Job Interviews are easy now - They're like exams I've already revised for

When I was at school I used to do exams.  Proper exams.  3 hours in a room with just a pen and a few pieces of paper (although they had started to bring out answer booklets by the time I finished).

And I was quite swotty at school, so I used to properly revise for exams.  And if you properly revise, there comes a time before the exam, when you need to stop trying to remember stuff and trust in the fact that you've done enough.  I was never one of those people reading notes outside the exam room, or reading notes on the bus on the way to the exam.  I used to mostly give up the night before, sometimes earlier.

And it's quite a nice feeling, knowing that you've done all you can, and now it's just about you and the exam.  I always found it was a good idea to try and remember that feeling during the first 10 minutes of every exam, when I used to have a complete and utter panic attack, and be convinced I couldn't do any of it.  Usually if I was still in there after 11 minutes, I did okay.

Well, job interviews are a bit like exams.  Except the subject is me.  And I used to revise for interviews the same way I used to revise for exams.  I used to look through lots of notes I'd made about different jobs I'd done, and I reflected on things like when I'd faced a challenging situation, or when I'd done well, or when I'd exceeded expectations, and all that telling your life story / competency based crap that you have to go through to get a job.  I used to wonder what they'd ask me, and I used to get ready to answer whatever came at me.

But these days I don't bother so much.  And for two main reasons.

1) I've done this exam so many times now, I know the answers off by heart.  I was crap at O Level Chemistry, but if I'd taken that bloody exam as many times as I've been interviewed for jobs, I'd have been getting 100% by now.

2) Self-confidence.  I'm not a performing monkey (some people might not agree), I'm a person, with a life story, and an employment record, and a history, and it is what it is.  And some of it is crap.  My employment history, like my life, is full of blind alleys, and some things I wish I hadn't done, and some things that didn't work out.  And sometimes what I am, and what I've got is totally not what an employer is looking for.  And that's fine.  It doesn't mean there's anything wrong with me, it just means I don't match what they want.

That's not to say I've not done some work things really well over the years.  It's not to say I don't have skills and talents and abilities, and strengths at work.  But being myself, and letting them find that out early is a good thing, not just for them, but for me.  There's nothing worse than doing a really good interview, and then ending up in a job where you want to flick your own eyeballs out with a grapefruit spoon after 5 minutes, just so you can get out of there.

The thing I've learned from all the interviews I've done, past and present, good and bad, is this.  There's no point telling them that you're who you think they want you to be, unless you are in fact that person.  If you're not, they'll soon find out, and they'll probably be really annoyed that you wasted their time, because now they've got to do the whole thing all over again.

And so job interviews for me now are easy.  They're like exams that I've revised for.  I don't overprepare, I go in, I show them who I am, and then I leave.  If they ask me questions, I answer them, if I want to ask questions, I do.  If they ask me why I only worked in a call centre for 3 months, I tell them it's because the job was totally wrong for me, and I found that out by working in a call centre.

I maybe wouldn't elaborate and say I knew the job was wrong for me about an hour in, but it took another 3 months less one hour to get out of there.  And I maybe wouldn't mention that if I'd only figured that out about myself before I went for an interview for a job in a call centre, I never would have gone to the interview, and in doing so wasted the time of the people who interviewed me.

But whatever I tell them, they will know that it's me talking.  They won't be fooled into thinking they're talking to Orville when they are in fact talking to Keith Harris.  And it will then be up to them what they do with that information.  And after getting to know me, if they think I'm not right for the job, they might be right.  But if they think I am right for the job, then they also might be right.

Life's too short for pretending (well it's okay if you're an actor, or at primary school), but when you're a grown up, just be a grown up.  When you take exams, you can't pretend to have revised, you either have or you haven't and it shows through.  And the same goes for interviews.  If you don't show them who you are, they'll probably notice anyway.



Postscript to this blog entry.  The interview I went for this morning, I got the job.

The Five Year Engagement - A stupid title but a good film

My favourite author Kurt Vonnegut was fond of saying that all his arguments with his wife boiled down to her being 'Not Enough People'.  All couples could do with some backup in the form of friends and extended families, but we're not all lucky enough to have it.  The ones that don't are likely to spend a lot longer kicking each other in the arse during the course of their relationship than the ones that do.

And like couples in real life, couples in films need backup too, especially ones that are in romantic comedies.  If ever a type of film needed a supporting cast, the romantic comedy is it.  And that's because it's pretty boring to spend an hour and a half watching someone else's relationship implode before being slowly put back together again.  It's nearly always the same.  First they fall in love, then they have a load of problems due to their total incompatibility, then they gradually find a way of living together without punching each other really hard in the face, blah blah blah, the end.  It's dull.  Films are supposed to be escapism.  If I wanted to watch two people arguing for an hour and a half about nothing in particular I could just set up a webcam in my own house.

