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The suit slid on comfortably for its first wearing and the gel in my hair was stylish without being sculpted. The pens were in the left inner pocket and phone in the right. The Fossil watch draped over the left wrist had enough give to slide up under the shirt cuff but not enough that it would rotate. I looked good.

I made it to the interview location within 30 seconds of on time and sat down to speak with the hiring manager. 30 minutes in, I hadn’t cursed, made an innuendo or forgotten how to speak and I was passed a competency test for SAS, SQL, and statistics. On this I did well and thence spake with two more people, the hiring manager’s manager, and the VP of Operations. Things were going well. I shook hands, I got business cards, I thanked the receptionist, I strolled, no strutted, out. I did well.

The car ride home went slowly and at the intersection of County Line and York Rd I was gripped with terror. One of the question was “how much greater is 5/8ths than 3/8ths”. Somehow, I responded “40%”. Whoops.

Return home, remove suit, hang up suit, unpack bag, find competency exam somehow in folio. Whoops.

Maybe I didn’t do as well as I thought.

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My day started at 9:30 with a call from the NJ Unemployment office that started “this is your 10:00 o’clock call regarding your employment status”. My 10:00am call at 9:30. Ok.

After that was worked out, I prepared for my 1:30pm phone interview for a job as a statistical analyst. By prepared, I mean I paced back and forth, reviewed flashcards and sweat a lot. I hadn’t lifted weights the previous day and kind of had a nervous energy. I thought to myself “I could probably do a pull up right now” and I did. My first pull-up brought about by me wanting a job.

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My previous reasonably nice PC at work was taken for a validation process that requires four identical computers to the point that one candidate PC was rejected its RAM having come from two different lots.  So my 3.2 GHz Xeon was replaced with  something having a 1/3 the processing power, 1/2 the RAM and a video card that could maybe power Q*bert.  The low RAM’s killing me as I normally leave an instance of Firefox open as well as each of the programs I use in my workflow and it chokes if open an instance of Notepad beyond that.  I’m seriously considering breaking into my bosses office, stealing the case key, installing an extra gig of RAM and installing my spare NVidia 7900.   Could I be fired for improving the assets at work?

Boss: Terry, we’re going to let you go for messing with company property
Me: But everything I did improved my throughput.
Boss: You think you can just waltz into your workplace and increase your productivity?  We live in a society of laws, Mr. Robinson.

Although that’d be an awesome interview story “why were you fired from your last position?”, “I was too efficient”.  Although that comes close to the phenomenon of “what’s your biggest handicap?”, “I work too hard” or “I don’t let go until everything’s perfect”.  Boy does that anger me.  Should I ever encounter that as an interviewer I’d reject them for failing to understand the word “handicap” and thus not meet workplace communication standards.