Me: I just got back from this "informational interview" with this company called Primerica.

Spider-Man: I fought Dr. Octopus earlier.

Me: How’d that go?

SM: The usual.

Me: He squirreled around for a while, ranting about this and that, until you finally landed a punch on his glass jaw and he fell down like a sack of bricks?

SM: Yeah. Sometimes it gets a little old. You know all these writers and psychologists and experts all think there’s some deeper meaning to that guy, like he’s got some secret history that explains everything about who he is and why he does what he does.

Me: You don’t buy it?

SM: He’s just a freak with bad fashion sense and a penchant for the over-dramatic.

Me: You’d be surprised how common that is.

SM: I’m sorry, though, you were talking about Primerica.

Me: There’s an hour of my life I’ll never get back.

SM: How bad was it?

Me: Well, the first sign of danger came when I drove into the parking lot and my fellow potential co-workers were wearing everything from a t-shirt and jeans to a full body sweatsuit.

SM: Why is that so bad?

Me: I was told to dress "business casual", so I can only assume that they were told the same thing.

SM: And?

Me: And I’m a little concerned about possibly working with people that consider a 40$ track suit as "business casual".

SM: You shouldn’t be so judgmental.

Me: Who’s being judgmental?

SM: The guy wearing two different colored socks while bitching about someone else’s track suit.

Me: Whatever. That was fine. I still went in, didn’t I?

SM: So when did it go really bad?

Me: When the guy speaking, Joe, who we were on a first-name basis with already, which is an entirely different problem in and of itself, but it was when Joe told us that it wasn’t an Amway-like pyramid scheme.

SM: What’s the problem with that?

Me: The problem is that the only people who actually run pyramid schemes are the guys who tell you they aren’t running a pyramid scheme.

SM: How do you know it wasn’t?

Me: Because immediately after saying that it wasn’t a pyramid scheme, he put up a model of how the business works that had the "corporate office" at the top, with three "branches" lined up below it and numerous "agents" lined up below the "branches" in an oddly familiar and triangular shape.

SM: Wow. That’s like a scene from a sit-com.

Me: I know.

SM: What happened next?

Me: Joe told us about how he made half a million dollars last year.

SM: Did he show you some plane tickets that the company gave him, too?

Me: No, but he talked about how he could go on vacation whenever he wanted.

SM: Same thing.

Me: Yeah.

SM: Did he ask the group if they wanted to make half a million next year?

Me: You took the words right out of his mouth.

SM: So what did you do next?

Me: I ran.

SM: Really?

Me: Really. I got up as fast as I could and made a break for the door.

SM: What did they do?

Me: They had a whole army of "agents" positioned between me and the door to stop me with "hello"s and "how are you"s.

SM: Like that time I fought Hydra.

Me: Yeah, like that time you fought Hydra.

SM: You know Hydra is legion, right?

Me: I know, Hydra is legion.

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