THE INTERVIEW ON THE ASPHALT

Chapter 1: The Rain of Despair

The rain on I-95 wasn’t just falling; it was attacking. It was a sheet of grey violence, a natural assault turning the East Coast’s main artery into a slip-and-slide for eighteen-wheelers. My windshield wipers were working at maximum capacity, thrashing left and right like a madman trying to fight off the inevitable.

My name is Stuart Miller. I am twenty-eight years old, and as of last Tuesday, I was technically “redundant.” That’s the corporate euphemism for unemployed. I had spent five years of my youth grinding at MIT, graduating as the Valedictorian of Aerospace Engineering. I had dreamed of the stars, of designing propulsion systems that would carry humanity to Mars. But reality had grabbed me by the ankles and dragged me into the mud. After three years of dedication to a mid-level firm, I was cut loose due to “budget constraints.”

Today was a bad day. I was driving my 2012 Ford Focus, a car that smelled of old fast food and despair, returning from a failed interview in Philadelphia. The interviewer, a guy my age wearing a shiny Armani suit, hadn’t even bothered to look at the thick portfolio I had spent three sleepless nights preparing. He scrolled through his phone while I presented my noise-reduction blade design. Finally, he looked up and said something that made me want to punch his smooth, moisturized face: “You have the theory, Stuart. But you lack ‘street smarts.’ You lack grit. We need warriors here, not librarians.”

Grit? I wanted to scream at him that I was living on instant ramen and selling my vinyl collection to keep the lights on. Wasn’t that “real” enough? I was tired. I was broke. I just wanted to get to my damp basement apartment and sleep for a week, maybe longer, just to forget this cruel world.

And then I saw them. On the emergency shoulder, hazards flashing weakly through the whiteout conditions, was an ancient beige Buick Century. It looked like a relic from the nineties, utterly lost amidst the stream of modern traffic tearing past. Standing beside the car, hunching against the gale-force wind, was an old man. He wore a thin, soaked windbreaker. He was wrestling with a tire iron, but his posture was frail. Inside the passenger seat, through the fogged-up glass, I saw a woman curled in on herself, her face a mask of terror.

Cars were whizzing past them at seventy miles an hour, spraying dirty road water over the old man. BMWs. Mercedes. Teslas. The symbols of success and wealth. Not a single one slowed down. No one cared. The world was moving too fast to worry about an old man and a broken car. I sighed, gripping the steering wheel until my knuckles turned white. I didn’t have time for this. I didn’t have the energy. I was worried about how I’d afford gas tomorrow. Why should I stop?

But then I looked at the old man again. His foot slipped on the slick pavement. He stumbled, nearly falling into the active lane. A semi-truck blared its horn as it barreled past, the slipstream nearly blowing his thin frame away. “Dammit,” I whispered. My damn conscience. I hit my right turn signal and pulled over.

Chapter 2: The Lug Nut Test

I grabbed the heavy raincoat from the back seat—the only thing of value in the car besides my engineering textbooks—and stepped out. The wind hit me like a physical blow. The rain was bone-chilling. “Sir!” I shouted, trying to cut through the roar of traffic.

The old man jumped. He turned around, his eyes wide behind glasses fogged with steam. He looked like a drowned rat. His hands were shaking violently—I couldn’t tell if it was the cold or Parkinson’s, but he looked pathetic. “I… I can’t get it loose!” he yelled back, his voice thin and reedy, like wind whistling through a crack. “It’s rusted on!”

I looked down at the wheel. The rear right tire was shredded, torn apart as if chewed by a monster. “Get in the car!” I ordered, not out of rudeness, but concern. His lips were turning blue. “You’re going to get hypothermia. I’ve got this.”

“But—”

“Go!” I gently but firmly guided him toward the passenger door and helped him climb in beside his wife. The woman, with her silver hair in an elegant bun, looked at me with gratitude mixed with anxiety. I closed the door and knelt in the mud.

The old man was right. The lug nuts were seized. Whoever had installed this tire last had used an impact gun with the force of a gorilla. Combined with years of rust, they were practically welded to the axle. I took a deep breath, letting the rain run down my neck. I engaged my engineering brain. Brute strength wouldn’t solve this, especially for a hungry, exhausted man like me. I needed leverage. I needed physics.

I went back to my trunk and rummaged through my messy toolbox. There. A hollow steel pipe I had kept from an old project. I slid it over the handle of the tire iron, effectively doubling the length of the lever arm.

Torque equals Force times Distance. Basic mechanics. I placed my foot on the steel pipe and put my entire body weight into it. CREAK… SNAP. The sound of rusted metal breaking loose was music to my ears. The first nut surrendered. Then the second. The third was stubborn; my foot slipped, and I slammed my knee onto the gravel. Pain shot up my leg. My suit pants—my only “good” pair for interviews—were now torn at the knee and soaked in black mud.

