A Middle-Aged Teddy Bear Dances with a Skeleton

Barry Maher
Mon, 09 Mar 2026 20:49:37 -0700
Opinion

"If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance," said George Bernard Shaw

It's 3:30 on a stuffy afternoon. The three people I'm with have been conducting job interviews all day. I'm there consulting on a hiring process that has left this company with a 37% annual turnover rate. They consider that a tad high.

Our sixth interviewee of the day sort of bounces in. I'll call him Clyde Thompson. He's got a thin scar running from his hairline down across his eyelid and onto his cheek. He's neat and well-groomed and even with the scar, he looks like a middle-aged teddy bear in a business suit.
Updated: Mon Mar 09, 2026

"If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance," said George Bernard Shaw

It's 3:30 on a stuffy afternoon. The three people I'm with have been conducting job interviews all day. I'm there consulting on a hiring process that has left this company with a 37% annual turnover rate. They consider that a tad high.

Our sixth interviewee of the day sort of bounces in. I'll call him Clyde Thompson. He's got a thin scar running from his hairline down across his eyelid and onto his cheek. He's neat and well-groomed and even with the scar, he looks like a middle-aged teddy bear in a business suit.

We've already got three strong candidates and there are only two openings. Plus, the division manager strongly prefers "vigorous and energetic" — meaning, young — candidates. And her two subordinates — known around the office as Dumb De Dumb and Dumb De Dumber — take their cues from her on everything. She starts the interview with the question she normally finishes with, "So, Mr. Thompson, why should we hire you?"

Thompson smiles. He leans forward in his seat. He says, "I'm 53 years old. I'm not pretty. I've been unemployed for five months — ever since my last company folded. I've got absolutely no experience in your industry. I checked "yes" on that application question about whether or not I've ever been convicted of a felony. I've applied for any number of other jobs. Nobody else will hire me."

Weirdly, Clyde's ticking these points off on his fingers as confidently as if he were listing his Stanford MBA, his Olympic gold medals and his seven years as CEO of Apple. Then he says, "So, let me tell you why I'm the best possible candidate you're ever going to find for this job."

"If you hire me," he says, "I can't afford not to succeed. If the job gets too grueling, I don't have the option of moving on to greener pastures. I don't even have brown pastures. There are no other pastures for me until I'm ready to be put out to pasture. I'm a hundred percent committed. I'm as locked into this position as I was locked into that jail cell 35 years ago. And you'll notice that's where I got most of the credits for my college degree. Fortunately, I never needed a Master's, so I've never had to go back. But the things I learned in that place — the formal and the informal training — have everything to do with why I've been so successful at every job I've had since then."

Clyde Thompson walked into that interview with about as much chance of getting that job as he had of becoming Miss Congeniality in the next Miss America Pageant. Then he gave us all the reasons why we might NOT want to hire him: all the things we would have come up with once he left the room — a couple of things we might never even have thought of.

But when he did leave the room, the discussion barely touched on any of those points. It felt like we'd already dealt with them. But it was an extraordinary discussion because Clyde had turned his unemployability into his strongest asset. The fact that the leading candidates were so good they could quit and get hired somewhere else in a heartbeat had become a liability for them. Every one of us was convinced that Clyde would never add to that 37% turnover rate. Not if there was anything he could do to avoid it.

The division manager made Clyde Thompson her number one choice. No surprise, her two subordinates agreed. The following Monday, Dumb-De-Dumber called and offered Clyde the job.

Clyde asked for 24 hours to think it over. Then he called back the next morning, thanked them and turned them down. Because "unemployable" Clyde Thompson had gotten a better offer.

Check out Barry Maher's dark humor supernatural thriller, "The Great Dick: And the Dysfunctional Demon" on Amazon. Sign up for his newsletter at www.barrymaher.com.