Back in the day at Michigan I used to give a lot of advice. Was I qualified to give advice? Probably not, but people kept asking. My toughest decisions centered around whether to go Pad See Ew beef or Pad See Ew chicken, and even then I had a hard time deciding. A Supreme Court justice I am not.
To the undergraduate girls I was friends with I became what I sometimes liked to call Sketchy Uncle Finger. I often found myself walking a fine line between “I’m interested” and “I’m your guidance counselor”. I advised on everything from boy issues to career issues. I mean, this wasn’t exactly Albert Camus insight I was giving here but sometimes things just had to be said.
-Why is my boyfriend so immature and why does he think it’s okay to call me at 3am?
-Because he’s 21 and on drugs and you’re wearing a bandana as a dress and you live in Michigan and it’s February.
-Do you think I need to go back to business school?
-It really just depends on how much you like being hit on by guys with buttondowns and facial hair?
It was both an art and a science. Office hours were held from 10pm to 11pm at the back tables at Scorekeepers, and then afterwards you could probably find me on the dance floor. I jest of course…kind of.
In addition to Sketchy Uncle Finger, I also was pretty involved in more wholesome endeavors, namely helping out other MBAs in the Corporate Finance Club. (Insert nerd joke here). Basically, I found the second year MBAs to have been incredibly helpful when I was going through the process so I wanted to give back, and since there was no chance in hell that I was going to give up my Sunday evenings which was when the meetings took place, I decided I’d just meet with other MBAs to review resumes, or to prep for interviews, or to take someone out for an ice cream cone if they needed cheering up. I had managed to wrangle a summer internship and then turn that into a full-time job, and de facto I became someone people thought “knew it all”. “Knew it all” to me meant I knew how to talk to recruiters, how to not cut myself shaving, and how to throw beanbags through a circular hole in a wooden box-ish thingy on the weekends. What more to life really was there?
CORNHOLE!
So yeah, I knew it all, whatever that meant. The students I used to meet with would usually come to me wound up like a jack-in-the-box and for whatever reason I did a good job calming them down. I told everyone that everything would work out. Right off the bat their shoulders would just relax and they’d stop talking to me like some pre-programmed robot. Sometimes people needed to hear that. Shit, sometimes, I need to hear that. As I look back I think people might’ve confused my gravelly “advice voice” with a Marlo Brando Godfather-esque voice and perhaps they thought I was dispensing good advice because I literally sounded like Don Corleone…when the more likely scenario was that I’d probably been belting out the lyrics to every single rap song the night before and was simply hoarse. Either way, for whatever reason, these MBAs seemed to hang on my every word and looked at me like a dog does a TV.
oh yes you are. oh yes you are.
In fact, after one one-on-one session the girl I was speaking with asked if I’d talk to her husband, and I said sure. To this day I’m still not sure whether he was a Michigan student or just a lazy husband who needed a pep talk and a slap on the tush. Either way I was happy to help. It was the least I could do. I always felt that the vibe inside the walls of the school could sometimes be a little toxic, so if I could just get someone to talk about recruiting without having to make it so formal or so pressure-filled I would because the people who were relaxed were always the ones who got the jobs.
But I’m a suit now and “greed is good” or something like that. I still speak to Michigan students who are in the recruiting process and offer advice but now I wear my corporate hat and it's not as fun but it’s good to be involved. Truly. However, the other day I get this email from a guy who graduated in 2008. He starts off by saying that he saw my profile on the business school directory, and that while we never met, my face looks very familiar….and I start filling out the restraining order. Next he says he came across a posting for a job at my company…okay…in Houston, TX. Now, for a second I’m going to pretend that perhaps he has me confused with the famous furniture Finger family from Houston and perhaps thought I had some pull down there because of my name, although I know this is not where he’s going. Next he says that he has someone he wants to recommend for this position. A fine candidate he says (excellent), a Michigan graduate he says (excellent), a woman who has won not one, not two, but yes, three “formal recognition awards” (excellent although unclear), a woman who has outstanding references from all of her past employers (excellent), a woman who is none other than…his wife (huh?).
His wife. His wife who apparently has no hands because she cannot type an email to me herself? His wife who is too busy knitting/churning butter/tending the rabbits to write me an email herself. In 2010 I thought nobody puts Baby in the corner. I guess I’m wrong. But like all Finger: The Blog tales, this gets better. He closes with the following:
“Can you please forward her resume to the right people for her consideration for an interview opportunity. I will greatly appreciate it. In [the] future it will be my pleasure to reciprocate this favor of yours if you need”.
This works out great for me because I know that when I’m ready to lock up my wife in a subterranean dungeon in about 15 years I’ll know exactly who to call to help me built it. Part of me wanted to write back “Two words. Happy. Ending.” But I thought better of it. It’s one thing to meet someone in person, and even talk on the phone, but it’s another thing to bend over backwards for a woman with three “formal recognition awards” who has to rely on her creepy husband to tell you via email that "you have a real purty mouth”. Suddenly Sketchy Uncle Finger is looking a whole lot more wholesome.