But I didn’t stop. I gritted my teeth and fought the remaining nuts. It took twenty minutes to swap the shredded tire for the spare. My hands were black with grease and mud, numb from the cold. I tapped on the window. The old man rolled it down. Warmth spilled out, smelling of old leather and pipe tobacco.

“You’re all set,” I said, wiping rain from my eyes. “But that spare is a donut. Do not go over fifty miles per hour. And get off at the next exit to check the pressure. It looks a little low.”

The old man stared at me. Now, seeing him up close, I noticed his eyes. They were deep blue, sharp, and… calculating. They didn’t look like the eyes of a senile old man at all. “What is your name, son?” he asked.

“Stuart,” I replied. “Stuart Miller.”

The old man reached into his soaked jacket pocket. He fumbled with a leather wallet worn smooth at the corners. He shakily counted out a few bills. “I… I want to pay you,” he said, his voice trembling. “I have… let’s see… forty dollars.”

I looked at the forty dollars. To me, right now, that was two weeks of food. But looking at the beat-up car, looking at the couple, I guessed that might be all they had for their trip. “Keep it,” I said, gently pushing his hand away. “Buy your wife some hot soup. You two look freezing.”

“But you ruined your suit,” the woman spoke up from the passenger seat. Her voice was strangely warm and patrician. “You look like a businessman.”

I laughed. It was a dry, bitter sound that mixed with the rain. “I’m an unemployed engineer, Ma’am. This suit wasn’t bringing me much luck anyway.”

The old man paused. His blue eyes narrowed slightly. “Unemployed? An engineer?”

“Aerospace,” I nodded, looking down at my filthy hands. “But they say I lack ‘grit.’ I guess they’re right. A gritty guy wouldn’t be stuck on the side of the road.” I sighed, feeling the exhaustion crash over me. “Anyway, drive safe. Watch out for the big puddles.”

I turned and ran back to my car. I didn’t wait for a thank you. I just wanted to escape the rain, escape the cold that was gnawing at my bones. I drove home in silence, the windshield wipers providing a hypnotic rhythm. I peeled off the ruined suit and threw it in the trash, discarding my last shred of ego. I ate a bowl of instant ramen, then crawled under my covers and fell asleep.

Chapter 3: The Silence of Failure

A week passed. It was a week from hell. Three more rejection emails arrived in my inbox, cold and automated. My landlord, Mr. Henderson, cornered me on the stairs to remind me rent was five days overdue. I started calculating how much I could get for my old guitar—the only thing my dad left me—at the pawnshop.

I felt invisible. I felt like the world was moving at light speed, and I was standing still on the shoulder with four flat tires. Tuesday morning, I was sitting on my tattered sofa staring at a crack in the wall.

My phone rang. It was Mom.

I hesitated. I didn’t want to lie and say “everything is fine.” But I couldn’t ignore her. I picked up. “Hello, Mom.”

“Stuart!” she screamed. Her voice was so loud I had to pull the phone away. “Stuart, answer me right now!”

“I… I am answering, Mom. I’m home.”

“Turn on the TV!” she shrieked. “Turn it on! Channel 5! Right now!”

“Stuart, oh my god, how could you not tell me? That you met HIM!”

I was utterly confused. “Met who?”

“Just turn it on!” I put the phone on speaker and opened the news app. The headline scrolling across the bottom hit me like a physical blow: THE RETURN OF A LEGEND.

Chapter 4: The Press Conference

The phone screen displayed a sleek podium. The background featured a stylized wing logo I knew by heart: AERO-DYNAMICS GLOBAL. This was the world’s largest aerospace defense contractor. I had applied here five times and been rejected by their automated system five times.

Standing at the podium was not a slick, gel-haired CEO. It was an old man. But this time, he wasn’t wearing a soaked windbreaker. He was wearing a charcoal suit, cut to perfection, radiating absolute power.

But I recognized those eyes. Deep blue. Sharp. The eyes that had peered into my soul in the rain. And standing beside him, regal in pearls and a silk dress, was the woman from the Buick.

“Mom,” I whispered, my throat dry. “That’s… that’s the old guy with the flat tire.”

“That is Arthur Sterling!” my mom shouted. “The Founder of Aero-Dynamics! Stuart, you met Arthur Sterling!”

Arthur Sterling leaned into the microphone. “Ladies and Gentlemen, as many of you know, I stepped down as CEO fifteen years ago. I left the company to the Board and retreated into the shadows.” He gripped the edges of the podium. “But recently, I felt uneasy. My wife, Martha, and I decided to take a cross-country trip in an old car, dressed as commoners. We wanted to see if kindness still existed in this era of speed and greed.”

