I had an interview for a government contractor in Alexandria, VA about 6 months ago. I got lost and made it to the interview 20 minutes late. I was nervous, sweating and edgy. I tried to cancel, but the headhunter would hear nothing of it; he said that they would still see me. Ugh. So I get to the interview. I missed the part with HR (they had other committments, naturally) and went right into the technical interview.
Keep in mind, I’m very irritable, but desperately trying to hide it. But I can’t hide the sweat (had to park 1/4 a mile away and jogged, in a suit, to get to the building). The question:
“What would you say is your best quality?”
I blurted out: “I’m excellent in pressure situations!”
I started a thread like this after a really emabarrassing interview a few years ago.
I was interviewing for a job as communications director at a Jewish organization. When asked how my proof-reading skills were, I responded with, “I’m obsessive about grammar; I would say I’m somewhat of a grammar nazi.” As I’m saying the words, my brain is running in slow motion toward my mouth and going “NOOOOOOO!” But it was too late. I had called myself a nazi. At an interview with a Jewish community center.
Didn’t get a call-back, but my family and friends have gotten their share of laughs out of it.
Applying for an academic job. (As I described in a recent thread, these are all day affairs.) During the AM I had a session with the department chair. He asked me something about teaching courses in area X. I had to break the news to him that I never taught any course in area X, had no general background in area X and in fact am 100% a specialist in area Y. While it is true that one of my results appears in textbooks for area X, my cover letter, my vita (including list of papers and courses taught), my enclosed reprints of selected papers, and my references should have clued him in. Oh, I also knew for a long time one of the faculty members.
He looked, umm, crestfallen? I guess that would be the politest way to put it. So the rest of the day was for show.
I interviewed for a faculty position once in London and gave a research talk in the morning. Slayed the opposition candidates, shat all over them. Unfortunately for me, the interview process didn’t stop there and we had a lengthy sit-down with the faculty in the afternoon. I just sleepwalked through it 110% certain that the position was mine. I remember giving absurd answers like
we do a lot of teaching here, up to 100 hrs lecturing a year, does that sound like a lot?
yes, it does.
-What would you do to inspire a recalcitrant student who is not attending class?
Don’t really know, sorry.
Basically the type of closed, negative answers you might give if you had totally crashed and burned in an interview and just wanted to go home, except I was coming at it from the exact opposite viewpoint where I thought it was a gimme. Seems unbelievable that I would think that in hindsight. Got the stiff arm the next day.
I remember flying back to the US - which gives you a long time to reflect - and saying to myself ‘Don’t you ever do that again you dopey bastard’ :smack:
I was talked into a job interview that was really out of the range of where I wanted to travel. The day of the interview, I headed north and the highway was wiped out by a large van carrying a lot of paint, somehow it shutdown all but one lane of the parkway and backed up traffic very far. No problem, I had left extra early and knew a few back roads. I try Rt9 and it is backed up with everyone else trying to get past the highway blockage. Same for Rt 35.
Damn, ok, I will cut through the local roads and strike for Rt. 18 to get up to 287. I make it most of the way to 18 and run into construction traffic, I am now running late. I have my wife’s cell phone with me and I call the contact at the place and explain the traffic problems and that I am going to give up and I am sorry for wasting his time. He still wants to see me, how about that afternoon instead. I think about it for a little while and tell him, “today is an excellent reminder of why I never should have accepted this interview in the first place”.
I think this qualifies as my worst interview ever, despite the fact I never made it. I managed to waste nearly 3 hours, not making it.
In Houston, on an all-day interview with Amoco. Went through 8 interviews. All liked me except number 8; he was an arrogant snooty prick and I knew the second I sat down in his office that my number was up. He took calls during the interview, barely looked at me, and was really dismissive. I got the impression he disliked “Northerners”.
Unfortunately (or rather fortunately) his opinion carried more weight than the others combined and no offer was made.
Just as well, as there would have ultimately been a confrontation between us and it wouldn’t have been pretty.
I’ve got two that were equally aggravating, but for different reasons.
The first one was one where the interviewer interviewed me, explained their different functional areas, let me be interviewed by the functional area heads, then asks me “If you had your choice, in an ideal world, which one would you want to work in?” So I tell him, only to find out after the interview, that I chose wrong, and if I’d chosen the right one, I’d have had the job.
Still pisses me off… it’s not like I didn’t want to work in the one that they had the opening in, but instead I thought one of the others sounded really, really cool.
I ended up staying at my craptastic job for another year…
The second one was on 9/11/2001, and I intentionally didn’t reschedule it because I had taken work off that day for the interview, and didn’t have a lot of vacation time to spare.
