My goddaughters Li and Em both had birthdays recently, Li turning 5 and Em turning 3. Each one had a birthday party, and it so happened that Keiko was in town at the same time each party happened, so we went to the parties together.
Birthday parties are a LOT different from what I remember growing up. I hate to sound all I-walked-barefoot-ten-miles-in-the-snow-uphill-both-ways, but birthday "parties" for me were family, a homemade cake, and a couple presents. And on my 10th birthday, the chicken pox. That was a great birthday, let me tell you.
But birthdays today are planned like the Olympics: there are tons of people; non-stop, carefully planned events; and the host country is subtly (or in some cases, not-so-subtly) trying to make sure that its Olympics is better, more fun, and more smoothly run than the Olympics that any previous host country has run. As GA put it the other night, after Em's birthday party: "It's something of an arms race."
Li's birthday party a couple of weeks ago was billed as "a pretend slumber party". Li and 14 of her 5-year-old friends, and several mothers, all came over to the house for a series of events similar to what would happen at an actual girls slumber party: face-painting, eating, storytelling, games played in a circle, and lots of giggling. One thing that differed from such a slumber party, at least from any such slumber party that any putative daughter of mine would ever be allowed to throw, was the presence of a boy. That's right, Li's party featured 14 girls, and Lorenzo. At one point as I was watching the party unfold I turned to Keiko and said:
Me: "I feel really bad for Lorenzo- he's too young to appreciate (a) that he's at a slumber party with 14 girls, and (b) that this is therefore the BEST party he is EVER going to go to. It's all downhill for Lorenzo."
Keiko: "So, what you want is, to be at a slumber party with 14 girls?"
[***ALERT***ALERT*** DANGER Will Robinson! DANGER! Quick- say something humorous and smooth!]
Me: "yes."
[D'OH!]
Keiko: "Grrrr."
Each of the girls [from this point onward, "girls" is assumed to include Lorenzo unless otherwise stated, because let's face it, if he's hanging out exclusively with girls at the age of 5, he thinks he is one, and is just a few short years away from becoming Gaylord McHomo, mayor of Gaytown] brought a sleeping bag and pajamas, and was to be given, on arrival a pillow, and a pillowcase full of goodies.
Earlier that week, on our regular Tuesday night 'boys night', GA had delegated to Laszlo and me the task of going to WalMart and Target to procure the various supplies needed, including pillowcases and the goodies for inside them. This, of course, was a deeply stressful experience for the both of us.
Laszlo: "You go find girly pillowcases while I look for little flashlights."
Me: "Why don't I look for the little flashlights, and you look for the girly pillowcases?"
Laszlo: "I've got the list, and I'm delegating. You get the pillowcases."
Me: "They're YOUR girls. You get the pillowcases!"
Laszlo: "Are you going to be at all helpful with this?"
Me: "Grrr."
So, I headed off to the bedding aisles to try and find girly pillowcases. A bewildering array of kid-themed bedding lined the back wall. Within minutes I had a headache. After giving the area a perfunctory search, I grabbed anything that had pink or purple on it and took it all back to Laszlo, who was busy grabbing little flashlights and batteries.
Me: "Here you go."
Laszlo: "What? 'Spiderman' and 'Cars' are NOT girly. Find stuff with Princesses on it!"
Me: "Look, this was the girliest shit I could find! And c'mon, Tobey Maguire?? Work with me here..."
But, Laszlo was convinced we could do better, so we went back to the wall o' lame bedding and, in short order, discovered that I was mostly right. There really wasn't much girly stuff. We ended up trading Spidey pillowcases in for some ones with horses (no pink or purple on them, so how I was supposed to notice them?), and left it at that.
We managed to get hairbands and t-shirts without much problem, and we decided not to get a book for each kid, since kids' books are like $3 billion dollars apiece anymore, but then it was time to find lip stuff.
Now, I don't know about you, but to me there is no more terrifying place in a store than the cosmetics aisle (or, more typically, aisles). There's just so much stuff. I mean, what the hell can it all possibly be for? It's more terrifying than the 'feminine products' aisle, in which everything at least is inside little packages, so you can pretend you're just buying kleenex or something. Nacole once made me go to the store to get her 'feminine products' for her because she was really sick, and insisted that I was a big baby and not terribly supportive for not being enthused about having to go.
Fortunately, she had the packaging from the most recent supply, so all I had to do was start at one end of the mile-long aisle of little green, blue, pink, and yellow packages, and methodically start comparing my packaging until I found a match. It was like Memory, only with feminine hygiene. "Hmm, ultra super thin, extra protection, with wings and struts and emergency parachute? Nope. Extra super thin, ultra protection, with escape hatch and driver's side airbag? Nope. Extra ultra thin, super duper protection, with extended cab and gun rack? Nope. [3 hours later...] Super duper ultra thin, extra maximum protection, with wings and bells and whistles. In a green package with yellow wavy shit on it. YES!!"
Anyway, there Laszlo and I stood, at the beginning of the vast expanse of products that women use for, as my Russian host brother Oleg used to say, "the cosmetic reconstruction of the face."
Laszlo: "Um, so, do you think we should get lipstick?"
Me: "Uh, I dunno. I think my girl students tend to wear lip gloss, rather than lip stick. But I don't really know. I only dimly understand the difference."
Laszlo: "Crap. Let's just pick something and get the hell out of here."
So, we bought the first thing we found that seemed extremely girly and intended for use on the lips, and then beat a hasty retreat. Upon arrival back at Laszlo's house, we proudly put the bags of stuff down on the counter for GA's inspection.
GA: "Uh, 'Cars'?"
Us: "Well, there weren't many princessy pillowcases so we got the girliest ones we could."
GA: "OK. Um, don't you think these flashlights are a little... big... for 5 year old girls?"
Us: "Uh..."
GA: "No books?"
Us: "Books were super expensive."
GA: "You couldn't find scrunchies?"
Us: "Those aren't 'scrunchy'?"
GA: "OK, thanks for your help. You boys can go play your game."
Fortunately for us- well, Laszlo really- GA has an old-fashioned, noblewoman's stoicism about these things, so we retreated to the den to play HALO 3. When little girls need saving from hordes of vicious aliens bent on nothing less than the extermination of the entire human race, Laszlo and I are the men you want on the job. When little girls need 'scrunchies', we're less obviously the people to turn to.
