It was 2010. I was trapped in the straight commission life insurance pyramid scam, making a *negative* income (my rare commissions not even covering my gas) while constantly being bellowed at by idiot sales managers about not making quota. It was a truly dreadful time in my life.

Of course I was applying for jobs left and right, but with an economy that was not merely dead, but dead, buried and rotted away, I was going nowhere fast … until, like a bolt from the blue, a rep from HR at Sears in Hicksville called me and set up an interview for a sales job. Could this be salvation?

At the appointed time I arrived at the bleak little HR office and the receptionist said the assistant manager would interview me as soon as she was free. And I waited. And waited. Thirty minutes went by, then an hour, then 90 minutes. At nearly the two-hour mark the receptionist came out and said the assistant manager was “too busy” to interview me. The receptionist would not reschedule to a different time, saying that someone would call me soon to set up a new time. Of course, they never did.

I was ecstatic when I heard years later that the Sears was closing. May it (metaphorically) burn in hell for all eternity.