Tips for the job interview

Recently, we've been conducting a number of interviews as we look toward hiring a college intern to help with graphic design. The process of interviewing candidates brings back lots of memories...of interviewing past candidates and also at times when I've been the one looking for a job.

Let's start with the easiest interview. About six years ago we were hiring a college intern and I had one person apply. So I had to do one interview and when it came time to pick the best candidate, it was easy. Luckily for me, he turned out to be a great hand.

How about interview jitters. Let's face it, we all get them. But there really is no reason to be scared. The employer needs you as much or more than you need the job. Also, very few people make it a career to be the one conducting interviews, so often the person conducting the interview is just as nervous as the person answering the questions.

The questions aren't hard. The hard part is keeping your answers short. How many of us remember the first question asked, "So, tell me about yourself?"

Remember that this is an open-ended question...intentionally. There are a lot of things that the interviewer can't ask you so there's no reason to voluntarily bring the up. Can you imagine the surprise if the job candidate actually said something like, "I'm a career child molester who has just spent five of the last 10 years behind bars. I didn't get out for good behavior, but was released because of prison overcrowding."

That's not the answer anyone would expect. Basically, you can answer the question by simply saying, "I'm a person who believes in hard work, family values and an appropriate salary for a good day's work." You might want to shape this answer in a way that more clearly identifies you, but that's the answer the employer is looking for.

You don't need to tell them your age, your religion, your wife's name, how many kids you have or anything else that you would just as soon keep to yourself.

There's a couple of other questions that get some strange answers. One of them is "What would co-workers say about you?"

No need in airing the family laundry here. Something short and to the point will do just fine. "They would say that I'm punctual, professional and like to get my work done right the first time."

However, there are others that will let you know that they suffer from procrastination, partying and trying to cram too much fun and frivolities into an eight-hour day of work.

Another question along the same vain is, "What would you say a weakness of yours is?"

A couple of sentences is all anyone is looking for as in: "I'm shy and find public speaking difficult." That's a good answer unless you are looking for a job in public relations or broadcasting.

Finally, at the end of the interview, you are asked if there is anything you would like to ask.

At a minimum, find out when they hope to pick the person for the job. You might also want to ask about salary, benefits, etc....but I've noticed a lot of applicants seem like they are too tired to think or talk at this point, so they just pass on this opportunity.

So, Steve's words of wisdom are simple. Keep your answer short and don't volunteer a lot of information that  can easily be misconstrued.

Watch where you're shoving that transducer, lady!

Have I mentioned that I don't like doctors, nurses, dentists and other medical technicians very much?

Probably outside of work, these are all nice people, but when they are working....it's another story. They become scary monsters who really know how to hurt people.

When I was in the hospital last March, I learned to hate the nurses who would come and put the world's largest needles in the tops of my hands for the IV's. First of all, they seemed to have a hard time finding a vein that wouldn't collapse on them. So I would have to be poked and poked and poked. Eventually, my hands turned black and blue.

But that pales in comparison to the torture chamber I was in yesterday.

I was getting my kidneys checked over with an ultrasound device. To do this, they first had me fast from midnight until mid-morning. I'm actually getting used to this drill so it's not a biggie any more. A lot of my blood tests require fasting.

Two weeks ago, I was in for an echo cardiogram, which is really nothing more than an ultrasound of your heart, so why should I expect anything different when it comes to the kidneys?

Well, it's because the kidneys seem to hide better.

The technician grabbed her transducer and started punching me in the stomach with it. Well, my first reaction was to tighten up my abs.

This, she told me, was a no-no. "You have to relax," she said, "or I just have to push harder."

Really? Is that possible. Well, I tried to relax, but that's hard to do when your covered with gel and a transducer is being pushed into your abdomen.

So, for an eternity, it seemed, she was squeezing gel on me and then poking her transducer under my rib cage -- front and both sides.

Now, on a horse, this area is called the flanks, and if you want a horse to buck, just go ahead and punch them in their flanks.

I didn't buck, but I certainly knew how the poor horses felt.

I asked her why she kept punching me with that transducer. "It's like a flashlight," she said. "Our window to the kidneys is through the liver and the spleen."

You wouldn't believe my sense of relief when she told me she was done. I felt like pounded round steak.

But my "pain" isn't over with yet. I still have to wait for the results from the doctor to find out if anything is wrong. I hope not, but I really hope I don't require another ultrasound on my kidneys.

The transformation of a Democrat to a Republican

This confession will shock a few of my loyal readers, but when I got married in 1985, I was a Democrat. I married a Republican so we used to kid each other on election day that our votes merely cancelled each other out. However, it was during the Clinton Administration that I switched parties. This makes it a little lonely at times when I discuss politics with my family, most of whom have remained loyal to the Democratic party.