When the day of the party arrived, Keiko and I came over to help set up, and shortly thereafter the girls started arriving. Soon there were 14 girls, Lorenzo, Laszlo and GA, me and Keiko, and several mothers. As the only adults present without kids of our own, Keiko and I were prime targets for the bored mothers. "Travel!", implored one mother, "Travel as much as you can, because once you have kids, you're staying put for a while." Um, thanks, but if I ever have kids, they're going to travel too. Even if traveling is less fun with kids, I'll bet it's more fun than the less-than-zero fun "staying put" is.
A few hours later, after face-painting, eating, storytelling, games played in a circle, and lots of giggling, the girls (and Lorenzo) left, leaving GA to put the girls to bed and Laszlo, Keiko, and me to restoring the house to its original state, which is to say, virtually spotless and with everything in its designated space. It's amazing Laszlo and I had 2 good years in college as roommates, given our very distinct philosophies about living spaces. For Laszlo, a dish in the sink is deeply troubling, whereas for me, a dish in the sink means 25-30 more dishes to go before there's a full dishwasher's worth, at which point I will finally do the dishes as they should be done: in a batch process.
Another thing that deeply troubles Laszlo is the thought that anyone he knows, no matter how superficially, has anything short of surgically clean hands. Consequently, Emily's birthday party, which featured a horde of 3-year-olds, was a very stressful time for him. While GA managed the flow of activities, Laszlo functioned as a floater, prowling around with handi-wipes looking for dirty hands to clean. Which, given the aforementioned horde of 3-year-olds, was a full-time job.
The main attraction at Emily's birthday party was Ariel. While most little girls seem to have some kind of bizarre princess fixation, Emily takes it to a whole new level. And Ariel is pretty much her favorite princess. So Laszlo and GA hired a woman who comes to your house dressed as Ariel, complete with a mermaid bottom thingy that forces her to have to shuffle around with super-teeny steps. Naturally, she was a big hit with all the girls. The boys seemed less interested, except Lorenzo, who was back for more and frankly is clearly on the fast train to Queerville.
Keiko was in town for this party also, and as she, I, GA, and Laszlo (taking a short break from wiping hands) observed Ariel, we decided she was actually a little creepy. Not in a kidnap/molest/butcher the kids kind of way, but in a you-have-to-be-freakish-to-be-doing-this-frequently kind of way. We started off by having a lively debate on whether Ariel was really Man-riel, given some of her body proportions, but we ultimately decided in favor of feminine based on facial features and voice.
Eventually, creepy Ariel left, and after another round of eating, games, running around crazily, and forced hand-wiping, the horde of kids and parents left. Fortunately, there was one dad there also so I spent some time talking to him. We started off on the wrong foot, since he gets paid slave wages to teach math at the local depressed urban public high school, and I get paid a trillion dollars an hour to teach math in a cushy office with a big window, but we warmed up to each other when I decided to (a) let him speak at length about his views on teaching math, (b) not take him too seriously since he lives in a $2 million dollar house that his parents bought for him.
All in all, the parties were fun, if exhausting. I don't know how GA manages running events like that. I think if I ever have kids they'll be allowed to have one friend apiece, which will simplify parties a great deal. To the extent they take after me they'll probably only have one friend anyway...
Friday, March 28, 2008
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Election '08 by Gus, Part 5
Just thought I'd check in and give a summary of where we are politically...
But first, let's do a poll: raise your hand if you ever saw, in a million years, Eliot Spitzer of all people banging high-priced hookers on his off days?
That's what I thought. Me neither. And you, with the hand raised- you're a bloody liar.
I have on occasion thought about getting into politics at some point later in my life, when I have a stable economic situation and can afford to do the right thing even at the cost of being a one-term version of whatever office I run for. At that point I'll be happy to fight the good fight, lose re-election as a consequence, and go do something else.
In the meantime, for others out there, particularly, though not exclusively, the men- if you are thinking about getting into politics and building a lasting political career based on an earnest attempt to do the right thing, let me offer you this strategy, which I've developed after countless hours of rumination on the classic treatises of political theory over the last couple thousand years and the actual political events of the last twenty years or so:
Keep it
in your
pants.
As a strategy, this has the elegance of simplicity and the tangible benefit of helping you avoid the kind of meteoric fall from political grace that eventually snags EVERY LAST FUCKING ONE of the politicians who ignore its sage advice. Seriously, NO ONE GETS AWAY WITH THIS SHIT ANYMORE. That includes you. You'll either be propositioning some dime-store prostitute on a dark streetcorner somewhere, and it's going to wind up videotaped on the security camera of the neighboring building, or you'll be trying hard to conceal movements of the vast amounts of cash it takes to participate in the high-priced call girl market. That might have worked back in the days when people kept wads of cash in coffee tins or under the mattress, but it doesn't work in this modern world. So, one more time, let's review the strategy. Say it with me:
Keep it
in your
pants.
If only Bill Clinton had hired me as a member of his strategic team, we'd have the greenest President ever in Al Gore, and foreign policy, economic, and military strategies that, while perhaps not perfect, would at least seem more like they were devised by thoughtful, rational people, and not by a group of drunken Phi Delts. I mean, George W. Bush's 2000 campaign strategy basically boiled down to a 2-point platform:
1) I'll keep it in my pants
2) I'll cut as many taxes as much as politically possible, regardless of whether it makes any sense at all to do so.
Seen from that perspective, President Bush has had possibly the most successful presidency certainly in modern times, and maybe ever. See the benefits of following my strategy?
"But Gus," you say, "I want to follow your strategy. I think it's good. But I'm trapped in an increasingly loveless marriage caused by the emotional distance that inevitably comes along with continually choosing to forgo spending time and energy on my relationship in order to feed the gaping, sucking maw of time and energy that is a political career. What am I supposed to do???"
OK, fair point. All I've given you so far is a strategy. It's time to get tactical. So there you are, on some Thursday afternoon, around 430. It's been a month since the last time you had sex. And the thoughts are coming. You know those thoughts: "Well, I could just hire a hooker. Just this once. Obviously I wouldn't make a habit out of it. It doesn't hurt anybody. And as long as I'm really careful, I won't get caught. People do it all the time and don't get caught. And I'm not an idiot like every last one of the other thousands of guys in office who decided to do it. No, I'm different. I'm SMART. I can get away with it..."
STOP!
****EMERGENCY SITUATION****DEFCON1****INITIATE EMERGENCY PROTOCOLS****
Quickly, before you do something really stupid, follow this emergency tactical plan:
Step 1) Quickly assess: do you have at least one usable hand? If yes, proceed to the nearest secluded space, perhaps a bathroom stall, and use the aforementioned hand. That's what it's for. It's why Man learned to walk upright, after all. If no, proceed to step 2.
