I got a strange phone call this afternoon. It was a (212) number, which was odd, and when I picked up the phone the person said they were from Greenberg Traurig, which was really odd. I interviewed with them for Miami and L.A. on-campus, and they were the only firm that never called me back nor dinged me. The person was just calling to say she was sorry that I didn't receive my ding in early September when I was supposed to, but apparently some batch of letters accidentally didn't get mailed out.

I'm not sure how to respond to that: Um...thanks for the personal attention in calling me 2.5 months down the road? Fuck off? That's OK, I only interviewed with Miami firms as pretext for a free fall callback trip anyway? No problem, I got a job somewhere better anyway?

Let's just say I was cordial and then got off the phone in a hurry.

I had the strangest experience on-campus with that firm on campus, where I interviewed with Cesar. Cesar is very Cuban, very colorful, and very charismatic--three useful things to be, I suppose, when you are the President and CEO of a Miami-based law firm. Let's just say it's odd for a law firm to have a CEO, let alone for him to be interviewing people on campus. Cesar was the only interviewer who had some sort of personal assistant on hand at the hotel--her one function in my interview being opening the door and then later closing it behind me. Any other inferences to be drawn from the presence of this young-20s woman are an exercise for the reader alone, as I draw none. In my 20-minute interview, Cesar spent a good 18 minutes 45 seconds talking. He told me about how they move fast, make decisions fast, and hire fast. (I didn't know at the time that I should have understood the lack of "notify fast" as a meaningful absence.) My favorite moment of the interview, though, was during his speech about the unified command structure of the firm, with few committees, mostly individual decision makers. Cesar was particular proud of the fact that there is no compensation committee; to this end comes the only direct quotation I remember from that week: "All compensation decisions are made by the C.E.O." Yes, Cesar referred to Cesar in the third-person!

Suffice it to say, I'm perfectly content that GT never came a-callin', at least not until today.