I, however, made a clean split and there is very little of the Democratic Party's platform that I would feel comfortable supporting anymore.

So the questions arise, "Who changed? Was it me or the party?"

Probably both to some extent, but certainly I changed more than the party. I felt like I could be an FDR New Deal Democrat, but I couldn't be a Clintonite Democrat.

During Clinton's years in office, I was really turned off by his seemingly endless succession of sex scandals with women other than Hillary. Bill's affair with an intern in the Oval Office was the last straw. But you can't blame the party for something that is Bill Clinton's fault.

However, I did feel that the "Progressive" agenda being pushed for by the rank and file Democrats in the 1990s no longer squared with my way of thinking. So, after pondering it for a while, I decided that I liked Republicans and conservative thought better. Now I've got to admit, I couldn't stand Rush Limbaugh when I first heard him 20 years ago. And I don't like him today. I also don't like his MSNBC counterpart Ed Schultz. To me they are both blowhards who try to talk louder than their opponents. Still I find comfort in the conservative agenda of lower taxes and government getting out of the way of companies trying to do business.

This is not to say that I liked everything President Bush did during his eight years, but I was really glad that he was in the White House on and after September 11 and not Bill Clinton. Did we really need to send troops into harm's way in Iraq? Probably not, but I remember when both Democrats and Republicans thought that Saddam Hussein held weapons of mass destruction. That feeling is similar to today when both parties feel that Iran is close to building atomic weapons, if they don't have them already.

In the 2008 Presidential election, I felt I had no real choice between moderate Republican John McCain and liberal Barack Obama. That was the election where I felt like staying home; however, I voted for McCain, whom I felt was the lesser of two evils.

Since that time, the presidency of Barack Obama has galvanized my position in favor of Republicans. I especially felt betrayed when the Senate under the leadership of Harry Reid and the House of Representatives led by Nancy Pelosi were radically changing my country, and not for the better, in my opinion.

So I was happy when the House tilted in favor of the Republicans after the 2010 election and John Boehner became Speaker. I'm not at all disappointed in the gridlock that is Washington, D.C. However, I am looking forward to the 2012 election when hopefully Mitch McConnell becomes Senate Majority leader and a conservative Republican takes the White House.

I would like to see a return to less government and more emphasis on family values. Call me old fashioned, but I still believe that a paycheck is something to be earned and not something to be shared.

I've been proud of my country since I was born, not just since 2008 when Barack Obama was elected President. I would like to see a little more common horse sense played out in Washington, D.C., such as "living within our means" and making government "accountable to the people" and not vice versa.

Yeah, I know that the United States is still a great country, but I would like it to be a greater, stronger country with low unemployment and well thought out domestic energy program.

My mantra comes from a Merle Haggard song popular in the 1970s, "If you don't love it, leave it." But I'm reminded of an old line from 1930s humorist Will Rogers, "We live in the greatest country on earth. Heck, even the people who hate it don't want to leave."

That rose bush used to be second base

When the late Harmon Killebrew was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, he recounted the story of his mom complaining to his dad that their lawn was dug up by Harmon and his siblings playing sports. Harmon recalled his dad saying, "Mom, we're raising boys, not lawn."

That thought has come to me many times over the years. Now our back yard has strawberries where the backstop against the fence used to be and a rose bush grows where second base used to be. The pitcher's mound is hardly perceptible any more.

One of the tell-tale signs that the backyard used to be a baseball diamond is the chalk markings on the inside of the garage. To this day, the score board still stands out on the east wall. The concrete blocks are covered with names and numbers representing the players and runs scored.

We had some wild games...back in the day. Scott would strike a pose at the plate like Chuck Knoblauch, the former rookie of the year for the Minnesota Twins. Derek swung for the fences like Twins Hall of Fame centerfielder Kirby Puckett. I was the perennial pitcher.

Our backyard isn't very big so we had to make some rules to go along with the game. One of the rules was that if you hit a foul ball into the garage, it was an out. If you hit a ball into the fence, that was like hitting the ball to the shortstop because the fence and a good shortstop can both stop a ball.

We also used furry, yellow tennis balls instead of hard baseballs. That was because the back of our house and two windows were only about 15 and 20 feet away from home plate. Line drives would come screaming off the wooden bats of the boys and smack the windows. However, we never suffered a broken glass pane.

The trick, of course, was to hit the ball over the fence between our yard and the city park. First, there was no one in the park to catch the ball. Secondly, the park is built on a hill so a well struck ball can travel a long ways down the hill side, especially if it makes it to the street.

The worst thing that ever happened in a backyard baseball game occurred on a foul ball that went straight back of home plate. Most of the time when the boys were little, the house next door was deserted, but the house beside that one was inhabited by an old, unfriendly lady who seemed to despise children and especially ours.

