Tuesday, October 21, 2008

It's important to read the job description BEFORE you apply

A couple years ago when I interviewed for a summer associate position at the New York office of a law firm called Linklaters. I had looked briefly on their website, and had noticed that they had a project finance practice. When I met with the partner with whom I was interviewing, he asked me what I liked about the firm, and I talked for about 10 minutes about how I was interested in project finance, and they had a great practice in that area, etc. etc. At the end of this, he stared at a spot on the wall slightly to the left of my head and told me that project finance was out of their DC office, and that they didn't do it at all in New York. Needless to say the rest of the interview was pretty short.

I was reminded of this when reading an item today describing how Sarah Palin answered a third-grader's question about what the Vice President does with the following:

That's something that Piper would ask me! ... [T]hey're in charge of the U.S. Senate so if they want to they can really get in there with the senators and make a lot of good policy changes that will make life better for Brandon and his family and his classroom.

Now, if you went to the wikipedia site for "Vice President" you'd notice that it says that the VP "presides" over the Senate. However, you'd think that somebody actually running for VP would have read a little bit farther down the page to note that presiding over the senate is not actually at all the same as "being in charge" of the Senate.

You would also think that, given how much time Palin spends bashing Harry Reid she would have some idea of what it is that he does.

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