It is unseasonably warm for a morning in early June. I persuade my personal care attendant to come in extra early, promising him added bucks in his pocket by the end of the day. He stumbles through the door as the first light of dawn comes through my bedroom window.

I am ready. I dispense with my usual dance of civility and adopt a more militaristic style of management. Forsaking phrases designed to soothe a soul weary from late-night entertainment, I bark out single words. They come out of my mouth soldier-straight: "Cereal. Milk. Fruit. Coffee. Very strong." This serves two purposes:

it gets my mind off how nervous I am and makes me focus on getting through my morning routine as efficiently as possible.

Breakfast is over and is now burning a hole in my stomach. No matter, my attendant and I must proceed to the difficult job of transforming myself into a bright and cheerful job-seeker. As the water, soap, and shampoo roll over my body, I go over my answers to "interview questions they always ask you." I’ve been assured by everyone I’ve talked to that these questions will come up in almost every job interview, and I’ve programmed carefully crafted answers to these queries into my communication device.

I tell my attendant to rub a little harder on my scalp while I imagine the interviewer asking me, "What will you be doing in ten years?" I have two answers to this question. In the interview I will smile broadly and proclaim, "I shall be the information manager of a small but vital company." I know the answer I want to give. "What will I be doing in ten years? How the hell do 1 know what I’ll be doing ten years from now; I hardly know what I’ll be doing next week, let alone in the next decade!" But this might be perceived as hostility and a lack of vision and goals on my part. Better stick to the safe answer.

I’m about to move on to another question when I find myself getting chilly. "It’s time to get corporate," says my attendant. This is his way of hassling me for trying to work in the real world. I don’t care. I’m tired of feeling useless; I’m tired of depending on government funds for my survival; and most of all, I’m tired of my blood pressure going up every time I hear people complain about folks on welfare, for being the good paranoid I am I know they are talking about me!

After two hours of blood, sweat, and tears, I find myself in a coat and tie ready to roll out the door and get in the van for the ten minute ride to the job interview. By the end of the day I may have a paid summer internship at a regional governmental agency. I’m pumped, primed, and out of my mind!

The outside of the building looks like a modern office edifice. There’s a long, smooth ramp on the side with an automatic door at the end. Things are looking up. I could work here. 1 roll inside and search for the appropriate suite.

It occupies a large corner of the building on the first floor. It is enclosed by two big glass doors with which I immediately start doing battle. My clanging and banging alerts someone on the other side of the door to my presence. A smartly dressed woman in high heels hurtles towards me with the velocity of a Nolan Ryan fastball; I suddenly start

praying that those doors are shatterproof. She is almost at her destination when she puts on the brakes, then in a move worthy of the finest running back she smartly stiff-arms the door open for my entrance.

"You must be Mr. Williams," she says.

Nailed! She knows who I am. The whole world must know who I am. They must have been tracking my movements ever since I got out of my van.

As I roll in, my heart is pounding, my antiperspirant is breaking down and I have a great urge to vomit. In short, everything’s on course; I feel like a first-time job candidate. "Sit right over here, Mr. Williams. I’ll tell Mr. Brown you’re here." I watch her fade into a distant office. The space I’m sitting in is enormous. Long shelves of books and other materials stand in rows throughout the room, and at the head of it all there is a large desk where the smartly dressed woman sits and keeps watch over everything. Except for the brilliant morning light that floods the room, I could be in the opening scene of Citizen Kane, and I half expect the woman to return with a pile of books, tell me I have only an hour and that I can take no notes.

Instead Mr. Brown comes to fetch me. I notice the closer he comes, the more perplexed he looks. He eyes me warily, makes an inept attempt to shake my hand, and bids me follow him into his office.

"Ah, good, Brown," I think. "It’s just me and you. One on one. Mano a mano. Show me your best stuff and I’ll hit it out of the park, baby."

He hurriedly moves a couple of chairs Out of my way and scoots around to his side of the desk. There he keeps looking at my resume; he seems to be searching for something to say. I wait for the first question, but it never comes. Finally, he asks me about a professor I may have had at the university, and at that moment it all comes crashing down on me. I realize that Mr. Brown is not going to interview me. There will be no summer internship for me; no foot in the door, no opportunity to prove myself in a paid position. It will be an endless summer of pain and self-hatred. I am enraged, but there’s nowhere to put it. I can’t blow up in here; I might find myself all over the evening news. Quiet civility and a quick exit seem the best course. I turn around and head Out the door. There are no protests from Mr. Brown; no inquiries into why I’m leaving; no cries of "Come back Shane." There is only the sound of my wheelchair moving softly cross the carpet. The smartly dressed woman rushes over and holds open the heavy portals.

Out on the street, I find myself filled with the hot breath of shame. I want to cry, but there’s nothing to do but hold my head up high and get in the van for the long ride home.

In the months that follow, I wait for a letter of rejection. It never comes.

AUTHOR’S NOTE:

I wrote the foregoing essay the way I did because the conference organizers requested a "personal statement." In rereading what I wrote though, I seem to come off a little neurotic. All people going for a job interview are nervous. Many employers talk about non essentials before getting to the heart of the matter. Well, all I can say is, you weren’t there. You didn’t see the way Mr. Brown looked at me, didn’t experience his failure to show up at a previous appointment, and didn’t behold a host of other small signs of annoyance, disdain, and rejection.

Nevertheless, let us assume that I over reacted. How would you feel going to a job interview where you really couldn’t explain yourself, where you didn’t have a linguistic locus of control, where everything imaginable seemed to be conspiring to make you feel "less than," and where you were without the scantest means for controlling the situation?

Where does a person marshal the confidence to remained centered in such a predicament? Can a person be trained to accept years of rejection and still muster enough self esteem to endure the risk of a job interview where he or she cannot really communicate? I thank whatever Gods may be for the existence of my communication aid and my personal expertise in handling it. Perhaps, my first job interview would have been very different had I been able to speak the way I can now. I just don’t know, but I do know that I remember the humiliation and pain of that first job interview more than 20 years ago as though it had occurred yesterday.

If the Pittsburgh Employment Conference, among its other important agendas can put some issues on the table as they are perceived from the point of view of the augmented communicator, I think this conference will be a success.