Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Five weekends ago, on a lazy Saturday afternoon, I paced back and forth in my spare upstairs room, garbed in a full suit as Mad Men played in the background. This was the full to-do, with jacket, button-down shirt, fancy pants. A tie tied correctly, even. The goal wasn’t to pretend to be Don Draper, like when nerds encase themselves in Yoda costumes for a sci-fi convention, though I imagine I may have been the only viewer in a 1,000-mile radius to experience the series in such an authentic manner. No, I was dressed to the nines with a singular aim: to reacquaint myself with how a suit felt, after having successfully avoided one for years. I just happened to be catching up on the third season of Mad Men at the time. The real show? A second round of interviews for my next job.
You know how I gravitate toward plans, so you can imagine the level of prep that went into this process. It began with mulling over pages and pages of handwritten notes detailing my own story–and the new story I wanted to pursue. These were bullet points constructed to address the boilerplate questions. What’s my background? What do I know about the new company? Why do I want to leave my current gig? Strengths. Weaknesses. Expectations. Then came the far more interesting part, in which I tried to anticipate the curveball questions. Tell you a joke? No problem.
Why was the goldfish kicked out of school?
Because he was caught with seaweed.
Obviously I’d pause briefly before delivering the joke to simulate thoughtfulness. Obviously. I also pictured a scenario wherein an interviewer would ask for a second joke, and upon finding the Internet miserly in its offerings, I decided to craft my own backup.
How do you get a penguin into a penguin suit?
Schedule him for an interview.
With a solid meta-joke up my sleeve, I proceeded to indulge my neurosis further by researching the total U.S. population, along with the contrasting densities of New York and Seattle, in an attempt to brace for those brain teasers I loathe so much. Say I had to calculate the cost of cleaning all the windows in Chicago, for instance, or guess the number of diapers purchased by Indianapolis residents in a given year. Using the rough range of population counts in New York City (9 MM) and Seattle (<1 MM), I’d arrive at population estimates for my respective cities, approximate diapers or windows per person, and then work from there.
Finally, I plotted the actual route to the interview site, which happens to be in the same corporate park I’m frequenting now. I had this horrific mental picture of waiting at a red light, looking to my right, and locking eyes with a current colleague. It would’ve been, like, “Uh, yeah, it’s a yearly tradition of mine to break out the suit and drive around the corporate park during early afternoon hours.” Awkwaaard, in a word, and you can bet I mapped it out so that there were right turns only, with as few stoplights and four-way stop signs as possible.
At the end of the day, all these interviews honestly only called for two things: being cleanshaven was important. I also needed to know my shit. That’s it. There were no brain teasers, no window washing estimates, no uh-oh moments during the drive there. I didn’t even get to tell my penguin joke! Disappointing, really. It all worked out in the end, though, and we’ll discuss the aftermath on Thursday. One of the secrets of this site will also be revealed. And total U.S. population is about 310 MM, in case you were wondering.