WARNING: if you do elect to use a bathroom stall, remember to keep your hands, and especially feet, inside the stall at all times.
Step 2) You are most likely a paraplegic. Therefore, quickly assess: do you have at least one usable foot? If yes, then you should gimp on down to your local video store and rent My Left Foot, a heartwarming, truly inspirational story that will help motivate you to learn to use your foot as a substitute for the hand in step (1) above. Obviously, this will take time and patience, but then again, if you have no hands, so would sex.
If no, proceed to step 3.
Step 3) You are a quadriplegic who has somehow gotten himself elected to public office in spite of the overwhelming institutional and prejudicial odds against you. Clearly, you have overcome personal challenges far greater than 'horniness'. It's time to reach deep down into that personal wellspring of courage and fortitude that has sustained you thus far, and deal. That's right- gut it out, Lieutenant Dan.
Or implode politically, tragically wasting what was otherwise a heartwarming, truly inspirational story that would have motivated people the world over. Your choice.
So there you have it- obviously, I'm not a high-priced political consultant (or, for that matter, a high-priced 'sexual consultant'). I am, in fact, a high-priced educational consultant. Nevertheless I think my strategy and tactics have a lot to add to our nation's political story. And if I ever do run for political office, I hope you'll remind me of this post.
Frequently.
But first, let's do a poll: raise your hand if you ever saw, in a million years, Eliot Spitzer of all people banging high-priced hookers on his off days?
That's what I thought. Me neither. And you, with the hand raised- you're a bloody liar.
I have on occasion thought about getting into politics at some point later in my life, when I have a stable economic situation and can afford to do the right thing even at the cost of being a one-term version of whatever office I run for. At that point I'll be happy to fight the good fight, lose re-election as a consequence, and go do something else.
In the meantime, for others out there, particularly, though not exclusively, the men- if you are thinking about getting into politics and building a lasting political career based on an earnest attempt to do the right thing, let me offer you this strategy, which I've developed after countless hours of rumination on the classic treatises of political theory over the last couple thousand years and the actual political events of the last twenty years or so:
Keep it
in your
pants.
As a strategy, this has the elegance of simplicity and the tangible benefit of helping you avoid the kind of meteoric fall from political grace that eventually snags EVERY LAST FUCKING ONE of the politicians who ignore its sage advice. Seriously, NO ONE GETS AWAY WITH THIS SHIT ANYMORE. That includes you. You'll either be propositioning some dime-store prostitute on a dark streetcorner somewhere, and it's going to wind up videotaped on the security camera of the neighboring building, or you'll be trying hard to conceal movements of the vast amounts of cash it takes to participate in the high-priced call girl market. That might have worked back in the days when people kept wads of cash in coffee tins or under the mattress, but it doesn't work in this modern world. So, one more time, let's review the strategy. Say it with me:
Keep it
in your
pants.
If only Bill Clinton had hired me as a member of his strategic team, we'd have the greenest President ever in Al Gore, and foreign policy, economic, and military strategies that, while perhaps not perfect, would at least seem more like they were devised by thoughtful, rational people, and not by a group of drunken Phi Delts. I mean, George W. Bush's 2000 campaign strategy basically boiled down to a 2-point platform:
1) I'll keep it in my pants
2) I'll cut as many taxes as much as politically possible, regardless of whether it makes any sense at all to do so.
Seen from that perspective, President Bush has had possibly the most successful presidency certainly in modern times, and maybe ever. See the benefits of following my strategy?
"But Gus," you say, "I want to follow your strategy. I think it's good. But I'm trapped in an increasingly loveless marriage caused by the emotional distance that inevitably comes along with continually choosing to forgo spending time and energy on my relationship in order to feed the gaping, sucking maw of time and energy that is a political career. What am I supposed to do???"
OK, fair point. All I've given you so far is a strategy. It's time to get tactical. So there you are, on some Thursday afternoon, around 430. It's been a month since the last time you had sex. And the thoughts are coming. You know those thoughts: "Well, I could just hire a hooker. Just this once. Obviously I wouldn't make a habit out of it. It doesn't hurt anybody. And as long as I'm really careful, I won't get caught. People do it all the time and don't get caught. And I'm not an idiot like every last one of the other thousands of guys in office who decided to do it. No, I'm different. I'm SMART. I can get away with it..."
STOP!
****EMERGENCY SITUATION****DEFCON1****INITIATE EMERGENCY PROTOCOLS****
Quickly, before you do something really stupid, follow this emergency tactical plan:
Step 1) Quickly assess: do you have at least one usable hand? If yes, proceed to the nearest secluded space, perhaps a bathroom stall, and use the aforementioned hand. That's what it's for. It's why Man learned to walk upright, after all. If no, proceed to step 2.
WARNING: if you do elect to use a bathroom stall, remember to keep your hands, and especially feet, inside the stall at all times.
Step 2) You are most likely a paraplegic. Therefore, quickly assess: do you have at least one usable foot? If yes, then you should gimp on down to your local video store and rent My Left Foot, a heartwarming, truly inspirational story that will help motivate you to learn to use your foot as a substitute for the hand in step (1) above. Obviously, this will take time and patience, but then again, if you have no hands, so would sex.
If no, proceed to step 3.
Step 3) You are a quadriplegic who has somehow gotten himself elected to public office in spite of the overwhelming institutional and prejudicial odds against you. Clearly, you have overcome personal challenges far greater than 'horniness'. It's time to reach deep down into that personal wellspring of courage and fortitude that has sustained you thus far, and deal. That's right- gut it out, Lieutenant Dan.
Or implode politically, tragically wasting what was otherwise a heartwarming, truly inspirational story that would have motivated people the world over. Your choice.
So there you have it- obviously, I'm not a high-priced political consultant (or, for that matter, a high-priced 'sexual consultant'). I am, in fact, a high-priced educational consultant. Nevertheless I think my strategy and tactics have a lot to add to our nation's political story. And if I ever do run for political office, I hope you'll remind me of this post.
Frequently.
Thursday, March 6, 2008
How I Got Into Business School, Part 3
(Wow, did the last 2 weeks ever get away from me. Here's the end of the story...)
Richard: "OK, walked into the wrong building... lost in the desert... to be honest, I'm almost afraid to ask this, but... what do you want to do with your life? What are your long-term goals?"
