Okay, here’s mine.
I went there to the office of the interviewer. He skimmed through my resume and started telling me how good I was. Then he asked me if I could start right then and there, that very day.
I was just sitting there all the time. 
My first interview - during my degree the 3rd year was a sandwich year (i.e. you go spend a year working in industry). Interviewer was an unbelievably laid-back guy smoking a pipe. He spent about 5 minutes showing me some very cool stuff in the somewhat esoteric computer language the company used (APL), then asked the only question of the interview; did I drink beer.
I replied with an enthusiastic affirmative [sub]I’m a student, right?[/sub] and was given the placement on the spot.
Over the intervening 15 years we’ve sunk quite a few between us. (I figure he keeps testing me to see if I lied during the interview).
My best interview was for the job that I am in at the moment. They looked through my CV, asked me a few questions - nothing to catch me out, just friendly questions and then told me what my job would be.
The great thing was I was expecting a real technical interview as I didn’t have much work experience and all it was was a chat!
Best interview was as a consultant, interviewing for a staff supplement technical writing job. It was really fun for two reasons:
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the marketing/sales guy wanted to sit in, because he didn’t know how to ‘sell’ technical writing, and he figured he’d learn about it by being in the tech interview.
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they’d asked for me by name, and the woman who was doing the tech interview turned out to be someone I’d worked with a few years before, so she already knew I was good.
The interview was very technical, dealing with how to analyze, design, develop, and troubleshoot online help for complex systems. She’d ask a question, part way into the question I’d start to grin, she’d let me finish the question, I’d start to answer the question, we ended up comparing alternate approaches we’d take to certain problems… it was a total geek-fest. 
The best part was afterwards, when the poor sales guy was still reeling - he had absolutely no clue how much thinking, analysis, and technical know-how went into writing online help and user materials. He was practically bowing down at my feet (oh geek goddess, me). he’d figured I just, well, WROTE STUFF. :rolleyes:
I didn’t get the job, though. The interviewer called and let me know that the manager gave it to someone with way fewer skills who was (not surprisingly) asking less than my usual $120-180/hr. She was pissed, because she’d have to hand-hold the guy to get the required quality out of him. But price is a factor. Sigh.
I’m a new college graduate in Systems Engineering, living at home and trying to find my first job as a programmer. After reading the classifieds for a few weeks, my brother hooks my resume up with a college friend of his working at Unisys. The manager calls and we set up a lunch interview. In my suit and driving my Dad’s Camry, I arrive for my first professional interview ever.
Lunch goes well as we talk about the job and things I’ve done and other stuff I don’t remember. He invites me back to the office. We sit and chat with one of the other managers. Then he takes me on a tour of the building, which is currently empty (I think it was a holiday for them or something) On the tour, his tone changes, and he starts talking about what I will be doing when I work here.
Back in his office, he asks me, if he offered me the job, would I take it? Gee, I thought job interviews were supposed to be hard!
In the end, I didn’t actually work there because of a hiring freeze, but it was a good ego boost.
20 years ago, I really hit it off well with the V.P. on my first interview out of school. They offered me the job that day, came back with a raise that afternoon :eek: and he and I drank scotch and told stories at his house that night. We stayed friends for the time I was there and through the years. Still exchange Christmas cards.
My last interview went quite well too. They offered me an awesome salary and position straight out of grad school on the same day I interviewed. The HR gal told me later they never do that but that I had been the perfect candidate.
blush
15 years ago, I quit my job the day my son was born and took off almost two years paternity leave (my wife was making over twice what I was at the time, so it made more sense for me to quit). After I decided to go back to work, I worked several unsatisfying (and potentially dangerous) temp jobs, then walked back into the publishing company I had quit two years earlier, asked to speak to my ex-boss, asked if she had any work for me, and she said, “Hell, yes!”
LOL. I just finished a round of interviews for a position I’m trying to fill and I was very tempted to ask that same question. I chickened out because HR had given me a class on “proper and improper” interview questions. Although that question wasn’t covered, I wasn’t sure where it fell.
