Lift (Part Two)

Part One here...

The day of the interview had arrived.

I awoke, got dressed up in my finest suit (minus waistcoat...let's not get ridiculous now) and headed to the bus stop.

The bus journey to the interview was less than appealing. For most of the journey I had to put up with the inane conversation of the two fat girls sat in front of me. From what I could hear, or rather, from what I had no choice but to have blown in my face at screechingly high volume, they were having some minor issues. Apparently someone had broken into somewhere and throttled someone. But said someone was not in fact murdered and survived to beat the living sh*t out of said breaker in/throttler. It was only later in the tale that I discovered the perpetrators of the throttling and beating were in fact brother and sister. Unfortunately I was too busy hiding my disgust behind them to hear which sibling had done what. You see I was quite interested to find out who had done the throttling, and who had done the beating. Alas, some things are best left to mystery I suppose...

Anyhow, I escaped the bus after about a 45 minute ear-bashing, and set about locating my interviewers.  The bus journey forgotten, I merrily trotted my way to the waiting area, announced my arrival to the man behind the desk, and took my seat.

After about a minute, another fellow arrived and sat down next to me. He was a largish man, with a rough beard and a meanish look in his eye, and had me slightly unnerved. He was however dressed in quite a fine suit, and this alleviated my worries somewhat. Yes he was quite an intimidating looking fellow, but clearly by his suit I could tell he was still somewhat well to do. My fears were all but removed when a classy young girl turned up, I had to be in the right place.

After about 10 minutes, I alone was called through to a room in the back. I was led their by another suited and rather official looking man, and along the way I made my final preparations, steadying myself and filling my mind with positive thoughts.

The sight that greeted my eyes when I stepped into the room knocked me completely off balance.

I had stepped into a medium sized room, with a reasonably sized table in the centre, it had a very bland office-like feel to it. But this wasn't what had alarmed me.

Around the table were sat, what can only be described as homo neanderthalensis or neanderthal men (plus one woman....but she might as well have had a penis and testicles).

None were wearing suits, and all were sat about in complete and confused looking silence, as a small woman rushed about them handing out application forms in a frantic manner. I felt like a tiny child, dressed up smart for his first day of school, and immediately thrown to the bullies the moment he arrived. This had to be a mistake. None of these figures in front of me could also be here for the same interview. I was just about to turn around and explain the blatant misunderstanding, when the small lady noticed me and beckoned me enthusiastically to the one available chair at the table.

Caught slightly off-guard, I sat down and had an application thrust before my eyes. It was at this point I was handed a huge clue as to why I found myself in this little huddle of giants.

The company I was being interviewed by was a security company. They had to be employing both the security and the service/stewarding staff, that had to be it! A little odd that they had decided not to separate us, but nevertheless, this seemed like an adequate explanation of the situation I was in. I was even more confident of this when the classy looking young girl walked in and sat down. Clearly everyone else was here for security, and we were here to steward, to provide the venues class and image.

Odd though I thought, that they only seemed to be interviewing two of us for the stewarding role, but I imagined they must have been running multiple interviews throughout the day.

I sat there feeling much more comfortable, filled out my application form, whilst watching the others around the table struggle to remember their names, and waited for my one on one.

I waited quite a while for this, and the entire time people were coming and going, every single one of them huge and dangerous looking. But I was still quietly confident of my theory, I clearly wasn't here for a security job. I mean they could tell by just looking at me. So I continued to wait.

When I got called for my one on one interview, I sat down opposite a tired looking woman, who proceeded to ask me the usual questions, name, experience etc. I of course came back with blindingly excellent responses as standard, and was clearly hitting it off rather well with my interviewer. Then she caught me by surprise.

First she asked me to read something on a wall some distance away...which I at first thought was a little joke of hers, but when she stared at me in complete seriousness I realised she wasn't joking. 'Okay then', I thought, 'I'll play your little game.'

Looking at the wall, I read what was written there with complete ease, and turned about proudly to see her ticking off a box on the sheet in front of her. Then she hit me with a second unusual question. She asked me what I could smell.

This had to be a joke. I've had a lot of interviews, but never have I been asked to prove that I can read and smell. Perhaps she had simply swapped the steward interview sheet for the security one and was having a little bit of fun. She was not laughing though, and did not even as I was shaking her hand and leaving the building.

As I sat on the bus home, confident that I had done more than enough to secure the job, I couldn't help but feel that something wasn't quite right.

[To be continued...]

Part Three