03 - The Resume
By SoulFire77
- 67 reads
THE INTERVIEW
3: The Resume
Q6. "Walk me through your career. Starting wherever feels natural."
Dale considered. Most interviewers wanted chronological—high school, first job, the steady march forward. But she'd said wherever feels natural, and what felt natural wasn't the beginning. What felt natural was the middle, the years that mattered, the place where he'd been most himself.
"Morrison Distribution," he said. "That's probably where I should start. Twelve years there, longer than anywhere else. Started as a shift supervisor, worked up to operations manager before—" He paused. Before they decided I wasn't worth keeping. Before the new VP brought in his own people. Before I learned that twelve years meant nothing when the spreadsheet said your salary was too high. "Before I moved on."
Ms. Vance wrote something on her legal pad. The pen moved in those quick, precise strokes.
Q7. "Twelve years is significant. What made Morrison work for so long?"
"The culture, mostly. Old-school distribution—the people who'd built the place were still running it when I started. They understood that a warehouse isn't just square footage and forklifts. It's relationships. The guy who knows which dock door sticks in cold weather. The woman who can look at a pallet and tell you if it's going to shift in transit. That kind of knowledge takes years to build, and Morrison valued it."
"Valued," she repeated. "Past tense."
"Things changed. Ownership changed. The people who'd built the place retired or got pushed out, and the new leadership had different priorities. Efficiency metrics. Automation. The kind of thinking that looks great in a quarterly report but falls apart when you're trying to get a hundred thousand units out the door during peak season and half your experienced staff has been replaced by temps who don't know a reach truck from a pallet jack."
He was talking too much. He could hear it, the frustration bleeding through, and he pulled back. Recentered.
"Sorry. I don't mean to sound bitter. It's just—I saw something good get dismantled, and it was hard to watch."
"You cared about the place."
"I did. I thought I'd retire there." He'd thought a lot of things. That loyalty was a two-way street. That hard work got rewarded. That a man could build something brick by brick and have something solid to stand on at the end. "But that's not how it worked out."
Q8. "And before Morrison?"
"Couple of smaller operations. Jackson Brothers—that was my first real supervisory role. They did regional furniture distribution back when furniture was still being made in this state. Closed in '09 when the last of the plants went overseas. Before that I was at a place called Tri-State Freight, mostly loading dock work, but I learned a lot about logistics there. How to move product efficiently. How things flow."
"You worked your way up."
"Only way I knew how." He allowed himself a small smile. "I didn't have a college degree, didn't have connections. Just showed up every day and paid attention. Eventually people notice."
Q9. "And after Morrison?"
The question he'd been waiting for. The gap on the resume, the story he'd told so many times he almost believed the version he was selling.
"Consolidated Distribution. Three years, good company, but they were bought out by a larger firm and there were redundancies. My position got eliminated." That was the clean version. The version that didn't mention the politics, the new regional manager who'd wanted his own people, the way Dale had seen it coming for months and done nothing because he'd believed—stupidly, naively—that his record would protect him. "Then AMF Industries. That was brief, just a few months. Not a good fit."
"Not a good fit," Ms. Vance repeated. "What does that mean, exactly?"
Dale hesitated. AMF was the wound that still bled. The operation that had been failing before he'd arrived, the owners who'd hired him to fix it and then blamed him when it kept failing, when the problems turned out to be structural rather than managerial.
"They had issues I wasn't equipped to solve," he said carefully. "Sometimes you walk into a situation and realize too late that no one could have fixed it. They needed a scapegoat more than they needed a solution. I was—I was convenient."
"That sounds frustrating."
"It was. But I learned from it." The lie came smooth, practiced. He hadn't learned anything from AMF except that some situations were designed to destroy whoever stepped into them. "And then the market shifted. COVID hit the supply chain hard, everything reshuffled, and I found myself on the outside looking in."
"For eleven months."
"For eleven months." He met her eyes. "I won't pretend it's been easy. But I've used the time well. Stayed current on industry changes, kept my certifications up, done some consulting work when I could find it."
That last part wasn't true. There'd been no consulting work, just endless applications into endless voids. But it was the kind of lie everyone told, the kind interviewers expected to hear.
"I'm ready to get back in," he said. "That's the main thing."
Q10. "Let's go back to Morrison for a moment. You mentioned you were operations manager. What did that role entail, specifically?"
And so he talked about Morrison. The daily rhythms, the seasonal surges, the constant calibration of manpower and machinery. He talked about the inventory system he'd helped implement—not cutting-edge, not flashy, but reliable, the kind of system that didn't crash during peak hours when you needed it most. He talked about the team he'd built, the supervisors he'd trained, the way he'd learned to read the mood of a warehouse floor the way a farmer reads weather.
Ms. Vance listened. Wrote. Asked follow-up questions that showed she was paying attention, that she understood the details he was describing.
"You mentioned the dock door that sticks in cold weather," she said at one point. "Is that the kind of institutional knowledge you mean?"
He felt a small flush of pleasure at being heard, at being understood.
"Exactly. Things you can't put in a manual. The reach truck in bay seven pulls slightly left—you have to compensate or you'll clip the racking. The temperature sensor in the refrigerated section reads two degrees high, so you adjust your targets accordingly. Little things that add up. You lose that knowledge when you churn through staff, and it costs you. It always costs you."
She nodded, made a note.
On the table, her coffee cup still steamed. The level hadn't changed since he'd first sat down.
Q11. "When you left Morrison, what lessons did you take with you? What did those twelve years teach you that you couldn't have learned anywhere else?"
