The Interview on the Asphalt

The rain on I-95 wasn’t just falling; it was attacking. It was a sheet of grey violence that turned the highway into a slip-and-slide for eighteen-wheelers.

My name is Stuart. I am twenty-eight years old, and as of last Tuesday, I was technically “redundant.” That’s the corporate word for unemployed. I had spent five years getting my degree in Aerospace Engineering, graduating top of my class, only to be laid off from a mid-level firm because of “budget cuts.”

I was driving my 2012 Ford Focus, a car that smelled of old fast food and despair, back from a failed job interview in Philadelphia. The interviewer had barely looked at my portfolio. He told me I lacked “real-world grit.”

I was tired. I was broke. I just wanted to get home to my basement apartment and sleep for a week.

Then I saw them.

On the shoulder of the highway, hazards flashing weakly through the downpour, was an ancient, beige Buick Century. It looked like a relic from the nineties.

Standing beside it, hunching against the wind in a thin windbreaker, was an old man. He was wrestling with a tire iron, but he looked frail. A woman sat in the passenger seat, looking terrified.

Cars were whizzing past them at seventy miles an hour, spraying them with dirty road water. BMWs. Mercedes. Teslas. None of them slowed down.

I sighed. I gripped my steering wheel. I didn’t have time for this. I didn’t have the energy.

But I looked at the old man again. He slipped. He nearly fell into traffic.

“Dammit,” I whispered.

I pulled over.

Chapter 1: The Lug Nut

I grabbed my heavy raincoat from the back seat and stepped out. The wind hit me like a physical blow.

“Sir!” I shouted over the roar of the traffic.

The old man jumped. He turned around. He looked like a drowned rat. His glasses were fogged up, and his hands were shaking violently—whether from cold or Parkinson’s, I couldn’t tell.

“I… I can’t get it loose!” he yelled back, his voice thin and reedy. “It’s rusted on!”

“Get in the car!” I ordered him. “You’re going to get hypothermia. I’ve got this.”

“But—”

“Go!” I gently guided him to the passenger door and shoved him inside with his wife.

I knelt in the mud.

He was right. The lug nuts were seized. Whoever had put this tire on last had used an impact gun set to ‘destroy’.

I looked at the flat tire. It wasn’t just flat; it was shredded.

Inside the car, the old couple watched me. The woman, who had white hair done up in a bun, gave me a small, anxious wave.

I took a deep breath. I used my engineering brain. Brute force wouldn’t work. I needed leverage.

I went to my trunk. I pulled out a hollow metal pipe I kept for leverage extension. I slid it over the handle of the tire iron. Physics.

Creak. SNAP.

The first nut broke loose. Then the second.

It took me twenty minutes. My suit pants—my only good pair—were soaked through. My hands were black with grease and mud. I was freezing.

But I got the spare on.

I tapped on the window. The old man rolled it down.

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

The old man stared at me. He had piercing blue eyes that seemed out of place in his wrinkled face. They were sharp. Calculating.

“What is your name, son?” he asked.

“Stuart,” I said. “Stuart Miller.”

The old man reached into his pocket. He pulled out a wallet. It was old leather, worn smooth. He fumbled with a few bills.

“I… I want to pay you,” he said. “I have… let’s see… forty dollars.”

I looked at the forty dollars. It was probably a lot of money to them. They were driving a twenty-year-old car.

“Keep it,” I said, pushing his hand away gently. “Buy your wife some hot soup. You guys look cold.”

“But you ruined your suit,” the woman said softly from the passenger seat. “You look like a businessman.”

I laughed. It was a dry, bitter sound. “I’m an unemployed engineer, Ma’am. This suit wasn’t doing me much good anyway.”

The old man paused. “Unemployed? An engineer?”

“Aerospace,” I nodded. “But apparently, I lack ‘grit’.”

I looked down at my grease-stained hands.

“Anyway, drive safe. Watch out for the puddles.”

