The recruiter had been calling the wrong number for three weeks before he realized it. The person who answered was named Dale and Dale was not the senior logistics manager the recruiter was trying to reach. Dale was a retired high school philosophy teacher who had nothing to do on weekday afternoons and found the recruiter's calls interesting. By the third call, they had established a kind of routine. The recruiter would begin his pitch and Dale would interrupt with a question about the nature of the offer. Not the salary or the benefits, but the offer in a broader sense: what did it mean to be recruited, was the right person for a job the one who wanted it most or the one who needed it least, could a company be said to have character and if so could it make promises. The recruiter, who had a quota and a manager and a CRM system that logged call duration, stayed on longer than he intended every time. The correct senior logistics manager eventually filled the role through an internal promotion. The recruiter kept calling Dale on Tuesday afternoons for another four months, logging the calls as In Progress. When Dale asked him directly what he was getting out of it, the recruiter said he wasn't sure yet. Dale said that was the most honest thing anyone had said to him since retirement.