Interviewrogation

The goodbye e-mails and leaving drink invitations continue to flood in (five this week alone) and colleagues have started flooding out. Lately, it's been impossible to ignore the unemployment deadline looming ahead.

So, with office morale dipping and a veritable bun fight for jobs ahead, I decided to get started on the arduous process of securing myself employment. Albeit three months in advance.

And yesterday, quite out of the blue, that effort culminated in an interview.

It started on Tuesday, when I'd come out of a meeting to find the usual two or three voicemails from various recruitment consultants on my phone (my current job hunting tactic is to upload my CV onto various job sites and let them come to me. So far, so good.).

And there, nestled between the generic "Awite darlin, this is Jaaaaames from Jobs-U-Like, just want to bore you senseless with some roles you're not suitable for" was a message from the HR manager of a big online outfit. Recognising the company, I rang him back immediately and by the end of our 10 minute conversation, had an interview booked in for the following afternoon.

And so it was that yesterday I found myself sitting in a meeting room being quizzed by two Good Cops and one Bad Cop. Bad Cop interrogated me about acronyms didn't know, while at the same time, cleverly testing my capacity for handling stress. He did this mostly by asking me about my weaknesses in precisely the sort of way that stresses me out: relentless nit-picking.

"But you said you get frustrated before you get calm, I don't understand?" he said, while I grasped the glass of water in front of me and wondered when, oh when will it end.
"Well, you have to recognise you're stressed in order to calm yourself down." I replied, adding with a tight smile, "Like I'm doing now".

Laughter. Ice broken. Phew.

To be honest, I'm not sure what I think about the job. It's not one I would have picked for myself, but you have to give everything a chance. And anyway, it's difficult to see interviews as anything other than good experience. Even when they're unnerving and ask questions you don't know the answers to. And even when the nature of the work requires revealing you have a good understanding of blogs. Which leads to questions about your own blog, most of which you can't answer. Yes you have a blog, honest, and people actually read it, honest, but no, I'm not saying what it is.

"Why would you have a blog that you don't want people to read?" asks Bad Cop, fixing you with a steely glare. "What is it?"

"It's anonymous" you reply.

It's this one.

And it's where I will document the slightly unnerving, long, faintly terrifying process of interviews and rejections and baffling questions which lie ahead over the next couple of months.

What's that? Yes, I agree. The excitement really is almost too much to bear.