molly mary o'brien

a disturbing pattern

Recently, at a certain bar in the town where I go to school, I have fallen victim to a conversational scam.  Here it is: a man under the age of thirty approaches me at the bar for some light chit-chat.

“Nice scarf.”  ”Cold out.”  ”I like your glasses.” “Whiskey on the rocks! Ho, ho, ho, that’s a drink!”

Inevitably the man asks me if I am in school.  (This bar teems with us college students on the weekends.) Then he asks me what year I’m in.  Then he asks me what I’m studying, and what I plan on doing after graduation.

“Writing,” I say.  ”And, obviously, something else too.”  Then the scam begins.  The man works at a prestigious company in New York!  He has connections!  He does something in finance.  He tells me he can get me a job, because his company “absolutely needs writers” to do press releases, or marketing, or…something.  He makes it sound as if writers are foreign and rare and special.  I spend enough time on the Internet to know this isn’t true.  But I have a glass of whiskey on my hand; I am momentarily convinced I’m a special creature indeed, the divine answer to this unknown financial company’s earnest prayers.  And then the man changes the topic to something else, music or basketball or my haircut, and I realize he’s just trying to sink the proverbial hook through my cheek.  This has happened twice, two different men on two different nights.

Men (and women): please refrain from pulling this maneuver!  We college seniors are frail and frazzled, dead-eyed after hours on craigslist, no more than the sum of our paltry LinkedIn profiles.  We have been networked down to the bone.  You should know better than to manipulate us with that kind of retractable bait.  A job offer — even the whiff of one — is cruel when used as a pick-up line.