NEEDHAM, Mass. Things were going swimmingly for Todd Flerwanger in his interview with Applied Widgetronix, a tech company that makes something technical in this western suburb of Boston. “I thought I really hit it off with her,” he says, referring to Chief Recruiting Officer Alison Barnes. “Then she noticed that we shared the same birthday in 1990.”
From that innocent-looking coincidence Barnes followed a trail of deductive reasoning that caused her to more closely question Flerwanger, who was applying for a position that paid a six-figure salary. “I noticed that he graduated from college a year after me, so I asked if he took a year off. He said no, and it turned out he graduated from high school the year after I did,” Barnes said. “That set off my internal alarm bells, which he couldn’t hear so he had no idea I had moved him to my ‘B’ list of prospects.”
After politely saying she would get back to Flerwanger, Barnes checked a national pre-school deportment database and found that Flerwanger had been held back at Miss Binchey’s KinderGarden, a local half-day program for five-year-olds. The reason for his failure to be promoted? The most heinous breach of decorum in the books; paste-eating.
“Some employers look the other way when they discover that an applicant was a paste-eater as a toddler, thinking that one’s juvenile criminal record shouldn’t be held against them,” says Devin Nostrand, a professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts-Seekonk. “Paste-eating may seem like a victimless crime, but it is frequently found in the records of death-row inmates so it’s better not to take any chances.”
Paste-eating is typically just one manifestation of an anti-social personality, and may be the “tip of the iceberg” for those who are engaged in other paste-based felonies and misdemeanors. “You take a guy like Con Chapman, a real smart-aleck,” says retired Pettis County, Missouri, Sheriff Darrell Suggins. “He used to smear paste under the edges of the desks at Miss Swope’s Kindergarten, and when other kids came in from recess they’d grab ahold and get it all over their hands.”
After a rote rejection by Widgetronix, Flerwanger is staying put in his lower-paying position at SeniorDate.com for now, and says he realizes he needs to take positive steps to get back on the straight-and-narrow path to success that non-paste-eaters travel. “I’m taking things one day at a time,” he says evenly as his co-workers head out the door for a “TGIF” get-together at a local restaurant. “They’re all going out for fondue and . . . I just said no.”
It’s a sticky situation.