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, drinking the broth to the last drop, then crawled under my covers and fell asleep, completely forgetting the old couple in the Buick.

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, watching everyone else zoom by in their spaceships of success.

Tuesday morning, I was sitting on my tattered sofa, wearing only boxers, staring at a crack in the wall. I wondered if the crack was getting bigger, or if my life was just shrinking.

My phone rang.

It was Mom.

I hesitated. I didn’t want to answer. I didn’t want to lie and say “everything is fine,” and I certainly didn’t want to tell her that her son—the family pride—was about to starve. She worried too much. She watched the news twenty-four hours a day and always thought the apocalypse was nigh.

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. It was piercing. “Stuart, answer me right now!”

“I… I am answering, Mom. I’m home.”

“Where are you?”

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

“Turn on the TV!” she shrieked, her voice cracking with hysteria. “Turn it on! Channel 5! Right now!”

“Mom, I don’t have cable, I cut it months ago…”

“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 utterly confused. “Met who?”

“Just turn it on!”

I put the phone on speaker and opened the news app. The homepage was livestreaming a special event. 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. A forest of microphones from every major network pointed toward it. The background was a glossy metallic blue, featuring a stylized wing logo I knew by heart.

AERO-DYNAMICS GLOBAL.

This was the world’s largest aerospace defense contractor. They built engines for 6th-generation fighters. They were designing the Mars transport. To any aerospace engineer, this was Mecca. I had applied here five times. I had been rejected by their automated system five times; I had never even made it past the digital gatekeeper.

Standing at the podium was not the slick, gel-haired CEO I usually saw in Forbes magazine.

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. His silver hair was groomed. He looked clean, sharp, and commanding.

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 into the phone. “The Founder of Aero-Dynamics! He’s been a recluse for ten years! Rumors said he was sick or dead! Stuart, you met Arthur Sterling!”

Trembling, I turned up the volume.

Arthur Sterling leaned into the microphone. The room held its breath. A heavy silence descended.

“Ladies and Gentlemen,” Arthur’s voice rang out, no longer thin or frail. It was deep and resonant like a brass bell. “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. I wanted peace.”

He gripped the edges of the podium, scanning the crowd of reporters like a general.

“But recently, I felt uneasy. I wanted to test what this world we are building has become. 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.”

Reporters were scribbling furiously. Flashbulbs erupted.

“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.”

He paused, letting the truth sink into the air.

“Not one of them stopped.”

He looked straight into the camera. I felt like he was looking through the screen, right into my messy living room.

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

My heart stopped. My stomach twisted.

“He didn’t know who I was,” Arthur said, his voice dropping with emotion. “He thought I was a poor old man freezing to death. He ruined his only suit. 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.”

The room gasped. In this world of money, that act sounded like a fairy tale.

“He told me he was an unemployed aerospace engineer,” Arthur said, his voice hardening. “He said people told him he lacked ‘grit’.”

Arthur chuckled. A dark chuckle that would terrify his competitors. “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. Wet hair matted to my forehead, grease on my face, but with determined eyes.

“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, every word driving a nail into the silence.

“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. The phone slipped from my hand onto the cushion.

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

“Mom,” I rasped, choking on the words. “I… I have to go.”

I hung up.

I stood up, swaying like a drunkard. I looked around my apartment. The stacks of instant noodle bowls. The sticky notes on the wall with meaningless equations. This impoverished reality had just been ripped apart by a lightning bolt from heaven.

Head of Innovation. That was a C-suite position. Seven figures. The power to change the world.

Ding-dong.

The doorbell rang.

I jumped. I walked to the door, hands shaking. I opened it.

Standing there was a giant of a man in a black suit, wearing a coiled earpiece—standard Secret Service or high-end security look. Behind him, parked blatantly across the narrow street, blocking the entire neighborhood, was a convoy of three black Cadillac Escalade SUVs.

“Mr. Stuart Miller?” the man asked, voice deep and polite.

“Yes?”

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

“You… you tracked me?”

“Mr. Sterling has significant resources,” the man smiled professionally. “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 last Christmas. I was in boxers and an old t-shirt.

“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. Neighbors were peering out of windows. Mrs. Higgins, who always yelled at me about the recycling bins, stood on her porch, jaw dropped, dropping her trash bag.

I climbed into the middle SUV. The door closed with a solid thump, sealing me off from the noisy world outside.

Chapter 6: The Reunion

The trip to Aero-Dynamics headquarters took twenty minutes. We didn’t stop for red lights; the convoy had police escorts clearing the way. I felt like the President, or a high-profile prisoner.

We pulled up to the massive glass tower piercing the city sky. I had stood before this building dozens of times, looking up with burning desire, wishing I could just be an intern sweeping the floors.

Now, the red carpet was literally rolled out.

I was escorted through the lobby, past the security guards—the same ones who used to look at me with disdain when I dropped off resumes. Now, they stood at attention, saluting as I shuffled past in my bunny slippers.

The private elevator took me straight to the top floor. The Penthouse.