I turned and ran back to my car. I didn’t wait for a thank you. I just wanted to get out of the rain.

I drove home, stripped off my ruined suit, and threw it in the trash. I ate a bowl of ramen and went to sleep, forgetting about the old couple in the Buick.

Chapter 2: The Silence

A week passed.

It was a bad week. Three more rejection emails. My landlord, Mr. Henderson, reminded me that rent was due in five days. I was calculating how much I could get for my guitar at the pawn shop.

I felt invisible. I felt like the world was moving at high speed, and I was just standing on the shoulder with a flat tire, watching everyone else succeed.

On Tuesday morning, I was sitting on my couch in my boxers, staring at the wall.

My phone rang.

It was my mother.

I hesitated. I didn’t want to talk to her. I didn’t want to tell her I still didn’t have a job. She worried too much. She watched the news twenty-four hours a day and thought the world was ending.

I picked up. “Hey, Mom.”

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

“I… I did answer, Mom. I’m here.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m in my apartment. Why? Is Dad okay?”

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

“Mom, I don’t have cable, I just stream—”

“Use your phone! Go to the news! Stuart, oh my god, how could you not tell me?”

“Tell you what?”

“That you met Him!”

I was confused. “Met who?”

“Just turn it on!”

I switched my phone to speaker and opened the news app. The livestream for the national news loaded.

Chapter 3: The Press Conference

The screen showed a podium. It was surrounded by microphones from every major network. The background was a sleek, metallic blue with a logo I recognized instantly.

AERO-DYNAMICS GLOBAL.

It was the biggest aerospace defense contractor in the world. They built the engines for the new fighter jets. They were designing the Mars transport. They were the company I had dreamed of working for since I was twelve. I had applied there five times. I had been rejected by their automated system five times.

Standing at the podium was not the slick, fifty-year-old CEO I was used to seeing in magazines.

It was an old man.

He was wearing a suit that cost more than my entire education. He looked clean, sharp, and powerful.

But I recognized the eyes. Blue. Piercing.

And I recognized the woman standing next to him, wearing pearls.

It was the couple from the Buick.

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

“That is Arthur Sterling!” my mom shouted. “The founder of Aero-Dynamics! He’s been a recluse for ten years! Nobody has seen him!”

I turned up the volume on my phone.

Arthur Sterling leaned into the microphone. The room of reporters went silent.

“Ladies and Gentlemen,” Arthur said. His voice wasn’t reedy anymore. It was strong. “As many of you know, I stepped down as CEO fifteen years ago. I left the company in the hands of a board. I retreated to a quiet life.”

He gripped the podium.

“But recently, I have been… testing. I wanted to see what this world has become. My wife, Martha, and I have been driving across the country in an old car, dressed as commoners. We wanted to see if kindness still existed in an era of speed and greed.”

The reporters were scribbling furiously.

“Last Tuesday,” Arthur continued, “we staged a breakdown on I-95 during a storm. It was a test. We sat there for an hour. Hundreds of cars passed. Many of them were driven by my own executives, rushing to meetings.”

He paused.

“No one stopped.”

He looked directly into the camera. I felt like he was looking into my living room.

“Until a young man in a cheap suit pulled over.”

My stomach dropped.

“He didn’t know who I was,” Arthur said. “He thought I was a broke old man. He ruined his clothes. He fixed my car with a level of mechanical ingenuity I haven’t seen in my own engineering department in years. And when I offered him my last forty dollars… he refused it. He told me to buy my wife soup.”

Martha wiped a tear from her eye on screen.

“He told me he was an unemployed aerospace engineer,” Arthur said. “He said he lacked ‘grit’.”

Arthur chuckled. “If fixing a rusted axle in a monsoon isn’t grit, I don’t know what is.”

He held up a piece of paper. It was a sketch. A police sketch artist’s drawing.

It was me. It was a perfect likeness of me, wet hair and all.

“I don’t know his name,” Arthur announced. “He only said it was Stuart. But I have a message for Stuart.”

