Interview!

Had an interview for prospective new jobbie today- an educative and interesting experience, regardless of the future outcome (which'll take awhile).

The jobbie's in industry, and the run-up was complex. I'd written tentatively and speculatively to a senior friend in my field, to ask whether his yet more senior friend (with contacts in this industry) would be willing to provide me a reference. Before I knew it, and before I'd applied, this secondary friend-of-friend is sending glowing references I hadn't anticipated nor known I deserved. Next thing I know, I'm at an interview in a south coast town before I'd really even gotten past the contemplation stage of applying.

I've never been interviewed by industry before. I was a pure pawn in the hands of people much cleverer and more sophisticated than me, and despite being physically present and responsible for my own responses, I've yet no idea if I performed 'well' or 'badly'. That'll come next week. The interviewers sucked me in and inveigled me to tell the truth, even though I knew absolutely beforehand this was bad practice. One hears of 'stress' interviews, and this was the opposite- to make you so relieved at not being waterboarded that you become scrupulously honest and ridiculously open.

For better or worse, I've egotistically gotten off on the me, me, me! aspects of the process. They're attending to me! If they want me I'm fucking brilliant! If they reject me I'm shit! Should one fail to subject this raft of bizarre cognitive consequences from the first premises to critical analysis, you could get lost quite quick.

I was expecting to start my interview with my prepared presentation on 'My Strengths in the Role...' but was instead seated in a darkened and massive boardroom (30 seats) to complete a psychometric inventory to evaluate my team-working skills.

I canny read fuck all in dim light these days, so asked for better lighting before deciding how to select and rate in 6 categories of 10 statements each my personal weightings about my attitudes to team-working. For each section, you're required to weight 10 points amongst any or all of 10 statements in each category, ranging from 'I'm an exploitative psycho' (paraphrased) to 'I'm a doormat for foot-wiping', or 'I'm an autistic egotist' to 'I'll go along with any Milgram experimental protocol'.

I hope the lighting was just SNAFU and not part of the test, because that would be pure shan. Also wish I'd attended to the psychometric test title better so I could retrospectively re-analyse whether I'm more a Nazi sado or an Epsilon masochist. Prolly a bit of both.

That was the first 15 mins. There was a 90 mins after this 'softening up' of interactive interview during which it was established (by my own admission) that I'm a patsy but with curiously rigid ethical boundaries, who has powerful friends, an analytical intelligence but no leadership skills, significant research, technological, educative experience and managerial proficiency (the latter less-liked), and that I'm a Scorpio with Virgo rising, of so crap a Virgo nature that she has to call on her friend H.etc to clean her house. Why can't I keep my stupid mouth shut?

Anyways, the wierdest/most critical interview experience was that they literally forced on me a lift back to the airport from their on-call driver. Some might have taken this as as a sign of favour, but just like my pre-interview interviews by two of their current staff I knew otherwise: this was a another non-interview of the most important kind.

The prospective boss told me that I'd enjoy my driver, and so it came to pass. On the stretch of A27 to the airport, Eddie spoke of and gently solicited my knowledge of the rich history of the south coast, its colonisation and migrations, naval background and its decline, and the economy of his wife's homeland of Norway. During this 40 min drive, we talked of Saxon, Roman, Norman. Viking invaders and before that Boxgrove Man, and how we're all migrants, of lime and flint in the construction of housing- a Sussex leitmotif, and how the Falklands and Gulf War 1 were 'won' on fading and now practically moribund naval kit. We passed the closed Ford plant (where once Spitfires were built), and all was of of faded glory. Unlike your regular taxi driver, politics were not discussed, but economics, military power, history and race became academic topics in the best possible way.

When he dropped me at the airport, Eddie revealed he lives 4 doors down from the HR interviewer, and that he'd put in a good word for me.