese, I think I have a real shot at this job.

I don’t mind the traffic jam coming home. I remove the tie and undo the neck button. The knot in my throat forming from the slow choke coming from the required formality of a shirt and tie starts to fade. I mindlessly listen to NPR and begin jotting some experiences down on my legal pad when I reach gridlock on the 520. The sun is shining and I replay some of the events in my mind. I'm getting more excited because I'm not replaying the dreadful moments. I'm highlighting the good ones and trying not to draw looks from the people in the other cars as I giggle.

Lena told me that she would be calling me tomorrow (Saturday) about the next step, most likely an interview with the Hiring Manager. Lena liked my salary requirements. She liked my resume. If I did as well as I thought on the interview test, I'll be seeing Melinda (not the HM's real name) very soon. I look forward to the sweet sin of a long weekend with little to do.

-----

Flash forward. Oct. 5.

It's been eight days since my interview and test and I haven't heard back.

At first, I really didn't think that Lena would call me on Saturday. First, it's Saturday. Second, I left Lena at 4:30 p.m. on a Friday. Precious little time for Lena to get in touch with Melinda and set everything up.

Lena told me during the phone interview that she would be scheduling face-to-face appointments on Friday and next Monday and Wednesday. Logically speaking, if everyone came in on those days, Lena would get back to me earliest by Thursday or Friday.

It makes sense that Lena and Melinda would look over everyone before the next round. Maybe Lena spoke out of turn about calling me the next day to set something up next week. Maybe someone couldn't come in for an interview. Maybe Melinda was sick.

Maybe not one of us fits the bill.

Maybe I fucked the test.

It’s been like that for the past few days, swerving in and out of logic and methodical paranoia disguised as logic. On Monday I sent a short and sweet thank you note to Lena, a signal flare so she would remember me and pass me on to Melinda.

Nothing. Not that I expected her to write back. Thank you notes are one-way streets, not correspondences.

As more time passes, I tend to think that I'm out of the running. Although Lena said they are looking for the right person, the guy that's leaving the copy editor job is going back to school. It's October here in Seattle and every school has started about now. I figure they have to pull the trigger soon. I'm either getting a phone call to asking me to come back to the big N or I'm getting a one-page letter saying thanks, but no thanks.

I've contacted most of the people I've put as personal references, asking them to let me know when Nintendo contacts them. I've mulled over sending an inquiry note to Lena, but I think I'll wait a while longer. I don't want to come off as a needy boyfriend, begging for attention all the time. It's out of my hands anyway. I'm just asking for an answer at this point.

And by Thursday, I got some kind of answer.

At my job, like any other I guess, you accrue time off. In my two-and-a-half years at my job, I just reached the maximum of eight weeks of vacation through some bizarre calculus of me working vacation days and union rules. I had no less than the head of computer systems, the HR person and a deputy managing editor all come up to me and talk about when I was going to take time off.

I said I have a few days scheduled around Thanksgiving and Christmas and three weeks in April for Europe.

Well, that was just marvelous, the DME, the systems guy and the HR person said, but you are losing vacation time now. If you don't take it, you won't accrue any more. Anyone remember that scene in the film "Office Space" where the poor office drone fails to fill out a business form properly and hears it from several different managers in a row? Understand that and you begin to trip on my weirdness.

So, in some twisted piece of business logic, my company is forcing me to take a week off in late October.

Now, here's the really fun part.

Suppose Nintendo calls me just before I go on my week vacation. They want me in to talk to Melinda. I schedule it for sometime in vacation time. I go see Melinda and I take the offer.

I roll back into work after the vacation and I give my two-week notice, but I put my notice on vacation time. That's right, I'm taking a vacation my last two weeks, rolling in at 9 a.m. to train my replacement and rolling out at 4 p.m. When my two weeks are up, I'll have used a total of three weeks of vacation, meaning I'll have five weeks left in the bank.

But, wait, aren't you out of a job, you ask.

My union has a rule where, if you leave work and have four or more weeks of vacation accrued, you cash out four of those weeks for four extra paychecks. In the crossfire, I'll lose a week, but I'll gain four paychecks...enough to send my butt to Paris first class.

Ahem...of course I'll give some money to some noble cause. Life isn't all foie gras, you know.

I'm very lucky to have a job, I know. If I don't get the Nintendo gig, I hope it goes to someone who needs it. I've been out of work for a few months and it's humiliating and terrifying. I would love the job, don't get me wrong, but as time goes on and the initial serotonin rush fades, I'm coming to terms with the idea that fate may not tap me on the shoulder for this one.... and that's okay.

All in all, I'm blessed. I have a great wife, two adoring cats, a nice home, a stable (albeit boring) job, a nice circle of friends, and time to pursue the leisure arts of writing, game playing and learning a new language.

Tomorrow, I'm going to protest Team Bush's insane drive toward war in Iraq. I'm going to celebrate my freedom to speak and to be a citizen peacefully petitioning the government. If you can make the march in your area, please go out and speak out, too.

It's been a hell of a nine days. Nintendo is fading into a memory and I'm remembering what's really important and how, everyday, I get a chance to see it and cherish it.