(Hello, at this point in time I have no idea how long ago this post was written. I was definitely still living in the DC area, and it was 2018. Maybe summer. So much of this is old hat. But whatever. I don’t take this blog all that seriously. Hopefully it tickles someone.)

I  had reached the breaking point with my teaching job, and wanted it. To be perfectly honest, I had wanted out back in China, and only took this job in DC till something better came along. But then it got overbearing again. The decision to find a better job was the easy part. The hard part was putting it into practice and converting my effort in job seeking into an actual tangible job.

In the months of job hunting I have had six interviews. Some friends say this is an impressive hit rate, although I remain unconvinced. This is doubly true considering that half of the interviews were with the same fucking company.

I had seen an ad for a job that I was just barely qualified for, so I applied for it on a whim. They emailed me back and put me through a process that began to demonstrate to me that this place did not really have their shit together. There were two tests, and three interviews spaced out over the period of about two months, often with little or shoddy communication between them and such gaps of time that I had at each stage assumed I had lost to another applicant. The first interview was scheduled, forgotten about, then hastily rescheduled, and that seemed like a red flag at the time. But as one of the unwashed and uninsured of America (USA! USA! USA!) I was willing to overlook this nearly infinite game of ass grabby-grabby.

But the interviews… they are starting to have an effect on me. Not in a good way either. Job interviews seems to exist in a liminal state of being neither challenging nor easy. I can do them, I feel like I can even do them well, but they are still extremely aggravating.

On interview number three with that one company it started to become obvious that these people had no idea what they were doing. Interview questions seem to operate on the principal of barraging someone with questions to establish whether or not they are full of shit based on their answers.  The problem with this approach is that I am old and seasoned, so much so that there is little to nothing I can’t spit back at them with a relevant anecdote, particularly when the questions are brain-strainers such as ‘Tell me about a time when  you had to resolve a conflict.’

Unless you are a fucking toddler, you’ve resolved a conflict in your life.

Throw me a fucking curve ball already! “Quick! There’s a bear in the office! What do you do?” Now that’s a question. But it wouldn’t make much of a difference, because at this point in my life with the experiences I have had there is little I cannot handle. “What would you do if you had an acid flashback at work?”

“Oh you mean like last Tuesday? I walked it off and did my job.”

Jokes aside, at the third interview they asked me what my hobbies were, which I guess is an acceptable question (you do want to know that your employees aren’t complete knuckle-dragging troglodytes), until they took my answer (reading) and gave me the follow up questions “what are you reading?”

Is you for fucking real? Is this your attempt at a gotcha question? Where you really expecting me, or anyone for that matter to be like “Oh shit dude you got me I don’t fucking read dick!”

These interviews are starting to feel like a waste of my damn time.