Well, I'm a straightforward kind of guy who prefers direct questions to open-ended ones.A company flew me down to Richmond yesterday for an interview. I haven't flown in a few years and not much at all in my life, but I wasn't nervous about the actual flying. It was the fear of the "Andy being Andy Experience" that had my stomach in knots.
The "Andy being Andy Experience" could be defined as anything that I seem to do wrong at the worst possible time. Anything from just plain being late, to losing my keys or wallet, getting lost, not following instructions, or losing a contact. On the last trip to West Virginia, the Experience that weekend was more concentrated evil than at any other time in history.
The first leg of my journey was Manchester to La Guardia. What a dump that place is. I didn't venture past my gate, sitting for 45 minutes in a chair doing nothing hoping to keep the Experience gods at bay.
La Guardia to Richmond. Now Richmond, that's a nice airport. I didn't dawdle though and went straight to the baggage claim area to find the limo driver who was picking me up.
Fifteen minutes past and I started to sweat. I walked around a bit. Looked outside. Sweated some more. The decision to walk back up towards the gates was made. Woohoo! There's the limo guy. The Experience avoided. Just barely. I must have just walked right past him in my rush to get to the baggage claim area. My efforts to thwart The Experience almost resulted in direct contact with The Experience. Oh, you are a tricky one aren't you, god of Experience.
On to the interview. I met up with the manager and a manager friend of his and we went to lunch. Strangely enough, we all ordered reubens, except I opted for pastrami on mine in order to avoid being a total copycat. The reubens were excellent. Sometimes you get a reuben and it ends up being a big pile of soggy bread and kraut on your plate, but not these. This portion of the interview was pretty casual. I asked a ton of questions and so did they. I was relaxed and it went well.
Next up on the agenda was to sit with another programmer. This too went well. The hour past quickly. We had a lighthearted discussion about the merits of multidimensional arrays and how Northsiders look down upon Southsiders. This refers to people who live north of Richmond and those who live south of Richmond. Unfortunately, I will be a southsider. Great. Two strikes against me (the first being that I am from the North) and I haven't even moved there yet.
The third interview was with a woman from the business side of things having nothing to do with technology at all. After 10 minutes, she declared that she had no more questions for me and told me to accompany her outside while she smoked. Then we sat in her cube for 40 minutes while she checked her email.
The last two people I met with were senior managers who were obviously too busy to talk to me, but they diligently fired questions at me for 15 minutes and then shuffled me off.
All in all, it went well, and now I could relax because The Experience couldn't hurt me anymore.
On the way home, at the Philadelphia airport, also a pretty nice place as far as airports go, I had a sandwich from Chick-fil-A, my first time ever. Holy CRAP! Good stuff.
4 comments:
Chick-fil-A has recently started offering hand spun milkshakes. The cookies and cream flavor rocks.
mmm. i wish i would have had one.
My last fly-away interview was this summer down to NC. After issues with the flight the night before I had to get at the airport at 5am, I expected nothing but the worst. I actually made it there fine. Unfortunately, they were in the middle of a crisis, a contractor had actually powered off the wrong machine, and it did not come up right so their whole internet access in and out was down. I got a quick talk with the guy that would be my manager, then out to lunch, then sent back to the airport with an apology. I got an offer out of it, but its now the second time I have gone to a company for an interview and they have an emergency and cannot talk to me...
They gave you limo service from the airport....dang I'm applying to the wrong companies....
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