So I looked at him and I said: "Richard, I want to mine the asteroid belt."
At this point, he actually put his face in his hands, which is not necessarily how you want your interviewer to be reacting, so I added: "But... but let me explain what I mean by that."
And so we had a long conversation about the potential commercial opportunities in space: natural resource extraction from the moon and asteroid belt, zero-g semiconductor manufacture, tourism, solar energy generation, off-planet refining and heavy industry. We talked about launch costs, and the possibility of carbon nanotube space elevators. We talked about what I see as the human imperative of space development, as a practical means of not having all the species' eggs in one planetary basket, and as a psychological means of providing a new frontier to explore.
At the end of all of it, Richard sat back in his chair as though he were really exhausted, and for the longest couple minutes in the world he didn't say anything at all. I started to sweat a little around the edges. Then,
Richard: "Wow. Well, thank you, this was nothing like what I expected, nothing like the usual interview." He got up and walked around the table to my end, and sat on the edge of the table. "I think that if you get your application in by the second deadline, we can probably find a place for you."
I was shocked. Was he saying I was in?? I thanked him profusely and left.
So I did eventually get my application in by the second deadline, though I had to run to the FedEx place before it closed so I could overnight it so that it would actually make it. And sure enough, I got in. Yale was the only place that accepted me; Berkeley, UCLA, and Stanford all said thanks, but no thanks.
In the end, just as Mickey hired me based on a gut feeling that I would be good in spite of not having the slightest idea what his company did, Richard let me into Yale based on his gut feeling that despite not having a career trajectory that made any sense, or any apparent qualifications other than a GMAT score, I would add something worth having to the class of 2000. I doubt, if I had had my interview with anyone else, that I would have gotten into Yale either.
During my 2 years at Yale SOM, I always felt a little guilty, as though I had stolen the place of someone more deserving, so I worked extra hard to make the most of the chance I'd been given. I got involved in just about everything I could fit into my schedule; in a place where a full course load is 4-5 classes, at peak I was taking 9. I felt a responsibility to Richard that if anyone should ever review his work, and say, "Why the hell did you let that one in?", there would be evidence to suggest it was a good decision.
In the end, he switched over to the medical school to do admissions, in part I think because the dean wanted to stop letting in so many quirky people, and start behaving more like a traditional business school. And sure enough, since then the school has been slowly climbing the rankings, and slowly morphing into a more traditional place. I wouldn't have had a snowball's chance of getting in even 2 years later. Timing, my friends, is everything.
As a postscript, when Yale SOM was founded a little more than 25 years ago, it needed to distinguish itself in a hurry in order to avoid being buried at the bottom of the rankings. So, the market strategy the founders came up with was to approach a business education from all 3 sectors: public, private, and non-profit. Everyone would get some background in all 3. This was unheard of- at other business schools, if you were interested in having a career in public service or in the non-profit sector, you could certainly find a few classes, but the assumption was that pretty much everyone would go into the private sector, and that those people didn't need to know anything about public sector or non-profit sector issues.
As a way of highlighting this revolutionary philosophical approach, Yale SOM decided to call their degree an MPPM, a Master in Public and Private Management, rather than call it an MBA. And until 1998, that's how it was.
By 1998, the reputation of the school had started to mature, and basically no student, once graduated, referred to their degree as an MPPM anymore. Everyone called it an MBA. And the dean, once again wanting to be a little less quirky, decided it was time to kill the MPPM. But, the classes of 1999 and 2000 were offered the choice of what their degree would be called. Everyone after that would receive an MBA.
I attended the 1999 graduation, because Laszlo was graduating. In his class, 6 people out of more than 200 chose to keep their MPPM, rather than convert to an MBA. Ever practical, Laszlo also went with the MBA. I expected that my class would be similar. In the weeks leading up to my graduation, speculation was rampant about who might choose to keep an MPPM.
Graduation at Yale consists of 2 parts: first, a massive ceremony in the central quad where all students, undergrad and grad, get together, followed by separate ceremonies at each of the graduate schools and undergrad colleges. Imagine my surprise when our dean got up and presented "212 candidates for the degree of Master in Business Administration, and 1 candidate for the degree of Master in Public and Private Management."
Yes, that's right. Yours truly was the only one who went with the MPPM. Our dean, anxious to kill the degree and conform (he came to us out of Wall Street, so his instinct is herd behavior), audibly gritted his teeth as he said the MPPM part. I felt a little bit of impish pride about that.
At our separate SOM only ceremony, when he announced my name, and my MPPM, several of the old guard professors, who had been with the school since its beginning, got up and gave me a standing ovation. I felt both proud, and a little sheepish. I mean, I never thought for a moment I'd be the only one to do it. But I like to think that had Richard been there, he'd have been proud.
And that's how I got into business school.
Richard: "OK, walked into the wrong building... lost in the desert... to be honest, I'm almost afraid to ask this, but... what do you want to do with your life? What are your long-term goals?"
So I looked at him and I said: "Richard, I want to mine the asteroid belt."
At this point, he actually put his face in his hands, which is not necessarily how you want your interviewer to be reacting, so I added: "But... but let me explain what I mean by that."
And so we had a long conversation about the potential commercial opportunities in space: natural resource extraction from the moon and asteroid belt, zero-g semiconductor manufacture, tourism, solar energy generation, off-planet refining and heavy industry. We talked about launch costs, and the possibility of carbon nanotube space elevators. We talked about what I see as the human imperative of space development, as a practical means of not having all the species' eggs in one planetary basket, and as a psychological means of providing a new frontier to explore.
At the end of all of it, Richard sat back in his chair as though he were really exhausted, and for the longest couple minutes in the world he didn't say anything at all. I started to sweat a little around the edges. Then,
Richard: "Wow. Well, thank you, this was nothing like what I expected, nothing like the usual interview." He got up and walked around the table to my end, and sat on the edge of the table. "I think that if you get your application in by the second deadline, we can probably find a place for you."
I was shocked. Was he saying I was in?? I thanked him profusely and left.
So I did eventually get my application in by the second deadline, though I had to run to the FedEx place before it closed so I could overnight it so that it would actually make it. And sure enough, I got in. Yale was the only place that accepted me; Berkeley, UCLA, and Stanford all said thanks, but no thanks.
In the end, just as Mickey hired me based on a gut feeling that I would be good in spite of not having the slightest idea what his company did, Richard let me into Yale based on his gut feeling that despite not having a career trajectory that made any sense, or any apparent qualifications other than a GMAT score, I would add something worth having to the class of 2000. I doubt, if I had had my interview with anyone else, that I would have gotten into Yale either.
