I was going to move to Tacoma.
I was going to work at the Tacoma Library.
It was going to be full-time, and I could have afforded to buy a kitten, eat two meals a day, and walk in the park.
But NO! My band of pirate lizards will make you pay, Tacoma Library!
In related news, I’ve noticed a trend, more and more, towards impersonal and graded interview techniques. No longer does it matter if you have a winning personality, or, frankly, what your interviewer thinks of you. First, before anything, you take a test which will determine your eligability to even get an interview. If you score in the top 16, of about 80 people, you will be interviewed. I scored 7, good enough, considering I forgot a calculator and had to do about 30 long math problems on paper. During the interview, they write down, nearly verbatim, all your answers. Later, this is run through an algorithm that will pull out certain “buzzwords”: welcoming, relate, cornucopia, etc …. These words will help in determining how precisely you answered the question like they wanted you to answer it. Each answer will then be given a score, and the talley will be the final score for your interview. Personality and desire, as long as they are not clearly unacceptable, are not scored. The score for your interview, indifferent to what your interviewers thought of you or how much you’d really, really, really like the job, will solely determine your success.
Soon enough, a robot will interview you, and record your voice. It will run the algorithm, determine eligibility and based on employment and interview history, the likelihood of any of the following interviewees doing better than you, and will tell you if you got the job on the spot.
“Thank you for interviewing with HAL 9000, your friendly interview-bot. You’re fired.”
One reply on “Thank you for interviewing with us, you’re fired.”
Hahaha, I give this rant two robotic thumbs up. You should see how hiring takes place in MY agency. (With the students we hire from OC, anyway.) My boss will get an application or letter of interest from the student, and will proceed to nose around and figure out exactly what clubs/sports/major/affiliations said student is in. Based on this information she will contact the various community members/college personnel who may have had contact with said student, and will ask all sorts of invasive questions about personality, relationship with parents, grades, temperament, social history, etc, etc. Depending on the answers received, she will then discard the application or call the student in for an interview. The interview consists of an awkward and unscripted discussion between the student and my boss in her office, with the door shut. At this point my boss isn’t listening to what the student is saying, she’s analyzing they way the student looks, whether they smile or frown, if their hair is curly or straight, if they’re in shape or overweight, and a million other infinitesimal nuances that for all purposes will have no real bearing on the student’s performance. If they pass her checklist of how a student should look/smell/speak/be, they’re in like flint. In which case they have a semester of condescension and meaningless tasks to look forward to.
See Bava, it’s like Garth Brooks said. Sometimes you gotta thank god, for unanswered prayers. Or wait, was it, I got friends in low places? Well, at any rate, you get the idea. You are the rule. Those people are big stupid heads to not have hired you. We should go out for a drink and then assemble the lizard army. Whaddaya say???!!