Arthur leaned in.

“Stuart, if you are watching this… I fired my current Head of Innovation this morning. He drove past me in his Porsche while I was shivering on the roadside. The job is yours. But you have to come and claim it.”

Chapter 4: The Convoy

I sat on my couch, frozen. My phone slipped from my hand.

“Stuart!” my mom was still screaming. “Did you hear that? You’re Head of Innovation! You’re rich!”

“Mom,” I croaked. “I have to go.”

I hung up.

I stood up. I looked around my messy apartment. The ramen bowls. The rejection letters taped to the wall.

Head of Innovation.

That was a C-suite position. That was a seven-figure salary.

My doorbell rang.

I jumped. I walked to the door and opened it.

Standing there was a man in a black suit with an earpiece. Behind him, parked illegally on my narrow street, was a convoy of three black SUVs.

“Stuart Miller?” the man asked.

“Yes?”

“Mr. Sterling is waiting for you, sir. We tracked your phone when you opened the news app.”

“You… you tracked me?”

“Mr. Sterling has significant resources,” the man smiled. “Please. Come with us.”

I didn’t even put on shoes. I walked out in my slippers.

The neighbors were watching from their windows. Mrs. Higgins, who always yelled at me about my recycling, was standing on her porch with her mouth open.

I got into the middle SUV.

Chapter 5: The Reunion

The drive to the Aero-Dynamics headquarters took twenty minutes. We didn’t stop for traffic lights; the SUVs had police escorts.

We pulled up to the massive glass tower that dominated the city skyline. I had stood in front of this building a dozen times, looking up, wishing I could just get an internship.

Now, the red carpet was literally rolled out.

I was escorted through the lobby, past the security guards who had sneered at me when I dropped off my resume months ago. They were standing at attention now.

We went up to the top floor. The Penthouse Office.

The doors opened.

Arthur Sterling was sitting behind a desk that looked like the cockpit of a spaceship. He wasn’t wearing the windbreaker. He was wearing a suit that commanded respect.

But when he saw me, he stood up. He walked around the desk.

“Stuart,” he said.

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

“That is the point,” he said. He grabbed my hand and shook it firmly. “If you had known, you would have stopped for the money. You stopped for the humanity.”

Martha was there too, sitting on a sofa. She stood up and hugged me. She smelled of expensive perfume, not rain.

“I’m sorry about your suit,” she smiled.

“It’s okay,” I managed to say.

Arthur walked back to his desk. He picked up a file.

“I looked into you, Stuart. After you left. I remembered your license plate. Top of your class at MIT. Two patents filed while you were an undergrad. And yet… rejected by my HR department five times.”

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

“We rely too much on machines,” Arthur sighed. “And not enough on character. I am changing that.”

He slid a contract across the desk.

“This is not charity, Stuart. I don’t do charity in business. I need an engineer who can solve problems with a tire iron in the mud, not just a simulation on a screen. I need someone who understands that the machine serves the person, not the other way around.”

I looked at the contract.

Position: Head of Special Projects & Innovation.

Starting Salary: $450,000 / Year + Stock Options.

Signing Bonus: $50,000.

My hands shook. This wasn’t just a job. This was a life.

“There is one condition,” Arthur said, his face serious.

I looked up. “Anything.”

“The signing bonus,” he said, pointing to the figure. “You must use it to buy a new suit. And fix your mother’s house. We did a background check. We know she needs a new roof.”

I choked up. I fought back tears. “Yes, sir. I can do that.”

“And Stuart?”

“Yes?”

“Get rid of that Ford Focus. Company car is downstairs.”

Chapter 6: The First Day

I signed the paper.

The next hour was a blur. I met the Board of Directors. I was given a badge—a Gold badge, giving me access to everything.

I walked into the R&D lab. It was a massive hangar filled with prototypes, drones, and engines. The engineers—men and women I had idolized from afar—stopped working. They looked at me.