Anyway, I came home from work and was met by the boys who told me that a foul ball had landed in the lady's backyard. The lady grabbed the ball and took it into her home.

So, I marched over to her house and knocked on the back door...the one the lady used. Her daughter was visiting her so I told the daughter what had transpired. The daughter heard my story and then went back into the house. In a couple of minutes she came back with a furry, yellow tennis ball and handed it to me. She apologized for her mother and I was on my way.

Back in our yard, I'm sure the boys were delighted to get the ball back and might even have been surprised to see me go get it. After all, it wasn't as if it was the only tennis ball we had. Our garage was full of tennis balls. However, I wanted to make a point with the lady that she could no longer get away with being rude to the boys.

As the years passed, the boys got bigger and somehow our backyard kept getting smaller. For a while, the boys would go to the nearby elementary school playground to play baseball. Then they got interested in other things...girls, among them. And it seemed as though baseball was nothing but a memory.

So when I look out and see the rose bush where second base used to be, forgive me if I smile. We now grow grass in the backyard, but once upon a time we were raising little baseball players.

What do you want to do when you grow up?

Most of us heard that question a number of times during our youth. My answer was that I wanted to be a sports reporter that covered the New York Yankees. Actually, I wanted to be the center fielder for the New York Yankees. At the time, Mickey Rivers was the center fielder and I figured that I was at least as good as him. But, alas, no baseball scouts ever came to see the Roundup Miners play baseball, so I was left for the next best thing...sports reporter.

That's why I wrote sports for our hometown newspaper when I was in high school. That's why I went to the University of Montana to study journalism. I even studied Russian as a foreign language when I was in college so that I could cover the 1980 Olympics in Moscow. You remember that Olympics don't you? That's the one that the United States didn't participate in because President Carter boycotted it to protest the USSR invasion of Afghanistan.

So what's a young grad with a journalism degree to do? Well, the Yankees hadn't come calling so my first job out of college was as a reporter in Beach, North Dakota. I was a general assignment reporter and covered everything from writing wedding announcements to covering an oil field explosion. After six months, I had had enough of Beach and I think Beach had had enough of me. We agreed to part amicably.

However, I stayed with newspapers for another couple of years until I made the swap to public relations in 1983, moving from the newspaper in Baker, Montana, to Mid-Rivers Telephone Cooperative in Glendive, Montana. From there, I moved to Mandan in 1985 with my new bride and a new job with MDU. I had another job transition in 2001, and actually worked for six months as the education reporter for the Bismarck Tribune before going to work for my present employer, the Lignite Energy Council.

So for 27 or so years, I've been in public relations. I never did get to write sports or cover the New York Yankees as I had wanted to...but my point of this blog and my question remains..."What did you want to do when you were growing up?"

Bittersweet at 91

Tomorrow is my dad's ninety-first birthday. He was born in Musselshell, Montana, the third oldest child of William and Clara Van Dyke. His older brother John and older sister Mattie are both dead now. Dad's parents died a long time ago. His father died in 1949, the year my oldest sister Janet was born. Dad's mom died in 1986, a year after I got married.

I'm not sure just how soon, but after he was born, dad's family moved to Wisconsin before moving back to Montana to settle on a farm south of Roundup where dad and his nine sisters and brothers were raised. The farm was called Strawberry Acres. Across the highway from the Van Dyke's farm was another one owned by the Crosmer family. That's where my dad met my mother. She was the granddaughter of Frank and Nancy Crosmer.

I think the grade school they attended was on Horse Thief Creek. The teacher was a Lindstrand, who lived on a neighboring farm. Anyway, the story goes that dad was in fourth grade and my mom was in first grade when an important incident occurred. Dad was teasing mom so to get back at him, she picked up a cow pie and threw it at him. As one of my favorite comedians, Don Knotts, used to say, "Mom had spunk."

The story must be true because I heard it lots of times when I was growing up and I never heard anyone contradict it.

The only good story I know about them courting was told to me by my mom's sister Millie. She said that dad liked to sing to my mother. This isn't hard to believe because dad still sings to this day, if the mood strikes him. Millie told me that one of his favorite songs was "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain." Yes, it was popular long before Willie Nelson recorded it in the 1970s.

I remember driving to Billings when I was a teenager with my dad to see my Grandma Van Dyke, who was in one of the Billings hospitals. It was on the return trip home to Roundup when I first heard Willie Nelson sing that song. I was amazed that dad knew the words. Generally us kids would learn a song long before dad did, but since the song was a classic, dad had known the words for a long time.

