Look, I don’t want to tell you how to do your job. I know you’re making a sincere effort to learn about my background. You’re here to assess my strengths and weaknesses. You’re trained to evaluate how I might fit into your fast-paced, team-oriented culture. You need to determine whether or not my résumé was full of lies. I just think a much more effective way to get to know me and my capabilities than asking a series of the same old behavioral questions and case studies might be to ask me to rank my favorite Cheers characters in order.
I know this seems risky on my part. Obviously, for many people, hiring someone on the wrong side of the Diane-Rebecca Divide is a nonstarter. But I think the question is more what can you learn about me from the fact that I have the courage to tell you I rank Diane higher based on how she propelled 90 percent of the plots forward in those early seasons. At the same time, I could expound on how Rebecca showed up at a time when the show had done everything they could with Diane and needed a change. This might give you a good idea of my understanding of team dynamics, not to mention where I developed a keen sense of when to pivot.
Sure, you could keep asking me stuff like “Describe a time I faced a conflict at work” and “Describe the specific situation, task, action, and the result of that action.” However, I strongly feel you would learn more about me if I told you about when Norm and Cliff argued over whether a monkey could do their jobs. Norm had been fired from several accountant jobs. The subtext was that he had crippling alcoholism, but they kind of glossed over that, and he had become a painter. Cliff, as always, was a mailman who liked to drink in uniform. Clearly, in this case, the situation was the argument, the task was either painting or delivering mail, the action was hiring a monkey to do each job, and the result was, man, did that monkey look funny in a mail delivery uniform.
Did you know there was an episode where Diane got a rejection letter from a literary journal, and the gang at the bar was trying to convince her it was a form letter? That was the entire episode of a network television show in the 1980s. Then, Sam sent a poem in so that he could get the same letter, but he accidentally got published. Diane gave a long, sad speech about how even though it only had a small circulation, people would leave that journal on buses and other people would pick it up and read it, and then they’d loan it to friends. I think about that speech all the time.
I also think about the time Norm had to distract Evan Drake so that Rebecca could sneak out of his room after doing some sort of shenanigans. All Norm could think to say was, “I’ve always wanted to have a rich man carry me across his lawn.” Then, when Rebecca failed to sneak out of the room, due to what I distinctly remember as another sort of shenanigan, Norm came back and told Evan Drake that none of his friends believed him, so he had to get carried across Evan Drake’s lawn while the whole gang applauded as Rebecca snuck out behind them.
What does this have to do with convincing you I could perform this job? I don’t really know. I just want to talk about Cheers with someone. There was this great show about a place where everybody knew your name—it was an all-time great show. Kurt Vonnegut said he would have traded anything he’d ever written just to write one episode of Cheers. But nobody even talks about it anymore, even though it’s on, like, three or four streaming platforms for free. Tens of millions of people watched this show every Thursday for eleven years, and we’re just pretending it never happened.
So, I don’t know. I thought maybe if we talked about it, you might get a better sense of what I’m about than me telling you that my greatest weakness is actually a strength, describing a time I overcame an obstacle without resorting to shenanigans, or pretending that I left my last position out of some journey of self-discovery that led me to this awkward Zoom interview rather than the fact that the management there was meaner than the crew at Gary’s Old Towne Tavern.