So anyway, I'm writing this because last night Ruth and I watched the Five Year Engagement, which had Emily Blunt and some bloke in.  The title is stupid and misleading, because the whole film hinges on a couple's decision not to get married because they have to move to Michigan.  This makes no sense whatsoever.  People move around all the time these days.  Half the people I know don't live near where they grew up, and where their families are.  Some of them don't even live in the same country as where they grew up.

But that's the thing about weddings.  Usually you get time off work to go to them, especially when they're your own, and you can go home to get married, or your family can come to you.  There's about a billion internal flights a day in the US, I'd be amazed if it's impossible to fly from San Francisco to Michigan relatively easily.  So why didn't they just take a couple of weeks off, and get married anyway?  He gave up his job and moved to Michigan with her, and they were living together, so they were virtually married anyway.  And she was a student with 8 weeks off every summer, that would have been the perfect opportunity to fit a wedding in.  All her family were English anyway, so she would probably have wanted to get married in England anyway.  Where they lived in the US was irrelevant.

Leaving aside this stupid fact, the film was a lot of fun to watch.  And that was largely because of the supporting cast.  There were some sick and twisted psychology students, a Welsh professor played by Rhys Ifans who was involved in a particularly funny chase, there was a heated argument between Elmo and the Cookie Monster, a bit of mime, somebody getting shot with a crossbow, some blokes going hunting, growing beards, knitting woolly jumpers, and drinking out of a woolly mammoth's hollowed out foot.  In fact, many of the best bits of the film had nothing to do with the central relationship at all.

So for me, it was a bit like Four Weddings and a Funeral, in that it was the interaction of the wider cast of characters that made the movie.  Imagine if Four Weddings had only had the vacuous Andie Macdowell character prancing around fancying herself and Hugh Grant bumbling and stumbling over his words for 90 minutes.  It would have been death.

Similarly, I was once chained to a chair and made to watch 'Failure to Launch' with Matthew McConnohee (I can't spell it properly, I give up) and Sarah Jessica Parker.  What a terrible film!  I probably would have had more fun reading a paint chart for 90 minutes.  But it was worth watching this particular dung heap for an hour and a half purely because of Zooey Deschanel, who played Sarah Jessica Parker's quirky room-mate.  She saved the movie.

And I've found myself, that it's not just in the movies, but in real life, when it's a good idea to have a good group of friends in the picture.  Because even the biggest stars sometimes need a bit of help.

Skyfall - Even James Bond is being affected by the austerity measures

I went to see Skyfall yesterday.  The new James Bond film.  Wow, things aren't what they used to be.

The film was 2 hours 20 long, but it could have been over in the first 3 minutes.  James Bond fell off a train and went headfirst into a river at about a hundred miles an hour.  Do that in real life and you die.  Added to that he'd been shot, so he definitely shouldn't have made it.  It wasn't the only implausible bit of the storyline either.  He also had a punch up underwater in a frozen lake, which went on for about 10 minutes longer than the world underwater holding your breath record, added to which, as I know from watching Bear Grylls, if you fall into a frozen lake, you can't move after about the first 10 seconds because your body completely shuts down.  Apart from these glaring factual inaccuracies, I really enjoyed the film.

It started off like they usually do with lots of people getting punched in the head, and stuff getting wrecked and blown up, but then it all went a bit low tech and old-fashioned.  It was almost like they used up all the budget in the first half, and the last hour was seriously affected by austerity measures.    James Bond used to routinely get helicopters and underwater cars, all he got in this one was a gun and a radio, and he even had to go back to his own house in an old car towards the end and raid the cupboards for something to fight with.

Without giving the end of the film away, it was a lot like watching the 80s TV series the A-Team where BA Baracus has to disable a posse of heavily armed men with a wheelbarrow full of cabbages and a potato gun.  Judi Dench bless her was making bombs out of leftover curry paste and staples and even Daniel Craig was struggling to find something deadly to massacre the helicopters full of ninjas with that arrived on his doorstep.

One thing I really liked about the film was that there was quite a lot of talking in it, especially between James Bond and the bad guy, played by Javier Bardem.  I can't be doing with films when it's a non-stop Transformer-a-thon of special effects, where there's not even a gap long enough between explosions to check whether you've got tinnitus or not.  I especially liked the bad guy's entrance where he started talking at James Bond while he was still absolutely miles away, and I was even thinking he probably should have used a megaphone, or got closer before he started, but I'm sure he had some sort of microphone near him, what with it being a film and all.  I really liked Javier Bardem as the villain.  He managed to convey just the right air of menace and was just crazy enough, without going completely over the top.  He was a lot more like Dennis Hopper in Speed than Heath Ledger in Batman.