When I was a little boy some of my dad's favorite songs were: "Jimmy Brown, the newsboy"; and "Skylark, won't you tell me where my love can be"; and the Sam Cooke hit, "She was only sixteen." He also had one that he sang when he got a hair cut: "Hey, Mister Zip, Zip, Zip, with your hair cut just like mine."

When I was born, dad was 39. As a young boy, I hated cold weather but my dad seemed to live in it without much suffering. He would walk outside on the coldest day of the year and chop wood wearing nothing but a white T-shirt.

At 91, his thermometer has changed some. Now he likes to wear long johns from September through May. He also prefers wearing a long sleeve flannel shirt to wandering around in a T-shirt.

But some things haven't changed. He still likes music, and if it's a song he knows, he'll sing right along with it. And dad is one of the most helpful men that God ever put on this earth. He helps Belinda with the laundry by folding clothes. He also likes to empty the garbage cans in every room and take a sack of garbage out to the alley at least once a day. Also, our birds will never go hungry nor will his cat ever have to worry about a dirty cat box. Dad also likes to vacuum the carpets and wash the dishes. If anything, he's as busy as he wants to be. He walks several times a day from our house to the highway and back. It's only a two block hike, but if you do it enough times, it must be a mile he's walking during the day.

No, he's not 21 anymore, or even 71, but he's doing pretty well for being ninety-one.

Dad's oldest brother John was born in 1917 and died in 1967 when he was 50 years old. Dad's sister Mattie was born in 1919 and died in 2006. That means that John was the oldest in the family for 50 years and Mattie was the oldest for 39 years. Dad has only been the oldest five years.

My guess is that he might like to be the oldest for a few more years. My Grandma Van Dyke lived well into her 90s and dad's father lived to be well into his 80s. So it's hard to tell how much longer dad will sing, walk and do our household chores. Maybe he's destined to be the oldest surviving World War II vet.

Anyway, happy birthday dad. You've been a part of my life for 51 years, and for that, I'm deeply blessed.

September 11th memories

Ten years ago, I was the manager of corporate communications for MDU Resources and working in the Schuchart Building north of the North Dakota capitol. I was in my office when I got a call from George McDonald, a videographer with MDU, who was in the TV studio watching the first World Trade Center Tower burning.

He called me to the basement and we were watching a replay on a TV monitor when a second jet hit the second tower and another ball of fire erupted from the explosion. I had been to the World Trade Center in 1976 and had eaten in one of the large ballrooms near the top floor….about where the jet hit.

As the fire and smoke rolled out of the buildings, the announcers were speculating about the start of World War III, the whereabouts of President Bush and any number of things. It would be later that the towers would fall and the huge clouds of dust would mushroom up from lower Manhattan. The fire trucks and the police cars were rushing to the scene; however, most of the video was being shot blocks away from the Twin Towers. You couldn’t see people jumping from the buildings like we did later on.

For me, I had some immediate concerns. The president of MDU Resources and a number of other company employees were in New York City at the time meeting with credit agencies and financial houses. There were a series of meetings that had been scheduled – some months in advance – and our department had worked on writing speeches, preparing powerpoints and printing complementary materials for the meetings.

I didn’t know exactly where the MDU officials were staying but my guess was that they weren’t staying next to the World Trade Center but more in the center of Manhattan. It wasn’t long before I got called to a meeting where I found that the company officials in New York City were safe, but they had been close to the World Trade Center earlier in the morning.

Then there was a new wrinkle that we had to deal with. My boss, the vice president of corporate communications, was in Washington, D.C., and staying near the Pentagon building where another jet had rammed into it.

It was a strange day because while I felt safe in Bismarck, I had lots of people I knew in places that weren’t very safe. I could feel for them because I was sure they were doing things that weren’t part of any travel plans. For instance, with these two cities being attacked, would there be any public transportation running or restaurants open? It’s one thing to be home and eating out of a crowded refrigerator, but it’s quite another to be on the road and find yourself isolated from the rest of the world because everyone is hunkered down waiting for the next plane to hit. Just think of living out of a suitcase in New York City with no running water, no toilet, no electricity and no food.

Eventually, all the people from MDU returned back to Bismarck. The group that was in New York City had to wait a couple of days before taking a taxi cab from New York to Cleveland, Ohio, before the company plane could fly out and get them. I can’t remember how my boss got home, but I remember, there was a no fly moratorium in place right after September 11, 2001.

I also remember the markets were tanking after September 11^th and that our local churches were never so full as they were on the next Sunday. A little more than a month later, I was about to be jarred even harder when I found out my position at MDU had been eliminated. It was a strange time, but now 10 years later, we can see with 20/20 hindsight. Still, at the time, it was difficult to navigate because everything had changed.

If there is a lesson from September 11^th, it might be this….above all, persevere. Life goes on.