When I was 19 and naive, I was interviewed for a desperately-needed summer job selling dictionaries door-to-door. The head interviewer wore a three-piece suit,

When I was 19 and naive, I was interviewed for a desperately-needed summer job selling dictionaries door-to-door. The head interviewer wore a three-piece suit, gold watch, and an expensive haircut. He told me that as a demonstration of my independence and maturity, he wanted a commitment from me right then and there that I would accept the job and sign all the paperwork if he made an offer. If I wanted to go home and think about it or discuss it with my parents, that meant I was "immature" and didn't have the right stuff for the job. Fortunately I had the presense of mind to see through that and walked out. When I got back to school, I found out that a friend of mine had worked for the same company selling Bibles in rural Tennessee; he hated it so much that he quit after a couple of weeks. He didn't make any money because the contract he had signed required that he stay for the entire summer before seeing a penny.