The foreman, a guy named Greg who had ignored my emails for years, walked over. He looked nervous.

“Mr. Miller,” Greg said. “Welcome aboard. We… uh… we have the schematics for the new turbine ready for your review.”

I looked at Greg. I looked at the engine.

“Pop the hood,” I said.

“Sir?”

“Take the casing off,” I said, taking off my new jacket and rolling up my sleeves. “Let’s see how this thing actually works. And get me a wrench.”

Greg smiled. A real smile. “Yes, sir.”

Chapter 7: The Legacy

Three years have passed since that day.

I am no longer the unemployed guy in the Ford Focus. I drive an Aston Martin now. I paid off my mother’s mortgage. I bought the building I used to rent in.

But I keep a reminder.

In my corner office, on a glass shelf overlooking the city, sits a rusted, bent tire iron. It’s the one Arthur used that day.

Arthur retired for good last year. He and Martha are currently in Italy. But he calls me every Sunday. We don’t talk about stock prices. We talk about cars.

Last week, I was driving home in the rain. I saw a car pulled over on the side of the road. A young woman, looking terrified, staring at a smoking engine.

I was tired. I was wearing a $5,000 suit.

I pulled over.

I got out into the rain.

“Need a hand?” I asked.

She looked at me like I was crazy. “I… I can’t pay you.”

I smiled. I felt the ghost of an old man’s hand on my shoulder.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Just pay it forward.”

Because you never know who you’re helping. And more importantly, you never know who you are becoming when you decide to stop.

Tóm tắt nội dung (Vietnamese Summary)

Tiêu đề: Cuộc Phỏng Vấn Trên Đường Cao Tốc

Câu chuyện kể về Stuart, một kỹ sư hàng không vũ trụ 28 tuổi, tài năng nhưng thất nghiệp, đang rơi vào cảnh túng quẫn. Vào một ngày mưa bão, trên đường về nhà sau buổi phỏng vấn thất bại, anh thấy một cặp vợ chồng già đứng bên chiếc xe cũ nát bị thủng lốp. Dù mệt mỏi và chán nản, Stuart vẫn dừng lại giúp đỡ. Anh dầm mưa thay lốp xe, sử dụng kỹ năng cơ khí của mình để xử lý những con ốc rỉ sét, trong khi hàng loạt xe sang trọng khác phóng qua. Khi xong việc, ông cụ muốn trả công 40 đô la (số tiền cuối cùng trong ví), nhưng Stuart từ chối và bảo họ hãy dùng tiền đó mua súp nóng. Anh cũng tiết lộ mình là kỹ sư thất nghiệp và chiếc vest của anh đã hỏng.

Một tuần sau, mẹ Stuart gọi điện trong hoảng loạn bảo anh bật TV lên. Trên tin tức là buổi họp báo của Arthur Sterling, tỷ phú sáng lập tập đoàn hàng không vũ trụ lớn nhất thế giới Aero-Dynamics. Ông Arthur tiết lộ rằng ông và vợ đã giả làm người nghèo khổ để thử lòng người. Không ai dừng lại giúp họ ngoại trừ một chàng trai trẻ tên Stuart. Ông tuyên bố đã sa thải Giám đốc Sáng tạo hiện tại (người đã lái xe lướt qua ông) và muốn tìm Stuart để trao cho vị trí đó.

Đội an ninh của tập đoàn đón Stuart đến trụ sở. Arthur Sterling trao cho anh hợp đồng làm việc với mức lương khổng lồ và vị trí lãnh đạo, vì ông cần một người có cả tài năng và đạo đức, người có “bản lĩnh” thực sự chứ không chỉ lý thuyết suông.

Câu chuyện kết thúc sau 3 năm, Stuart đã thành công và giàu có. Anh vẫn giữ chiếc cờ-lê cũ làm kỷ niệm và tiếp tục dừng lại giúp đỡ những người gặp nạn trên đường, tiếp nối di sản của lòng tốt mà Arthur đã dạy anh.