"That people matter more than systems." He said it without hesitation. "Every operation I've ever seen fail, it failed because someone forgot that. They got so focused on the metrics, the efficiency targets, the cost-per-unit, that they stopped seeing the people doing the actual work. And then they're surprised when turnover spikes and institutional knowledge walks out the door and suddenly their perfect system isn't working anymore because nobody knows how to run it."
"That sounds like hard-won wisdom."
"Twelve years of watching what works and what doesn't." He paused. "And then three years of watching it all get taken apart."
"Three years?"
"The last three at Morrison. After the acquisition. That's when—" He stopped. Frowned. He hadn't said that. He'd said twelve years at Morrison, but he hadn't specified the timeline of the decline, hadn't broken it down into acquisition and aftermath. "I'm sorry, I don't think I mentioned—"
"You've been very thorough." Ms. Vance smiled, made a note. "It's clear Morrison was formative for you."
He let it go. She was right—he had been thorough. He must have mentioned the timeline somewhere in his explanation, even if he didn't remember doing it. The details were blurring together now, all the things he'd said in all the interviews, the same stories told so many times they'd lost their edges.
Q12. "What about the operations manager role specifically? I know you mentioned you stepped back into supervision at Consolidated—what was that transition like?"
"Humbling." The word came out honest, unguarded. "Going from managing an entire operation to supervising a single shift—that's an ego hit, no way around it. But I'd rather be working than not. And there's something to be said for being closer to the floor again. You lose perspective in management sometimes. You forget what the actual work feels like."
"Do you think you lost perspective at Morrison?"
The question landed wrong, sharp in a way he couldn't quite identify.
"I don't know. Maybe. It's hard to see clearly when you're inside something."
"That's very honest."
"I try to be."
He reached for the water glass again. His throat was dry, had been dry this whole time, and the water was still cold—colder than made sense, as if it had just come from a refrigerator. He drank, set the glass down, and glanced at his watch out of habit.
The face was blank.
Not stopped. Blank. The digital display showing nothing at all, just a gray rectangle where numbers should be.
He blinked, and the numbers were back: 9:47 AM. Nearly an hour since he'd sat down.
It felt like less. It felt like they'd just started.
Q13. "You said you did some consulting work during your time between positions. Can you tell me more about that?"
He'd hoped she wouldn't ask. The consulting was the weakest part of his story, the part that didn't hold up under scrutiny. But her eyes were on him, patient and expectant, and the silence was waiting to be filled.
"It was informal, mostly. Helping some smaller operations troubleshoot their fulfillment processes. A friend of a friend who was having issues with their shipping times, that kind of thing." None of this was true. There had been no consulting, no friends of friends, just the slow erosion of his professional network as people stopped returning calls. "Nothing that would show up on a resume, but it kept my skills sharp."
"I'm sure it did." She wrote something. "You know, Dale, I find that the best candidates are the ones who stay engaged even when they're not employed. It shows character. It shows that the work matters to them beyond just the paycheck."
"The work has always mattered to me."
"I can tell."
She looked up from her notes, and her eyes held something he couldn't read—approval, maybe, or understanding, or something else entirely.
Q14. "Looking at your career overall, what patterns do you notice? The types of challenges you've faced, the roles you've gravitated toward?"
He thought about it. Really thought, not just reaching for the prepared answer.
"I keep ending up in places that are falling apart," he said slowly. "Morrison, Consolidated, AMF. Every company I've worked for has been in some kind of decline—either when I got there or by the time I left. I'm always trying to hold things together, trying to keep the wheels from coming off. And sometimes I succeed, for a while. But eventually—" He spread his hands. "Eventually it falls apart anyway."
"Does that frustrate you?"
"It used to. Now I'm not sure what I feel." He looked at his hands, spread on the table in front of him. The veins stood out blue-green beneath the skin, age spots he noticed more every year. "Maybe that's just what this industry is. Maybe everything is always falling apart, and the job is just to slow it down."
"That's a melancholy thought."
"Is it?" He looked up at her. "I think it's realistic. Nothing lasts. Companies don't, jobs don't, people don't. You do what you can while you're there, and then you're not there anymore, and someone else takes over. Or no one does. And the thing you built—the systems, the knowledge, the relationships—it all just..." He made a vague gesture. "Dissipates."
Ms. Vance was watching him with that absolute attention, that total stillness. Her pen wasn't moving. She wasn't writing.
"That's very honest," she said quietly.
"I told you. I try to be."
The silence stretched. The fluorescent lights hummed at the edge of hearing. The HVAC cycled air that tasted like it had been breathed a thousand times before. And beneath those sounds, the room held something else—a stillness that felt almost physical, a pressure against his eardrums.
He glanced at the water stain on the ceiling. Was it larger than before? The brown edges seemed to have spread, creeping outward across the acoustic tile. But that was impossible. Water stains didn't grow. Water stains didn't change.
He looked away.
"I think we've covered your background thoroughly," Ms. Vance said, and something in her voice had shifted—a new register, warmer somehow, more intimate. "Now I'd like to move into some behavioral questions. Situations you've faced, how you handled them. The kind of thing that shows who you are, not just what you've done." She paused. "Are you comfortable with that?"
The door was behind him. He knew it was behind him. He could stand up, thank her for her time, walk out.
But the interview was going well. He could feel it going well. And he needed this job—needed it like air, like water, like the next heartbeat. The mortgage was fourteen days late. The credit card was maxed. His daughter's cracked face was pressed against his thigh in his pocket, and his wife was at home waiting for him to come back with news that wasn't another rejection.
"Of course," he said. "I'm comfortable."
Ms. Vance smiled.
"Good," she said. "Then let's continue."
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