It Was Back In 2001 That I Applied To Be Manager Of A "Sex Shop"

I had returned from my two year "single man adventures" in Sydney* with a pot of gold under my arm and no great desire to work for the man. I joined any number of societies, clubs and communities. I had dinners, lunches and even the odd breakfast with friends. I even managed to desist from trying to shag the whole of Wellington after it was pointed out to me that I was off on that particular circle of life once again.

The life of leisure. A man with more money that time ...
God I got bored pretty bloody quickly.

And so I started looking around for something to do.
I most certainly did not want to go back to working in IT every again ... hmm. In fact I wanted to do something more people focussed. Now I can't remember the exact order of things but there was the Counselling Degree at WelTec and ... well, something very different.

I spotted in the local paper (ah, the days of physical newspapers :-) that d.vice ("Quality Adult Toys for Adventerous Everyday People") were expanding from the one shop to another (or moving to bigger premises ... or something). Anywho they wanted a Manager for their shop.

I like adventure, pretty keen on sex and love making people smile.
So, I found a PC somewhere and set about trying to make my very IT-centric CV as relevant as I could which, as you can imagine, was a labour of creativity and a lot of fun.

Popped the application form and CV into the post and then set off for another lunch meeting with the local art society (or some such activity I was prone to get up to a lot back then).

The post came, my CV was returned to me and I was regretfully not suitable for the position. Ah well, no big surprises there and nothing ventured nothing gained. I was disappointed but by no means down-and-out, I mean who knows where my life may have gone if they had said, "Yip, you're the man for us" - interesting to speculate eh. Ok, I confess, I did think for a few seconds it was because I was a man of the male species but I may have been looking for any excuse to make it general and not about me, hey we all do it :-)

Hang on though, what's that yellow sticky poking out of the CV ... oh lordy lord, they had inadvertently left their notes on the CV as they, I assume, passed it around the three owners of the company. And the one that will always stick in my mind was:

Totally qualified but I would be worried he would steal our ideas

Wow, really ... that was a thought that had never crossed my mind.

Firstly I recall thinking (and still do), "If you think that then surely you'd want to at least meet me!", I mean the people that may go into competition with you (and boy-oh-boy was that never gonna happen) are exactly the sort of people you should be hiring.

My second thought was, "How bloody rude!" ... they'd never met me and I was tarred with the brush 'industrial espionage'. Hurumph.

I never really lost a lot of sleep about it and to be honest, apart from having a giggle with my mates at the time (yip, I showed them) it's never even popped into my mind.

Until this floated across my Twitter stream from @dviceNZ

Are you a sales super star and experienced retail manager? Lead the D.VICE Welly team…find out more. http://www.dvice.co.nz/vacancies/12

HA HA HA HA - I RT'ed it with "I once applied for this, blog post to explain hilarity coming" and @dviceNZ asked what the "hilarity" was to which I said give me an email address and I'll send you this post. They did, and I did ... [silence] ... :-)

BTW: Their Wellington position is still open, applications must be in by 14th September - have at it!

* Yes, I know, it's time to put fingers on keyboards and add to the life story with "Chapter Six: The Hellraiser Years (Sydney)" ... sometime very soon.