Saturday, February 05, 2011

I stood at the desk, stuffing envelopes and making small talk with the public relations director of my daughter's performing arts program.  I mentioned to him that I had had a job interview earlier that day.  He asked how it went.

"Not bad but I was informed that I didn't dress correctly," I said, gesturing at my outfit which consisted of a short sleeve button-down shirt, jeans, and slightly scuffed shoes.

"You wore jeans to a job interview?" he asked incredulously, his eyes bugging slightly out of his head.

"Oh, the jeans weren't the problem," I explained.  "The problem was that I wasn't wearing a t-shirt, let alone a hipster-friendly ironic one."

"Ah, a tech company," he said, understanding.

So, yeah, I interviewed again.  Despite the fact that I've only been at this new job for a few months, Liz couldn't take any more of my moaning and groaning about my commute, so she set up an interview at her company which she likes very much.  The only issue is that I've interviewed at this company before and was soundly rejected.  Two of the three interviewers had asked me to write code on the whiteboard, an act which immediately drives all the blood out of my brain, and they subsequently labeled me an idiot.

Liz was not deterred, however.  She found a new group at her company that was less aware of my idiocy.  She held their arms behind their backs and twisted strongly until they cried and agreed that white-board coding was not a good way to evaluate programmers (a stance I don't really agree with).  Whatever the hell she said to these people really put the fear of god in them.

The first guy discussed some touchy-feely topics with me and then delicately asked if we could just have an open-ended low-key technical discussed.  The second interviewer asked me questions about my resume and then in the middle of the interview nervously blurted out, "I'm not going to ask you to write any code!".  The final guy didn't even broach the topic of code, as though this dot-com did something else like bake cookies for money.

So, how did I do?  Not sure, depends on how well I pulled off my human-being impression.

Afterwards I met with Liz and she appraised my tshirt-less appearance.

"Don't they have places to get your haircut near where you work now?" she asked, eyeballing my shaggy mane.

"Well, yes, there is a barber a block away, but that's the place where Ashton got his haircut and the creepy old barber pressed his testicles against him and then invited him into the back to drink rum.", I explained.

"Ah, so you're scared of the barber?" Liz asked

"No.  I mean, I don't really want to feel old-man testicles on my arm, but what I really fear is NOT getting hit on.  Ashton would give me endless crap if I was the one guy to go into this barber shop and not get hit on."

"And that's why you didn't get a hair cut?"

"Correct.  I was worried that the molesty barber wouldn't molest me.  I suppose it's vanity."

With razor sharp logic like this, it's really a wonder that I don't fare better in interviews.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

J and I can't stop chuckling at this post. I can almost smell the fear of god in your characters.

Oh and +1 for 'molesty barber' - that should be the title of that guy's yelp reviews.

--Pablo

Mike said...

It's probably a better experience having heard Ashton's tales of molestation first-hand.

carey said...

Hi again Mike, and good luck going on sucky job interviews. There's really no way to sugarcoat it, sorry. I hope to have to go through some of that torture soon.

Mike said...

Hi Carey! No, there's no sugarcoating. I hope you jam on your or at least make good blog posts of them.