During my 2 years at Yale SOM, I always felt a little guilty, as though I had stolen the place of someone more deserving, so I worked extra hard to make the most of the chance I'd been given. I got involved in just about everything I could fit into my schedule; in a place where a full course load is 4-5 classes, at peak I was taking 9. I felt a responsibility to Richard that if anyone should ever review his work, and say, "Why the hell did you let that one in?", there would be evidence to suggest it was a good decision.
In the end, he switched over to the medical school to do admissions, in part I think because the dean wanted to stop letting in so many quirky people, and start behaving more like a traditional business school. And sure enough, since then the school has been slowly climbing the rankings, and slowly morphing into a more traditional place. I wouldn't have had a snowball's chance of getting in even 2 years later. Timing, my friends, is everything.
As a postscript, when Yale SOM was founded a little more than 25 years ago, it needed to distinguish itself in a hurry in order to avoid being buried at the bottom of the rankings. So, the market strategy the founders came up with was to approach a business education from all 3 sectors: public, private, and non-profit. Everyone would get some background in all 3. This was unheard of- at other business schools, if you were interested in having a career in public service or in the non-profit sector, you could certainly find a few classes, but the assumption was that pretty much everyone would go into the private sector, and that those people didn't need to know anything about public sector or non-profit sector issues.
As a way of highlighting this revolutionary philosophical approach, Yale SOM decided to call their degree an MPPM, a Master in Public and Private Management, rather than call it an MBA. And until 1998, that's how it was.
By 1998, the reputation of the school had started to mature, and basically no student, once graduated, referred to their degree as an MPPM anymore. Everyone called it an MBA. And the dean, once again wanting to be a little less quirky, decided it was time to kill the MPPM. But, the classes of 1999 and 2000 were offered the choice of what their degree would be called. Everyone after that would receive an MBA.
I attended the 1999 graduation, because Laszlo was graduating. In his class, 6 people out of more than 200 chose to keep their MPPM, rather than convert to an MBA. Ever practical, Laszlo also went with the MBA. I expected that my class would be similar. In the weeks leading up to my graduation, speculation was rampant about who might choose to keep an MPPM.
Graduation at Yale consists of 2 parts: first, a massive ceremony in the central quad where all students, undergrad and grad, get together, followed by separate ceremonies at each of the graduate schools and undergrad colleges. Imagine my surprise when our dean got up and presented "212 candidates for the degree of Master in Business Administration, and 1 candidate for the degree of Master in Public and Private Management."
Yes, that's right. Yours truly was the only one who went with the MPPM. Our dean, anxious to kill the degree and conform (he came to us out of Wall Street, so his instinct is herd behavior), audibly gritted his teeth as he said the MPPM part. I felt a little bit of impish pride about that.
At our separate SOM only ceremony, when he announced my name, and my MPPM, several of the old guard professors, who had been with the school since its beginning, got up and gave me a standing ovation. I felt both proud, and a little sheepish. I mean, I never thought for a moment I'd be the only one to do it. But I like to think that had Richard been there, he'd have been proud.
And that's how I got into business school.
Monday, March 3, 2008
How I Got Into Business School, Part 2
Having told Richard the story of how I blundered into advertising, he next asked me this:
Richard: "We don't get a lot of applicants from the advertising industry. Tell me, what made you decide you wanted to apply to business school, and why are you applying to Yale?"
Me: "Well, I was lost in the desert, in Arches National Park..."
It was the summer of 1996. My dad had had his stroke back in late May, just before my 24th birthday and just after buying a used second car for the family. He had been mostly taking the bus to and from work so my mom could have the car. That was nice of him, though I sometimes suspect that my mom would have traded some of the use of the car for more of his assistance in the many child-rearing tasks that she needed the car to perform. But my dad was raised in India, and had an old-school Indian view of fatherhood as providing, and motherhood as raising kids.
With my dad's career unexpectedly and suddenly ending, and the family income essentially reduced to his disability checks, my mom was not in a position to be able to afford the payment on the car, so I volunteered to take over the payment for her. At that time, I was making $19,600 while living in Los Angeles, which is not a cheap place to live, and paying student loans and trying to finance a very rewarding, but very expensive, competitive ballroom dance habit. So I ended up taking on a second job tutoring for a company called The End Result. Since I was using the proceeds to pay for my mom's car, she suggested that I should have that car, and I could give her my car: Mr. Perkins. Mr. Perkins was a beat up old blue Plymouth Sundance, and I gave him his name because he was the most average, nondescript car you've ever seen, and therefore deserved an average, nondescript name.
Trading cars was an exciting idea for me because it meant not one, but two road trips. Sarah and I did the first one, flying to StL and driving the new car back. It was a white Hyundai Elantra that rode low and had a ridiculous little spoiler on the back. I figured I looked like a total cholo driving it, so I named it Julio. We took the southern route, taking I-55 down into New Orleans, and then I-10 across the bottom of the country.
Laszlo and I did the trip to take Mr. Perkins to StL. For that, we took a northern, meandering route through Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, South Dakota, Iowa, and down into Missouri. And among the places we stopped was Arches National Park, which neither of us had ever been to before.
Arches National Park, as you might expect, is sprinkled liberally with a lot of, well, arches. By design, none of said Arches are super convenient to the road that goes through the park, since many of the arches are very delicate and would not necessarily respond well to the vibrations from a lot of vehicular traffic. The arches in this park were formed by wind, rain, and alternating cold/heat, rather than flowing water, and as a result many of them are extremely fragile. Flowing water, being a pretty brute force, tends not to leave behind such fragile structures.
Given the many and varied places we planned to stop on the trip, in our limited time frame, we decided we would start at the visitor's center and pick the most spectacular arch, see that one, and then push on. So at around 11a.m. we found ourselves at the trailhead. It being July in the Utah desert, it was already quite hot, and rapidly getting hotter. We only had one small bottle of Evian between us, but we figured we would just go on a very quick hike, so it would be OK.
From the trailhead, we had two options. Option 1: take the paved, easy difficulty, 1hr round trip trail to the arch. Option 2: take the unpaved, moderately strenuous 2hr round trip trail to the arch. Or, as we viewed it: option 1- be girlymen, or option 2- be Men. So we decided for option 3- be Manly Men, taking the unpaved, moderately strenuous trip and doing it in at most 90 minutes.
