Not much to report. Things are much the same. I have registered for with a new agency though. I went to see them last week. I had the usual conversation with the stock promises. What was different was the disdain shining from the other side of the desk. Well I assumed it was disdain, it could just as easily have been the post Christmas blues..
So you can probably imagine my utter bewilderment when, they actually delivered. They'd set me up with a telephone interview with a potential employer. Flipping hell!
Long time readers (Hello!) will now be expecting the "but" and I'm not one to disappoint. But after doing some research about the company and having a poke around their premises I found I didn't think I wanted the job. Ultimately they didn't want me either so it balanced out nicely. Of course these were pre-interview reservations. Afterwards? They had vanished, replaced by certainty. I definitely didn't want it.
Why?
The interview.
Okay it wasn't the oddest I've ever had*. But it was amongst the most baffling. Now telephone interviews are kind of an intangible thing, however they usually follow the generally accepted rules. So it's fairly easy to get a handle on things, what the employer wants, where they are going and so on. However answering questions about famous people, the weeks news headlines and the last book I'd read, asked with the all panache of a Facebook Quiz thrown together by someone with only as passing notion of "English" (And no I don't want it to access my profile thank you), completely threw me. I wasn't even given the opportunity to ask any questions back. Regardless of what they thought of me, I didn't want to work for them. Especially as I was assured there were "no right or wrong answers." (which, if this was really true, would make you wonder why they'd bother asking them in the first place. I mean you'd think they'd be expecting some sort of answer that fell, at least broadly, into a big category called "right" and another category called "wrong". But what do I know? Obviously nothing.) It just struck me that this suggests a company that doesn't know what they want. Meaning I'd never know what they'd want either. Nor would I be told what their goals and objectives were. I'd just be expected to "know". Worse, in my experience, a company that claims there are no "right" or "wrong" answers, is usually a company that actually has a very clear idea of what constitutes "right" and "wrong". They just chose not to tell you what these are until you've done something "wrong". So I was quite relieved when I got call from the agency telling me that I hadn't been successful.
Okay it was a false start. But it was still a start.
*Two others stick in my mind - the first when a guy kept asking me about the fleet of refrigerated lorries I ran - I think he was confused about who "Curry's" were and what they did. The second was one of those "whacky" interview things big companies did. The guilty party in this instance was Canon. Myself (and a hundred others) were loaded into a room and expected to do a "Whose Line Is It Anyway" with a random object that was left on the desk. I thought "Are you fucking serious?" They were. Needless to say my respect for Canon vanished at that point. Perhaps I shouldn't have mimed that. Or I should have have at least done it in the style of John Sessions doing it in the style of a Restoration Comedy. I mean it always made Clive Anderson laugh.
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