I got into the lobby of the place, and pretty much knew I didn’t want to work there, and then had to sit through a hideous interview on top of it. The worst part of the interview itself was that I was already an ERP programmer for an obscure ERP system written in a little known language, and yet these bozoes wanted me to take about 2 steps backward technology-wise.
I seriously considered saying “Look… I don’t want your job. Let’s call off the interview now and let us both get back to watching CNN.” several times, but I persevered and tried to be polite and not say “You’re kidding- you still do that?” when not wanting to say the bit about CNN.
Roughly 15 years ago, I interviewed for a position for which I not only covered every relevant bit of experience they wanted (in the IT world, that’s rare), but I considered myself over-qualified. But I was also in need of a job…
Three people interviewing me. One is very friendly, one is somewhat indifferent, one is actively hostile. Very bizarre. I wondered if that was their standard practice, so as to see how you handled it. I thought that I had swayed the first two and was about to be offered the job in the first interview when #3 went into straight out attack mode. I kept expecting #1 (the Director, senior person in the room) to stop the “unprofessional” behavior, but he kept silent and let the asshole keep snarling about petty nothings.
By the end of the interview, I didn’t want the job and I think it showed.
Second one was a few years later. Interviewed by a seriously pregnant woman who was interviewing for someone to replace her while she went out on maternity leave. Within a few minutes it became obvious that she was actively afraid of men, especially single men, and was only going to hire a woman.
Very half-heartedly shook my hand at the door and wished me luck elsewhere. :rolleyes:
Third was with a head hunter. He kept telling me how the position he had in mind would require me to keep my head down, keep my mouth shut, put up with a lot of bad behavior from the boss, etc, etc. No way I’m doing that shit. It’s just not worth it. So I ended up telling him about the time I (alone in the entire company) stood up to the CFO of the Very Large Corporation that I was a grunt for and convinced him that we, as an Insurance Company, should be offering better insurance than the stripped down high priced offering he was angrily replacing our old policy with (because it cost too much! Grrr!).
The head hunter actually threw my resume in his garbage can as I walked out of his cube. I saw it out of the corner of my eye as I walked out, turned around, gave him a look and let him know that I would never accept a job through his firm because of his disrespect for me. He of course, just blew me off.
Going for a desperately-wanted job at a very large, impressive corporation. Arrived 15 minutes early.
I hadn’t wanted my current employer to know I was going on an interview, and wearing a suit to work would have been a dead giveaway (I was working as a web developer in a jeans/tee environment). So, I wore jeans to work, then left at lunch and changed in my car, in a dark corner of the parking garage at Impressive Corp. Got into my suit, pulled on my socks, put on my left shoe, started to put on my right and realize… it doesn’t match my left. I had two pairs of black dress shoes and had grabbed one shoe from each pair. I panicked for a moment and then thought, well, I’ll likely be sitting down and so hopefully they won’t notice that the shoes don’t match. Start to put on the right shoe, and it feels all wrong.
Not only had a I grabbed one shoe from two different pairs, I’d grabbed the LEFT shoe from two different pairs. I lived a half-hour away from where the interview was to be.
I ended up calling, lying about being stuck in a meeting, driving home at breakneck speed to get matching shoes, driving like a maniac to get back to Impressive Corp., and then sitting for another half hour while my interviewer, none the wiser that I was late in the first place, leisurely wrapped up his meeting and invited me in.
I got the job after all that, so I guess it worked out.
My worst was in an interview with the hiring manager and the owner, when the owner went into an epileptic seizure. Apparently it was a common event and not serious, the manager just kept on with the conversation, and I followed his lead. Still, it was very uncomfortable, although it didn’t last long. No one said anything about the seizure. When it was over, the owner just joined right back into the conversation.
I was on person five of a five person interview. He appeared rather disinterested, even saying at one point, “I don’t know why they’re making me interview you. I don’t know what to ask you.” I was totally convinced he hated me.
I got the job.
I was to work directly with person five.
Person five ended up being my mentor and supervisor and I dare say a sort of friend for the next eight years (and counting). It turns out he just really isn’t very good at small talk with strangers.
The worst was the one where the interviewer kept trying to get me to tell him what I knew about gearswitches. The opening had to do with technical work on gearswitches, and he couldn’t believe I didn’t know what he was talking about. He kept saying, come on, how can you not even know about this???
Turns out he meant switchgear, like the phone company uses to direct calls. He got the word confused.
I had a college entrance interview at Temple University in Philadelphia. I was driving there with plenty of time to spare, and then there’s a firetruck with sirens blaring on my tail and noplace to pull over, so I turned down a side street. The truck followed. I turned on another, smaller street, and the truck followed again. They were four feet behind me and leaning on the horn by now. So I turned down an alley. The truck followed. Then another truck appeared at the far end of the alley, and they came together with me between their noses and started unfurling hoses and raising ladders. I was 4 hours late.
