“Hi Mr. Pfeffercorn! It’s nice to meet you,” said the recruitor. Sebastian, sitting there in his boxers and a button up, wasn’t entirely sure what this actually meant.
“It’s great to meet you too, Hunter!” Seb replied, smiling in what he hoped was a confident and calm way to the man on the screen, who was roughly the same age and, as far as Seb could tell, wanted to get this over with.
“How’s it going over there? Are you in New York?”
“Yes!” Don’t tell him about your life, Seb reminded himself. Don’t tell him about your life, whatever you do. “I actually am housesitting”
STUPID! WHY ARE YOU TELLING HIM ABOUT YOUR LIFE
“or cat-sitting, really,” Seb chuckled, although it was not a joke.
FOR GODS SAKE AT LEAST DON’T TELL HIM IT’S WITH A WOMAN YOU ARE ON UNCLEAR ROMANTIC TERMS WITH
“for a friend.”
GOOD SAVE DON’T LET IT HAPPEN AGAIN. IDIOT
You know I would really appreciate it if you would talk to me nicely Seb replied to his internal monologue.
AND I’D APPRECIATE IT IF YOU DIDN’T BOMB EVERY INTRODUCTORY INTERVIEW YOU AMANGED TO GET
Fair enough
PAY ATTENTION THE MAN IS SPEAKING TO YOU
“…and so a remote or hybrid culture just really isn’t part of what we stand for. Is that okay with you?”
“Oh yeah,” Seb said, glancing down to see that he had picked off the end of his thumbnail in such a way that he was now bleeding quite a lot onto Sophie’s floor. “I worked remotely for a few years and I just found that I craved those in-person relationships. You know, the, just talking to people. In real life.” Seb smiled at Hunter. Was smiling good? Or did it make him seem like a clown? A clown who hadn’t had time to put on pants before the interview because he’d mixed up the timezones?
DON’T STAND UP said his internal monologue.
Why would I even have to do that?
MAYBE IF SOMEONE RANG THE DOORBELL OR SOMETHING
That actually makes sense.
“…hear you tell me about yourself, I’ll ask you a few questions about your work experience, and then I can tell you some more information about the role at the end of the interview. How does that sound?”
“Sounds great,” Seb said in the wistful tone of someone who was being asked on a date and was pretty sure the relationship would end in tragedy but was ready to live a little.
“So tell me about yourself.”
Seb experienced a a physical sensation that wasn’t dissimilar from being tossed off of a remote, icy cliff.
DO NOT START WITH YOUR CHILDHOOD
Okay. inhale
HOW YOU INHALING INTERNALLY.
Yes.
“So I was born in Northern Virginia, and…just kidding. I’m an impact-driven fullstack developer. I was born in Impact, Oregon, and that’s what I really care about. I am really passionate about AWS code pipelines, and I actually dream about them sometimes. In my dreams, they are beautiful, timeless structures like aqueducts built by some future species far more advanced than us, and their, modular easy-to-maintain units weave through the city, like plumbing, but instead of sewage, they carry data. Pristine, normalized data. And I think that HR is a really important modern issue. The other day, I heard someone died because they didn’t have enough. Or payroll. And, their dying words were, if only I had the Saas I needed, I would be able to see my grandchildren, and their partner or husband whoever man next to them said but Anisa, we haven’t discussed having children, and the woman on the ground just said It’s because this world is too fucked up - there isn’t enough modular HR software built with graph databases. And then she died. People were crying.”
The above is just placeholder, since Seb blacked out around this point, and he isn’t really sure what he had. Nobody knows, actually. Studies have shown that interviewers black out around this point as well, so it’s just an all-around poorly understand part of the job interview.
Sometimes, after interviews, his words will come to him. Sometimes it turns out he did talk about his childhood. No job. Sometimes he talks about teaching himself to code. No job. Sometimes he talks about how much he loves data pipelines. Job. But mostly he simply has no memory of what he said at all, which tends to be a tossup.
What probably saved him was that at some point during his monologue, Sophia’s cat walked over his keyboard and exited the call.