We headed out on the unpaved trail, with our one little bottle of water, and made very good time. The trail was marked only by the occasional little pile of stones, and these were not very close together. And so, since we were having ourselves a most delightful conversation, and taking small side trips to explore neat piles of rock/cliffs/cavelike formations, we never really noticed that it had been a while since the last time we had seen one of those helpful piles of rock.
Neat rocks! (Laszlo gave me a scanner this week, and I found pics from this road trip and scanned 'em in...)
At some point, one of us, I don't remember which, said: "When was the last time you saw one of those piles?" That's the point when we realized we were off the trail completely. We had been walking for quite a while, and the landscape all looks exactly the same there, and it's rock so there're no footprints, and so we really had no idea where we were relative to anything.
At that point, Manly Concern started setting in. Not panic, mind you- that's what happens to girlymen. But definitely some Manly Concern. Off to our left was a small mesa, and so our inspiration was to head over to it and climb it; once there, on the high ground, we would be able to spot the other trail, people, the parking lot, something.
This being the West, the small mesa off to our left was some distance away, in direct sun, and as we started to climb it, we were really getting hot. And cranky. We finally stopped to take a water break in the lee of a huge boulder, which provided the only meaningful shade around. After each taking a sip of our water, it was clear there was only going to be enough for one more water break, where we would each get half a gulp. And so, with a moment to stop and really feel the extent of our predicament, naturally we got into an impassioned discussion about Whose Fault Was This Anyway?
Laszlo: "I can't believe you got us lost."
Me: "ME?? I 'm not the one who got us lost. YOU got us lost!"
Laszlo: "I didn't get us lost. You were leading."
Me: "We were walking together. I most certainly was not leading. At best I get 50% of the blame here."
Laszlo: "No way. YOU got us lost."
Me: "Kiss my ass. I did not get us..."
Let us leave 24-year-old Gus and Laszlo in their rapidly escalating cycle of mutual recrimination and recap the situation. It is July in the Utah desert. By now it is about 1 in the afternoon, so it is scorching hot. We have 1 adult-sized gulp of water between us, and we have no idea where we are relative to other people. We figure we can't possibly be too far away, since we've only been going a couple hours, but we only have the vaguest idea of which direction would be good to go in, there is NOTHING out here, and all the scenery looks the same.
But the most worrying issue is the water. We have a serious water problem, and so we could do any of the following things:
1) Go as long as possible without touching the remaining supply
2) Take super-teeny sips in an effort to spread it out over a long period
3) Each drink half the remainder and hope it keeps us going long enough to get us back to civilization
I put those 3 in the order I would prefer to do them, but any of them could be considered reasonable approaches to our water situation.
Let me tell you what we did instead. Or rather, what Laszlo did. I return you now to our regularly scheduled argument, already in progress, about who got us lost...
Me: "This is what I get for letting a Jew lead in the desert."
Laszlo: "Ha ha. That's real funny, Indian boy. Why don't you dance us a little rain dance, so we can get some more water. It's your fault we're in this mess."
Me: "It is NOT my fault. You know what, let's settle this. Let he who is without fault in this situation bring forth water from this rock."
I thought that was pretty clever. Tied in to the whole Jews-lost-in-the-desert Old Testament theme, and, I figured, neither one of us can actually make water come from the rock, so we can finally stop this stupid argument and figure out a way out of this.
So Laszlo looks at me, then down at the water, and then looks up at me again, and gets an evil smile on his face. Then, he takes the water, our last gulp of precious, precious water, and dashes it on the face of the rock, where it almost instantly evaporates in the dry desert heat.
Laszlo: "AHA! Look, I called forth water from the stone! YOU"RE the one who got us lost!!"
Me: "$%#^& ..... %^#&*QO% ....... ^#&*@^%)@%)&_%&_@ ..... WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING??????? THAT WAS OUR LAST GULP OF WATER, YOU FUCKING LUNATIC!!"
Laszlo (suddenly looking sheepish): "Uh..."
Me: "OH MY GOD! WE ARE GOING TO DIE OUT HERE, BECAUSE YOU HAD TO MAKE A JOKE?????"
Laszlo: "Well... but it was a pretty _funny_ joke, right?"
Me: "Oh my god, we are going to die."
With no more water, we decide we had better push on. We continue climbing the mesa, and when we get to the top, we can see off in the distance, bearing 10 o'clock, a lone hiker, moving quickly. A person!! We immediately start climbing back down the mesa and put ourselves on a collision course with the unknown hiker.
When we finally reach him, we explain our predicament and he points out the way to the arch. Apparently we're only a half hour away or so. It so happens that this guy is wearing a Yale SOM shirt, and Laszlo is considering applying there this fall. They get into an intense discussion about business school in general, and Yale in particular. At this point in my life, I have never once considered business school; in fact, I had always considered it the graduate degree with the least intellectual content out there. [FYI: now that I have an MBA, I'm sure I was right about that.]
The part of the conversation that I perked up in hearing concerned the fact that the guy had just graduated, and was going to work for Sikorsky aircraft. Sikorsky is an aerospace company, with a particular specialty in helicopters. As it happened, I had been trying for several months now to make a move from advertising into aerospace. Although I was doing very well at Katz, I knew in a year's time that it wasn't what I wanted to do with my life, and I thought aerospace would be an interesting field to be in.
As he talked about how Sikorsky, and its parent company, UTC, loved to recruit at Yale's campus, and how he hadn't had an engineering background before business school, and how it was a big industry sector shift for him, I realized that business school might just be my ticket into aerospace. I mean, I wasn't having any luck cold-calling aerospace companies and explaining how my 2 years in TV advertising were a perfect preparation for a career in aerospace...
After a 20 minute conversation in the searing heat, the SOM guy continued on his way, and Laszlo and I headed in the direction he had given us. Sure enough, in half an hour we had found the arch.
The arch. Worth seeing. Take plenty of water. And take the marked trail.
We spent maybe 10 minutes at the arch. Once you see it and take a couple pictures, there's not much else to do. And if you have no water, and it's hot, and you're about ready to kill your travel buddy, you're mainly concerned with getting back to the car.
Laszlo: "OK, I'm leading back to the car."
Me: "Fine. You lead, Mr. Smart Guy. I'm just going to follow you."
And so we headed back. Ten minutes later...
Me: "Are you sure this is the trail?"
Laszlo: "Shut up. You got us lost last time."
An hour later...
Me: "Seriously, where the hell are we?"
Laszlo: "Uh, I'm sure it's over there somewhere..."
