Daniel dried, shaved, brushed his teeth, combed his hair, dressed. In his suit, he looked conservative, presentable, respectable. He straightened his tie, looked at himself in the mirror, practiced smiling. He didn’t hold out a whole lot of hope for today. The fact that he was being interviewed instead of just rejected outright was of course a good sign, but he’d been to dozens of similar interviews since he’d been unemployed and none of them had amounted to anything.

Still, it had been quite a while since he’d had any interview at all, and at the very least, this would enable him to keep in practice.

He drove into downtown Philly and paid five bucks to park in an underground lot beneath the Bronson Building. Cutting Edge Software, the firm with the job opening, owned the top three floors, and he took an elevator up, quickly putting Chapstick on his too-dry lips before the metal doors slid open.

He was ushered immediately into the personnel office, where a young efficient-looking woman who could not have been more than a year out of college introduced herself as the personnel director. She bade him sit in one of the padded chairs opposite her desk, and the two of them talked for the next half hour or so. It was an interview, but it felt more like a conversation, and Daniel found that he liked this relaxed informal approach. They hadn’t discussed the job specifically, had instead talked mostly about him, his life, his interests, but he knew she’d probably gotten a good read on him from the discussion, and he was gratified when she stood and said, “I think you’d work well here. You’re self-motivated, intelligent, and I think you could do a good job. I’d like you to meet the president of our firm and talk to him for a few minutes.”

He followed her out of the office, down a carpeted hallway to a bigger office. She rapped on the sill of the open doorway, then motioned for Daniel to walk in.

The president of the company was one of those men who tried too hard to be jovial and just-one-of-the-guys, and who referred to himself in company literature as “W.L. (Bud) Williams.” Daniel hated men with nicknames. And he hated men who used only their initials even more. Together they were a lethal combination. “Never trust a man who doesn’t use the name his parents gave him,” his father had always said, and it was advice that Daniel had taken to heart.

Still, he needed the job and he couldn’t afford to pick and choose, and he sat across the desk from W.L. (Bud) Williams and smiled.

The president looked over the résumé in his hand. “I see here that you’ve worked as a tech writer before.”

Daniel nodded. “Yes. For the City of Tyler.”

“Did you like the job?”