Another good thing about the film was that it was very old person friendly.  I've written before about poor old Roger Moore in Octopussy, running around at age 57 chinning circus performers whilst wearing big cloppy shoes and gorilla outfits, but this one was even kinder to old folk.  The last 20 minutes saw the positively ancient pairing of Judi Dench and Albert Finney, trying to run around but being barely able to move, yet still managing to dodge bullets and explosions.  At one point Albert Finney does a brilliant impersonation of a statue, when someone shoots a gun at him and he doesn't even move.  He just waits there while the bullet blows the doorframe he's standing in apart.  At his age, he wouldn't have seen it coming till about 10 minutes after he'd been shot.

As well as watching old people failing to run around on the screen, the audience at the screening we went to were ancient as well.  It was the middle of the afternoon on Orange Wednesday but it looked like a reunion of all the people who'd been at the original Dr No screening 50 years ago.  I haven't seen so many sticks and wheelchairs since I went past the motability store in Stockton the other day.  I was almost getting comfortable in my seat when the old lady with the two sticks who was trying to get to her seat behind me started rocking my seat backwards and forwards like I was on a see saw, just before she fell over and had to be helped up by some other crumblies.

After spending so much time lately working with people who look about 12, I felt like I'd accidentally stumbled on to the set of Last of the Summer Wine.

The old ladies in particular wouldn't have been disappointed, as Daniel Craig in particular looked chiselled and rugged throughout, so chiselled and rugged in fact, he looked almost pixalated.  He did gratuitously get his kit off a couple of times for the benefit of the grandmas in the audience, although it didn't do much for me.  And it wasn't the best Bond film I've seen for Bond girls either, the ones that were in it were either disappointing, or dead.

But as for storyline, and excitement, it was one of the best, and I'd definitely recommend it.  Even if there was no hollowed out volcano with hundreds of people in coloured jumpsuits and a megalomaniac with a massive laser and a plan to takeover the world in it, it was still a really good film.

And much as I still enjoy watching the old slapstick Roger Moore doing his one liners after he's thrown someone out of a window, I'm warming to Daniel Craig.  I wasn't a big fan of his after Casino Royale, and I've never seen Quantum of Solace, but I enjoyed him in this, and I feel like he's lightening up a bit now he's got into his stride.

Looking forward to the next one....

Is this a restaurant? For a minute there I thought I'd wandered into a toy shop

Tonight I had my second leaving do in the last 3 days.

Tonight's meal had twice the number of people in attendance but it was also twice as much money for half as much food, which is a big consideration when you're unemployed.  That Copper Beech place we went to on Wednesday, the dinners were huge, and even with drinks you still got change out of a tenner.  The mince and dumplings I had could have fed a village, and the parmos were so big you could have used them as liferafts in the event of a flood.

But for all the cheapness on Wednesday, the food was still excellent.  Also, I understood the menu.  I knew what every dish was.  Parmo, check.  Mince and Dumplings, check, Fish and Chips, check.  I had a pretty good idea in my head what each of those things might look like, and when they got delivered to the table, I had no trouble telling them apart.  And neither did the waiter.

The restaurant tonight was a lot posher than the Copper Beech, but it was one of those places where they build stuff out of your food.  Dan Footy's dessert looked like a scale model of the Black Pearl out of Pirates of the Caribbean, and as for me, I got served a stack of something that looked like a replica of the paperwork I used to batch.  It even had orange case separators made out of carrot.  The veg was advertised as being hot pot potato, but it looked more like potato that had been hit with a hammer, mixed with some carrot and then assembled into a square in one of those car crushers.

I didn't have chips, and I was glad I didn't, but some other people did and they were those big chips that you got about ten of and that you could have started a game of Jenga with.  If I'm going to order chips, I want them to look like chips, not building blocks.  I'm not a child, I haven't played with blocks and bricks and that type of shit since I was about 9.  I just don't get what the appeal of this kind of food is.

The choice of food on offer played havoc with poor old Deano.  He'll only eat traditional British meals, so he ordered sausage and mash which you would think would be a safe bet, but they'd even tried to cut the sausages in half and build something out of that.  And instead of good old Bisto on it, it had some sort of black sauce, and they couldn't just slip him a wadge of mash, they had to mix it with some green stuff so it ended up being the colour of mint chocolate chip ice cream.  For God's sake, just give us food we understand!