At the last minute, a friend told me about an adjunct position at Drew University, teaching an intro to ecology class. They were desperate to fill the spot, so I thought, “Why not?”
The night before the interview was the night of the big NJ/NY black out that happened about four years ago. Fortunately, my little apartment in Newark was spared. I had power to iron my interview clothes! Yippee. So no panicking there.
But I didn’t realize that I was lucky. Just about everyone in northern NJ had spent the night in pitch black, non-air conditioned heat. So the morning rush-hour was extremely chaotic. First, I got struck in really bad traffic. And then I got majorly lost. And as I started to panic about the lateness of the hour, the temperature in my car shot up a kajillion degrees. Too bad my clunker didn’t have AC. My hair started to frizz up and turned into the hugest afro, and I began to sweat through my clothes.
I showed up to the school an hour and half after my appointed time. Not only was my hair a mess and my face bathed in sweat, my feet were all jacked up because I had to walk across campus in heels. The other candidate was standing outside of the interviewer’s door when I showed up. The interviewer came out and saw the both of us and said, “Oh dear”.
I apologized and flat-out told the woman that the other candidate was no doubt going to get the job. But she told me to go to the lounge and wait for about a half hour. Sure, I told her. I managed to calm myself down and get my head straight, certain there was nothing to fear since this interview was just going to be “practice”. There was no way I was going to get the job. Who gets a job showing up almost two hours late to the interview?!
Long story short, I got the job. I apparently wowed the students with my mock lecture, and I asked the department chair all the “right” questions. But I did tell one lie. I told her the reason why I was late was because I had been stuck in Manhattan during the black-out and had to take a ferry home in the middle of the night. What a lame excuse, but she must have bought it!
My attempts to get to my interview in Philadelphia weren’t quite as nightmarish, but I still managed to get seriously lost during the car trip (Seeing the sign “Welcome to Delaware” was a tipoff that I was off course). Then when I finally got into town I took the wrong exit and wound up in a maze of streets populated by row houses, all looking like the set of “Rocky”. I was close to an hour late for the interview (for a university fellowship).
About two and a half years ago, I had gotten near the point of desperation to get out of the position I was in at the time. I managed to get an interview about 30 miles north of my job at the time, down a pretty busy traffic corridor. I spoke with the guy about it and he agreed to a 6 pm interview.
Just to make sure I get there on time, I left work at 4:30 and changed in the car in the parking garage. Traffic kind of sucked but I got there in decent time and at about 5:55, I went in. I went up to the second floor suite and the door was locked, lights out. Not to worry, I thought, it’s natural that everyone else would have gone home by now. In fact, it’s a good sign that they don’t force their people into a lot of overtime. I knock on the glass door. Then again a couple of minutes later. And again.
So 6:00 passes. Then 6:10 comes and goes. Then 6:15. Right after that, someone walks by inside and asks if I need any help. I explain that I’m there for an interview with Mr. WhatsHisFace. She says “Oh, okay, I think he’s here, I’ll let him know you’re here.” I wait another couple of minutes and she returns sheepishly, “Ummm…he went home for the evening. I called him at home and no one answered…”
So I hopped back into my car and drove the 45 minute drive back home with nothing to show for my 2+ hour adventure.
Just this day came back from the two-and-a-half-hour job interview from hell … Interviewer spent the first half hour talking about the company and drawing an enormously complicated business process diagram - which might have made sense to him, but he wasn’t trying to read it upside down.
Then we talked about my CV and my skills and experience, which was all right, I guess, I’m used to that sort of thing.
Then he explained in some detail how much the job was going to suck, how some of his staff had become ill from overwork and others had quit after only three weeks, how the entire rest of the company had unrealistic expectations of the IT department and there was nothing he could do about it, all that sort of thing.
Then he left me alone for forty-five minutes with a technical test that was apparently composed of all the questions they left out of the MCSD certification exams because they were too obscure and difficult.
Then he left me alone for a further fifteen minutes, just because … ummm … I guess he felt like it.
I had an interview during the dot com era. I knew my stuff cold. What I did not know was that I had asthma.
When I got off the plane, I walked into heavy humidity. I started coughing, but I though I just was catching a cold. It got worse and by the time I was in the interview, I was suffering from oxygen deprivation. Now in addition to a constant cough, I also could not think clearly. It was awful. It went on all afternoon. Got on the plane & went home.
Fast forward a few years - asthma is under control & dot com “new media” company is dead. Guess it worked out.