I. At an interview for a university press job, I was facing the editor in chief and two other staffers across a conference table. While my hiring was no slam dunk by any means, we’d developed an easy rapport talking about what the press was doing, my history as a student at the school and one of its magazines, and the EIC’s travails as a transplant into the American South from London. Near the end of the session, I got sidetracked into telling a shaggy-dog media story that would have killed had I not forgotten that the setup for the punchline depended on one person’s thick British accent. I was so engrossed in my own raconteurism that I actually delivered the penultimate line as something like “… but if only he wasn’t so very …” trailing off as I realized my lethal error, and the EIC dryly completed the thought: “… English?” The remaining minutes of the interview lasted a thousand years of me writhing in agony under her justifiably pitiless gaze, while her colleagues visibly attempted to teleport from their chairs. Later a friend of mine confessed she had gotten the job herself and was very worried I’d be upset and jealous, but I assured her I had done just fine on the self-sabotage front without any help from her certainly more appropriate qualifications.
Three Terrible Interviews
Three Terrible Interviews
Three Terrible Interviews
I. At an interview for a university press job, I was facing the editor in chief and two other staffers across a conference table. While my hiring was no slam dunk by any means, we’d developed an easy rapport talking about what the press was doing, my history as a student at the school and one of its magazines, and the EIC’s travails as a transplant into the American South from London. Near the end of the session, I got sidetracked into telling a shaggy-dog media story that would have killed had I not forgotten that the setup for the punchline depended on one person’s thick British accent. I was so engrossed in my own raconteurism that I actually delivered the penultimate line as something like “… but if only he wasn’t so very …” trailing off as I realized my lethal error, and the EIC dryly completed the thought: “… English?” The remaining minutes of the interview lasted a thousand years of me writhing in agony under her justifiably pitiless gaze, while her colleagues visibly attempted to teleport from their chairs. Later a friend of mine confessed she had gotten the job herself and was very worried I’d be upset and jealous, but I assured her I had done just fine on the self-sabotage front without any help from her certainly more appropriate qualifications.