Not only could we not tell what the meals were, neither could the staff.  Nothing looked like you thought it would, and it took about 10 minutes of swapsies before we got the right dinners.

Also, the gap between the courses was really long, and I think at least some of this was probably because of all the time it took to assemble the stuff out the back.  I've put IKEA bookcases together in less time than it took to fetch our desserts.

It was £13.95 for two courses tonight, plus drinks, so £15 each near enough whereas on Wednesday I was almost embarrassed to walk away after only paying £8.40 for what I had.  Not only embarrassed, I could only just get out of there under my own steam.  I nearly had to put my stomach in a wheelbarrow to get it out to the car, it was so full.

Maybe there are some people out there who want to pay extra to have their dinners made to look like stuff you might find in a 3 year old's bedroom, but I'm not one of them.  Just give me a proper dinner, that looks like a dinner please, and not one that looks like a Lego house.

Thank you.  Rant over.  Now I'm off to make some toast.

Getting fired and laughing at stuff - 20 years on

The last time I worked in a big office was in the early 90s.  Gazza was bawling his eyes out and the internet hadn't been thought of.  It was all faxes and post then.  I think mobile phones were just getting off the ground, but only just off the ground because they were as heavy as a log.

Even though that was half my life ago, I still remember that time like it was yesterday.  I can't remember the work very well, but I remember the laughs.  I remember going out to the pub for lunch all the time, and I remember being off my bonce on whisky at the Christmas party because there was no other booze left, and I'm told while I was out of it I won a competition for moving an elastic band from my forehead to my neck without touching it, just by wiggling my face, but that part I don't remember.

I remember getting absolutely bollocked for bouncing hundreds of direct debits that I wasn't supposed to, and I remember having trouble getting to work because of the snow, and I remember being late in and having to take it out of our lunch breaks.  And I remember arguments about parking charges and I remember being in a very minor car crash with Alison Rhodes and I remember her falling on her arse in her wellies on the ice, and it was funny even though her bum really hurt.  And I remember Andrew Spink being annoyed that Leeds had sold Vinnie Jones, and I remember the two of them dressed up for Yorkshire Day (Alison and Andrew, not Andrew and Vinnie Jones).

And I remember Mandy Mason dressed as Andy Pandy and I remember her going on maternity leave to have her daughter who is now all grown up.  And I remember Anne Smith and her stories of horrible car crashes and the worst broken arm anyone had ever seen.

And I remember that the manager's office doorframe was coming away from the wall, because of all the times it got slammed behind one of us, when we'd got absolutely hammered for making a mistake, and I remember the long walks across the office we had to do when our badge card numbers got read out.  And I remember how they used to draw the blinds before they used to shout at you.  And I remember Liz Thompson always wore trainers and she was always chasing and tackling things in them, or so she said.

And I remember that they brought Total Quality Management or TQM in, and part of it was that there was supposed to be a no-blame culture, but I still remember getting the blame for a lot of stuff.

And I remember Angela Richardson used to hang around for hours out the back looking through boxes and I remember that we used to make each other giggle, just by saying the word 'smashed'.

But the thing I remember the most is the laughing.

Anyway, since then I haven't worked in a big office, with lots of people.  It's all been small offices with only a few.  Until the last 4 months.

I'm 20 years older now but it's been like going round again.  Working with a new bunch of young people, all in their twenties or younger.  They've all got smart phones now, and they're all on Twitter, and they like to Facetime each other, and music's all gone digital and now there's more different colours of drink to get hammered on.  And nobody uses faxes anymore.

But some things have stayed the same.  Sometimes you still get called into meetings to get bollocked, and sometimes you even get called into meetings to get fired.

But the thing I'll remember the most has been the laughter.  And if I can still remember the people I was laughing with in the early 90s now, I'm sure in twenty years time I'll remember the class of 2012 just as well.

I may forget what a PFF2 is, and I might forget that it goes 'cover letter, then financial' (although I doubt it) but I'm sure I won't forget the people.  I didn't forget the ones I went to Germany with in 1983, I didn't forget the ones I worked with in 1990, and I won't forget Gibbo and Rob and Vicky and Footy and Rookesy and Deano and Joss and Lucy and Sophie and Cozza and Kirstywho'snotaGeordie and Steve and Phil and Edd and Rebecca and all the rest.

Because whatever differences we may have had, whether we were older or younger, or came from different places, or had different backgrounds, or had different life experiences, we all had one thing in common.

We all knew how to laugh at stuff.