“Last Tuesday,” Arthur continued, “we staged a breakdown on I-95 in the middle of a storm. It was a test. We sat there for an hour. Hundreds of cars passed. Many were driven by my own executives, rushing to meetings to discuss profit margins. Not one of them stopped.”

He looked straight into the camera. “Until a young man in a cheap suit pulled over. He fixed my car with a level of ingenuity and mechanical logic I haven’t seen in my engineering department in years. He used a steel pipe as a lever—a simple, yet genius solution in that environment.”

Martha wiped a tear from her eye on screen. “And when I offered him my last forty dollars… he refused. He told me to buy hot soup for my wife.”

“He told me he was an unemployed aerospace engineer,” Arthur said, his voice hardening. “He said people told him he lacked ‘grit’.” Arthur chuckled. “If fixing a rusted axle in a monsoon, kneeling in the mud to help a stranger, isn’t grit, then I don’t know what is.”

He held up a piece of paper. It was a charcoal sketch. It was me. “I don’t know his last name,” Arthur announced. “He only said his name was Stuart. But I have a message for Stuart.”

Arthur leaned into the mic. “Stuart, if you are watching this… This morning, I fired my current Head of Innovation. He was one of the men who drove his Porsche past me while I shivered on the roadside. The position is yours. But you have to come and claim it.”

Chapter 5: The Convoy

I sat on the sofa, petrified. “Stuart!” my mom was still screaming. “Head of Innovation! You’re rich!”

“Mom,” I rasped. “I… I have to go.” I hung up. I stood up, swaying. Head of Innovation. That was a C-suite position. Seven figures.

Ding-dong. The doorbell rang.

Standing there was a giant of a man in a black suit. Behind him, parked blatantly across the narrow street, was a convoy of three black Cadillac Escalades.

“Mr. Stuart Miller?” the man asked.

“Mr. Sterling is waiting for you, sir. We tracked your phone as soon as you opened the news app. Please, sir. We shouldn’t keep him waiting.”

I looked down at my feet. I was wearing bunny slippers—a gag gift from my mom. “I… I need to change.”

“No need, sir. Mr. Sterling said to come as you are. That is ‘real grit’.” I walked out in my bunny slippers. Mrs. Higgins, who always yelled at me about recycling, stood on her porch with her jaw dropped.

Chapter 6: The Reunion

The private elevator took me straight to the top floor. The Penthouse. The office was the size of a football field. Arthur Sterling sat behind a massive desk of glass and steel. Seeing me, he stood up immediately.

“Stuart,” he said.

“Mr. Sterling,” I stammered. “I… I really didn’t know.”

“That is the point,” he said, gripping my hand firmly. “If you knew, you would have stopped for money. You stopped for humanity. That is something I cannot buy.”

Martha was there too. “I’m sorry about your suit,” she smiled.

Arthur went back to his desk. “I investigated you, Stuart. MIT Valedictorian. Two patents. Thesis on fluid dynamics cited in multiple studies. And yet… rejected by my HR department five times.”

“Algorithms,” I said. “I didn’t have the right ‘buzzwords’.”

“We rely too much on machines,” Arthur shook his head. “I need an engineer who can solve problems with a steel pipe in the mud. This is not charity. I need someone who understands that the machine serves the human.” He slid a contract toward me.

Position: Head of Special Projects & Innovation. Starting Salary: $450,000 / Year + Stock Options. Signing Bonus: $50,000.

“There is one condition,” Arthur said. “The signing bonus… you must use it to buy a new suit. And fix your mother’s roof. We know her house leaks when it rains.”

Tears spilled over. “Yes, sir. I… I can do that.”

“And Stuart? Get rid of that Ford Focus. A company car is waiting downstairs. And please, buy some decent shoes. Bunny slippers don’t fit the boardroom.”

Chapter 7: The Legacy of Kindness

Three years have passed. I am no longer the unemployed guy. I drive an Aston Martin DB11. I paid off my mother’s debts and turned the rundown apartment building I used to rent into affordable housing for students. Under my leadership, Aero-Dynamics launched engine lines that are more fuel-efficient than anything on the market.

In my corner office sits a strange object. It is a rusted, bent tire iron. The very one Arthur used that day. Last week, I was driving home in a storm. I saw an old Honda Civic pulled over. A young girl stood there staring at the engine with utter hopelessness.

I turned on my hazards. I grabbed the umbrella and stepped into the rain. “Need a hand?” I asked.

The girl turned, eyes wide at the supercar. “I… I can’t pay you.”

I smiled. I felt the invisible hand of an old man on my shoulder. “Don’t worry about that. Just promise me one thing. Pay it forward someday.”

Because you never know who you are helping. The world needs brilliant engineers, yes. But it needs people who stop in the rain even more.