Yep, we were lost again. I'm sure we were off the trail within 10 minutes of leaving the arch. We ended up climbing around the edge of a mesa, into a small canyon along its side. We were walking on a ledge about shoulder-width, about 30 feet up from the canyon floor. The Utah desert can also be quite windy, and this canyon was like a wind tunnel. At one point, we reached a place with a 4 foot gap or so in the ledge, which we had to jump over. "4 foot gap?" you say, "That's not that wide." Sure, but try jumping it with a 30 foot drop on one side, in a stiff headwind, with a sheer towering cliff on the other side. There's not much margin for error. That bit was terrifying.
When we emerged from the canyon, we had this view:
2 important things here: (1) you probably can't tell, but that's the road in the distance I'm pointing to, and (2) look how much more hair I had then
Sweet Jesus! The road! It was way far off, and took us forever to reach it, but we finally did, and discovered that it was the original road we had driven in on. So we ended up approaching the car from behind. Since I'm having fun playing with my new old scanner, I've drawn a picture of the trails, and a rough idea of the path we followed instead. The thing at the top of the picture is the arch:
All told, a 3 hr hike that we were going to do in 90 min took us 6 hours.
When he finally got back to the car, at 5pm, I knew 2 things:
1) You should never let a Jew lead in the desert, unless you're prepared to spend the next 40 years there, and
2) I was going to apply to business school, and specifically to Yale, so that I could finally make the shift into aerospace.
That's the story I told Richard. With minor bits like the racial epithets deleted, obviously.
Richard: "OK, walked into the wrong building... lost in the desert... to be honest, I'm almost afraid to ask this, but..."
And then he asked his third question.
Richard: "We don't get a lot of applicants from the advertising industry. Tell me, what made you decide you wanted to apply to business school, and why are you applying to Yale?"
Me: "Well, I was lost in the desert, in Arches National Park..."
It was the summer of 1996. My dad had had his stroke back in late May, just before my 24th birthday and just after buying a used second car for the family. He had been mostly taking the bus to and from work so my mom could have the car. That was nice of him, though I sometimes suspect that my mom would have traded some of the use of the car for more of his assistance in the many child-rearing tasks that she needed the car to perform. But my dad was raised in India, and had an old-school Indian view of fatherhood as providing, and motherhood as raising kids.
With my dad's career unexpectedly and suddenly ending, and the family income essentially reduced to his disability checks, my mom was not in a position to be able to afford the payment on the car, so I volunteered to take over the payment for her. At that time, I was making $19,600 while living in Los Angeles, which is not a cheap place to live, and paying student loans and trying to finance a very rewarding, but very expensive, competitive ballroom dance habit. So I ended up taking on a second job tutoring for a company called The End Result. Since I was using the proceeds to pay for my mom's car, she suggested that I should have that car, and I could give her my car: Mr. Perkins. Mr. Perkins was a beat up old blue Plymouth Sundance, and I gave him his name because he was the most average, nondescript car you've ever seen, and therefore deserved an average, nondescript name.
Trading cars was an exciting idea for me because it meant not one, but two road trips. Sarah and I did the first one, flying to StL and driving the new car back. It was a white Hyundai Elantra that rode low and had a ridiculous little spoiler on the back. I figured I looked like a total cholo driving it, so I named it Julio. We took the southern route, taking I-55 down into New Orleans, and then I-10 across the bottom of the country.
Laszlo and I did the trip to take Mr. Perkins to StL. For that, we took a northern, meandering route through Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, South Dakota, Iowa, and down into Missouri. And among the places we stopped was Arches National Park, which neither of us had ever been to before.
Arches National Park, as you might expect, is sprinkled liberally with a lot of, well, arches. By design, none of said Arches are super convenient to the road that goes through the park, since many of the arches are very delicate and would not necessarily respond well to the vibrations from a lot of vehicular traffic. The arches in this park were formed by wind, rain, and alternating cold/heat, rather than flowing water, and as a result many of them are extremely fragile. Flowing water, being a pretty brute force, tends not to leave behind such fragile structures.
Given the many and varied places we planned to stop on the trip, in our limited time frame, we decided we would start at the visitor's center and pick the most spectacular arch, see that one, and then push on. So at around 11a.m. we found ourselves at the trailhead. It being July in the Utah desert, it was already quite hot, and rapidly getting hotter. We only had one small bottle of Evian between us, but we figured we would just go on a very quick hike, so it would be OK.
From the trailhead, we had two options. Option 1: take the paved, easy difficulty, 1hr round trip trail to the arch. Option 2: take the unpaved, moderately strenuous 2hr round trip trail to the arch. Or, as we viewed it: option 1- be girlymen, or option 2- be Men. So we decided for option 3- be Manly Men, taking the unpaved, moderately strenuous trip and doing it in at most 90 minutes.
We headed out on the unpaved trail, with our one little bottle of water, and made very good time. The trail was marked only by the occasional little pile of stones, and these were not very close together. And so, since we were having ourselves a most delightful conversation, and taking small side trips to explore neat piles of rock/cliffs/cavelike formations, we never really noticed that it had been a while since the last time we had seen one of those helpful piles of rock.
Neat rocks! (Laszlo gave me a scanner this week, and I found pics from this road trip and scanned 'em in...)
At some point, one of us, I don't remember which, said: "When was the last time you saw one of those piles?" That's the point when we realized we were off the trail completely. We had been walking for quite a while, and the landscape all looks exactly the same there, and it's rock so there're no footprints, and so we really had no idea where we were relative to anything.
At that point, Manly Concern started setting in. Not panic, mind you- that's what happens to girlymen. But definitely some Manly Concern. Off to our left was a small mesa, and so our inspiration was to head over to it and climb it; once there, on the high ground, we would be able to spot the other trail, people, the parking lot, something.
This being the West, the small mesa off to our left was some distance away, in direct sun, and as we started to climb it, we were really getting hot. And cranky. We finally stopped to take a water break in the lee of a huge boulder, which provided the only meaningful shade around. After each taking a sip of our water, it was clear there was only going to be enough for one more water break, where we would each get half a gulp. And so, with a moment to stop and really feel the extent of our predicament, naturally we got into an impassioned discussion about Whose Fault Was This Anyway?
Laszlo: "I can't believe you got us lost."
Me: "ME?? I 'm not the one who got us lost. YOU got us lost!"
Laszlo: "I didn't get us lost. You were leading."
Me: "We were walking together. I most certainly was not leading. At best I get 50% of the blame here."