The doors opened.

The office was the size of a football field, with glass walls overlooking the entire city. Arthur Sterling sat behind a massive desk of glass and steel that looked like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise.

Seeing me, he stood up immediately. He walked around the desk, arms wide.

“Stuart,” he said.

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

“That is the point,” he said, gripping my hand firmly. His shake was warm and solid. “If you knew, you would have stopped for money, for fame. You stopped for humanity. That is something I cannot buy, and it is something this company is severely lacking.”

Martha was there too, sitting on a white leather sofa. She stood and hugged me. She smelled of lavender and luxury, the smell of rain long gone.

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

“It’s okay,” I mumbled. “It was old anyway.”

Arthur went back to his desk. He picked up a thick file.

“I investigated you, Stuart. After you left, I remembered your license plate. The results were impressive. MIT Valedictorian. Two patents filed as an undergrad. Thesis on fluid dynamics cited in multiple studies. And yet…” he sighed, tossing the file onto the desk, “…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. “And not enough on people. I am changing that. Starting today.”

He slid a contract toward me.

“This is not charity, Stuart. I am a businessman; I don’t do charity in business. I need an engineer who can solve problems with a steel pipe in the mud, not just run simulations on a screen. I need someone who understands that the machine serves the human, not the other way around.”

I picked up the contract. The numbers danced before my eyes.

Position: Head of Special Projects & Innovation.

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

Signing Bonus: $50,000.

My hands shook violently. This wasn’t just a job. This was a new life. This was salvation for my mother, for my dead dreams.

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

I looked up, heart pounding. “Anything.”

“The signing bonus,” he pointed to the $50,000. “You must use it to buy a new suit. The best one. And fix your mother’s roof. We ran a background check. We know her house leaks when it rains.”

My throat tightened. Tears spilled over, hot and salty. I couldn’t hold them back.

“Yes, sir. I… I can do that.”

“And Stuart?”

“Yes?”

“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.”

We laughed together. Laughter echoed through the most powerful room in the world.

Chapter 7: The Legacy of Kindness

I signed the paper. The blue ink marked the start of a new era.

The next hour was a blur. I was introduced to the Board. I was given a Gold Badge—the highest clearance, allowing access anywhere.

I walked into the R&D hangar. It was massive, filled with prototypes, drones, and jet engines. Hundreds of engineers—men and women I had idolized from afar, the greatest minds in the industry—stopped working. They looked at me. Some with curiosity, some doubt, some fear.

The foreman, a guy named Greg, who had tossed my resume in the trash two years ago, walked over. Sweat beaded on his forehead. He knew who I was. He knew he had rejected me.

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

I looked at Greg. I looked at the massive jet engine on the test stand.

“Pop the hood,” I said.

“Sir?”

“Take the casing off,” I said, taking off the suit jacket Arthur had lent me and rolling up my sleeves. “Don’t just show me the drawings. Let’s see how this damn thing actually works. And hand me a wrench.”

Greg blinked, then a smile spread across his face. A real smile, the smile of a mechanic recognizing one of his own.

“Yes, sir!”

Chapter 8: The Full Circle

Three years have passed since that fateful day.

I am no longer the unemployed guy driving a smelly Ford Focus. I drive an Aston Martin DB11. I paid off my mother’s debts, renovated her house into a villa, and bought the rundown apartment building I used to rent to turn it into affordable housing for struggling students.

Under my leadership, Aero-Dynamics launched three new engine lines, more fuel-efficient and quieter than anything on the market. We don’t just work on computers; we work with grease, with sweat, and with true “grit.”

But I keep a reminder.

In my corner office, on a bulletproof glass shelf overlooking the city, sits a strange object. It is a rusted, bent tire iron. The very one Arthur used that day.

Arthur retired fully last year. He and Martha live in Tuscany, Italy, growing grapes and enjoying their golden years. But he calls me every Sunday. We don’t talk stock prices or billion-dollar contracts. We talk about vintage cars. About fixing engines by hand.

Last week, I was driving the Aston Martin home in a storm. The conditions were identical to three years ago. I saw an old Honda Civic pulled over, smoke billowing from the hood.

A young girl, maybe twenty, stood there, soaked, staring at the engine with utter hopelessness.

I was tired after a day of board meetings. I was wearing a $5,000 bespoke suit. I could have called roadside assistance and kept driving.

But I pulled over.

I turned on my hazards. I grabbed the umbrella from the back seat and stepped into the rain.

“Need a hand?” I asked.

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

I smiled. I felt the invisible hand of an old man on my shoulder, warm and encouraging.

“Don’t worry about that,” I said, rolling up my silk sleeves, not caring about the rain ruining the fabric. “Just promise me one thing. Pay it forward someday.”

Because you never know who you are helping. You never know how a small act of kindness can alter a destiny. And most importantly, you never know who you are becoming in the moment you decide to stop, rather than drive by.

The world needs brilliant engineers, yes. But it needs people who stop in the rain even more.

THE END.