The Interview

Last night my company had an interview with a non-profit organization, and we were so anxious to be awarded the work that we arrived a few minutes early to make a good impression.

We could hear an interview going on in the large office, but we couldn’t see it because of a partition.

We were greeted by a middle aged woman wearing a knobby tan ski cap with tassels hanging down the sides, ending just above her ample bosom, which gravity was pulling down like a boy ringing a giant church bell. The bright, multi-colored shirt she was wearing looked like it had come from the 70% off racks at a discount store. She had dark brown freckles on pale ale skin, and when we approached she kept her face level with the computer screen but raised her eyes to look at us and say, “Can I help you?”

“We’re here for the interview,” the company owner whispered. “We’re a few minutes early, do you have a bathroom?”

“Sure do,” she said, and hoomphed herself up from her chair, “I’ll show you where it is.”

“I’ll go too,” I said, thinking I could check my hair and see if I had any of that black stuff you get in the corner of your eyes if you wear mascara.

When the receptionist was finally on her feet, she was stooped over like little pine tree in a snowstorm. She put one foot deliberately in front of another, like a hospital patient inching down a long hallway with an IV pole.

She rounded the corner of her desk and started heading toward the aisle where the interview voices were coming from.

“Oh crap,” I hissed.

“I’m not going,” my boss whispered.

We stood there watching the receptionist progress along until she was beside where the interview was happening, muttering and not realizing we weren’t behind her.

“Oh my gosh, that poor woman,” I said. “I’ll go.”

I scurried toward her – this aisle was a good forty feet long and she had covered most of it. I kept my eyes straight ahead as I passed the interview table, noticing in my peripheral vision that there were at least five people – not counting the three from the other company with their backs to me – who saw me whisking by.

The receptionist stopped and turned to speak to me and saw that I was hustling to catch up. “Lord, honey,” she said in a voice oblivious that business was being conducted a few feet away, “I didn’t know you wasn’t behind me, I’ve been talking to myself the whole way.”.

She led me through a closed door, down a stretch of hallway, around a couple of corners and through another door or two. Finally she said, “Here it is!” - proud she’d accomplished this important mission.

I ducked into the door and started asking myself important questions in preparation for the interview, such as: “What were you thinking, you idiot? Why did you ask to go to the bathroom, you didn’t need to go to the bathroom? You looked like an idiot out there and now you have to walk past that table. There’s no escaping this blunder." Then I looked at myself in the mirror and found 9,000 flaws. “Oh my gosh, how are you going to go back out there looking like that and walk past table?”

I decided to skip the interview and stay in the bathroom. Seeing the impracticality of this, I figured I’d wait until I thought the other company would be gone.

When I thought it was safe, I crept out the door and turned to the right and encountered a network of cubicles and hallways - and freaking got lost. I’d been preoccupied with being an idiot so didn’t notice the hallways running in all different directions. I wandered around for an eternity until I finally discovered the main door that led to the other room.

When I got to the table, my company’s interview was already in progress. That threw me so off kilter that I could barely look anyone in the eye as the boss hurriedly introduced me. When it came my turn to speak, I started saying my rehearsed words, got a frog in my throat, cleared it two or three times, stuttered, stuttered some more, got a few things out before my brain fizzled on me.

No one asked me any questions.

I spent the whole evening and restless night worrying that I had blown our chances. I kept saying, “Why didn’t you make a joke like, ‘That’s really a journey to your bathroom - I felt like I was on some reality show and had been dropped in a maze.’ They would have chuckled and loved you forever. Why? Why? Why?

The next day, at 1:38 in the afternoon, we got a call saying we’d been awarded the contract. We must have been the very lowest bidder!