Laszlo: "No way. YOU got us lost."
Me: "Kiss my ass. I did not get us..."
Let us leave 24-year-old Gus and Laszlo in their rapidly escalating cycle of mutual recrimination and recap the situation. It is July in the Utah desert. By now it is about 1 in the afternoon, so it is scorching hot. We have 1 adult-sized gulp of water between us, and we have no idea where we are relative to other people. We figure we can't possibly be too far away, since we've only been going a couple hours, but we only have the vaguest idea of which direction would be good to go in, there is NOTHING out here, and all the scenery looks the same.
But the most worrying issue is the water. We have a serious water problem, and so we could do any of the following things:
1) Go as long as possible without touching the remaining supply
2) Take super-teeny sips in an effort to spread it out over a long period
3) Each drink half the remainder and hope it keeps us going long enough to get us back to civilization
I put those 3 in the order I would prefer to do them, but any of them could be considered reasonable approaches to our water situation.
Let me tell you what we did instead. Or rather, what Laszlo did. I return you now to our regularly scheduled argument, already in progress, about who got us lost...
Me: "This is what I get for letting a Jew lead in the desert."
Laszlo: "Ha ha. That's real funny, Indian boy. Why don't you dance us a little rain dance, so we can get some more water. It's your fault we're in this mess."
Me: "It is NOT my fault. You know what, let's settle this. Let he who is without fault in this situation bring forth water from this rock."
I thought that was pretty clever. Tied in to the whole Jews-lost-in-the-desert Old Testament theme, and, I figured, neither one of us can actually make water come from the rock, so we can finally stop this stupid argument and figure out a way out of this.
So Laszlo looks at me, then down at the water, and then looks up at me again, and gets an evil smile on his face. Then, he takes the water, our last gulp of precious, precious water, and dashes it on the face of the rock, where it almost instantly evaporates in the dry desert heat.
Laszlo: "AHA! Look, I called forth water from the stone! YOU"RE the one who got us lost!!"
Me: "$%#^& ..... %^#&*QO% ....... ^#&*@^%)@%)&_%&_@ ..... WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING??????? THAT WAS OUR LAST GULP OF WATER, YOU FUCKING LUNATIC!!"
Laszlo (suddenly looking sheepish): "Uh..."
Me: "OH MY GOD! WE ARE GOING TO DIE OUT HERE, BECAUSE YOU HAD TO MAKE A JOKE?????"
Laszlo: "Well... but it was a pretty _funny_ joke, right?"
Me: "Oh my god, we are going to die."
With no more water, we decide we had better push on. We continue climbing the mesa, and when we get to the top, we can see off in the distance, bearing 10 o'clock, a lone hiker, moving quickly. A person!! We immediately start climbing back down the mesa and put ourselves on a collision course with the unknown hiker.
When we finally reach him, we explain our predicament and he points out the way to the arch. Apparently we're only a half hour away or so. It so happens that this guy is wearing a Yale SOM shirt, and Laszlo is considering applying there this fall. They get into an intense discussion about business school in general, and Yale in particular. At this point in my life, I have never once considered business school; in fact, I had always considered it the graduate degree with the least intellectual content out there. [FYI: now that I have an MBA, I'm sure I was right about that.]
The part of the conversation that I perked up in hearing concerned the fact that the guy had just graduated, and was going to work for Sikorsky aircraft. Sikorsky is an aerospace company, with a particular specialty in helicopters. As it happened, I had been trying for several months now to make a move from advertising into aerospace. Although I was doing very well at Katz, I knew in a year's time that it wasn't what I wanted to do with my life, and I thought aerospace would be an interesting field to be in.
As he talked about how Sikorsky, and its parent company, UTC, loved to recruit at Yale's campus, and how he hadn't had an engineering background before business school, and how it was a big industry sector shift for him, I realized that business school might just be my ticket into aerospace. I mean, I wasn't having any luck cold-calling aerospace companies and explaining how my 2 years in TV advertising were a perfect preparation for a career in aerospace...
After a 20 minute conversation in the searing heat, the SOM guy continued on his way, and Laszlo and I headed in the direction he had given us. Sure enough, in half an hour we had found the arch.
The arch. Worth seeing. Take plenty of water. And take the marked trail.
We spent maybe 10 minutes at the arch. Once you see it and take a couple pictures, there's not much else to do. And if you have no water, and it's hot, and you're about ready to kill your travel buddy, you're mainly concerned with getting back to the car.
Laszlo: "OK, I'm leading back to the car."
Me: "Fine. You lead, Mr. Smart Guy. I'm just going to follow you."
And so we headed back. Ten minutes later...
Me: "Are you sure this is the trail?"
Laszlo: "Shut up. You got us lost last time."
An hour later...
Me: "Seriously, where the hell are we?"
Laszlo: "Uh, I'm sure it's over there somewhere..."
Yep, we were lost again. I'm sure we were off the trail within 10 minutes of leaving the arch. We ended up climbing around the edge of a mesa, into a small canyon along its side. We were walking on a ledge about shoulder-width, about 30 feet up from the canyon floor. The Utah desert can also be quite windy, and this canyon was like a wind tunnel. At one point, we reached a place with a 4 foot gap or so in the ledge, which we had to jump over. "4 foot gap?" you say, "That's not that wide." Sure, but try jumping it with a 30 foot drop on one side, in a stiff headwind, with a sheer towering cliff on the other side. There's not much margin for error. That bit was terrifying.
When we emerged from the canyon, we had this view:
2 important things here: (1) you probably can't tell, but that's the road in the distance I'm pointing to, and (2) look how much more hair I had thenSweet Jesus! The road! It was way far off, and took us forever to reach it, but we finally did, and discovered that it was the original road we had driven in on. So we ended up approaching the car from behind. Since I'm having fun playing with my new old scanner, I've drawn a picture of the trails, and a rough idea of the path we followed instead. The thing at the top of the picture is the arch:
All told, a 3 hr hike that we were going to do in 90 min took us 6 hours.
When he finally got back to the car, at 5pm, I knew 2 things:
1) You should never let a Jew lead in the desert, unless you're prepared to spend the next 40 years there, and
2) I was going to apply to business school, and specifically to Yale, so that I could finally make the shift into aerospace.
That's the story I told Richard. With minor bits like the racial epithets deleted, obviously.
Richard: "OK, walked into the wrong building... lost in the desert... to be honest, I'm almost afraid to ask this, but..."
And then he asked his third question.
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