I’d have to say that my best three were the ones I went to when I moved to VA a few months ago. The interviews were nothing special, but it was SWEET and ever so ego boosting to get three offers from three interviews. It was even more ego boosting to have two of them counter offer each other.
My best was when I went for a desktop publishing position in the marketing department of a research firm.
I write a different resume for each job, spotlighting the skills needed for it. Since this was a computer position, I concentrated on my computer skills for the resume.
The interview went well, but near the end, the person hiring said, “All this computer stuff is great, but since this is marketing and we’re doing advertising and brochures, we also need someon who has some writing skills. What do you have in that area?”
I must have grinned. “Well,” I said, "I have a Masters Degree in English. I’m also a published author and . . . " I reached into my portfolio and took something out. “This is my novel.”
I got the job.
My mate was a talented programmer, who decided to move up from his current steady work. He set up several job interviews for the same day.
After the first interview, the company man asked my mate to wait. Then the MD (it was just a small company) walked in and said…
“How much do we have to offer you to forget all your other interviews and join us?”.
Most satisfactory!
After being laid of 3 times in 3 years from Boeing, I decided to try one more time after over 3 years doing a variety of low paying jobs. At the employement office I told the gal behind the counter I was a former employee looking to get back on. She took my name and found my old employee file. She told me to wait and she would be back in a few minutes. 30 seconds later another gal came out called my name and took me to an interview room. I was offered a job and given a list of openings, my choice. I later found out that I was eligible for rehire a few years earlier but my folder was passed over for some reason. I was given full seniority from my original hiring date and now have almost 22 years of service. I hope to last another 14 years and retire from Boeing.
This one is pretty funny. I applied for a bunch of computer jobs and wasn’t getting anywhere because I was way over qualified for most of the positions I was being offered and the companies didn’t want to pay what I wanted.
Anyway, one night I called a good friend of mine and he said he’d call me back in 5 minutes. 5 minutes later the phone rang and I answered saying “Hey, M****** F*****, what’s up?”
The response was “Can I speak with sleestak?”
Me: “Umm, I am sleestak.”
“Hi, I am Alex from ‘Big Company’ and I called to see if you could come in for an interview tomarrow.”
Me: “Yes, I could. I’m sorry about the way I answered the phone, I thought you were someone else.”
“No problem, can you come over at 10 AM?”
Me: “Sure.”
The next day I showed up at 10 and Alex was running a bit late. When Alex showed up we went into his office and he looks around and could not find my resume. I handed him a copy of my resume. Alex looked over the resume for a minute and then asked me a couple of questions about my background. We then ended up spending the next 20 minutes talking about stupid users and managers. Alex then said “I see you have Unix experience”. I told him that I had done a lot of work on various *nix platforms. Alex then tells me about a problem they had in house. They had an AIX server running and couldn’t figure out how to get the tape backup to work and they were ftp’ing the contents of the drive to a MS server every night to back it up (they used MS and Novell for everything else). Alex then asked me if I could fix the problem. I said sure, give me a login with root access and about a half hour and I could get it done. At that point Alex telnetted into the box as root and told me to go at it. It took about 10 minutes to write a shell script to get the backup working and then I cronned it so it would run every morning at 4 AM.
Alex gave me the job on the spot and at a higher rate than I would have asked for.
The downside to this little story is that they ran the most insanely unorganized shop I have ever seen. About 2/3’s of the staff were idiots and slackers who had no idea what was going on. One guy left and he was in charge of documenting how the network was setup and how to do various things. He had 3 3 inch binders on his desk that he was using for the ‘documentation’. When this guy left I offered to take over the documentation project and was given the ok. So I went down and claimed the binders. I opened each of the binders and the first page was a table of contents. After that there was 3 inches of blank paper in each of the binders. This guy had been working on the stuff for three months and often begged off other duties because he was working on the ‘documentation’ yet all he had was the table of contents.
I ended up leaving because I couldn’t stand working there.
Slee