This is the story of an interview I had few days back. Now why is this The Interview?? Because this paved the route for a 100K job hop? Or because I attended the interview while travelling in a train, while negotiating with passengers to keep their voice low so that I can understand the questions, while pulling my luggage to a corner of the Chicago Union station, while taking another phone call from my friend, while providing help to a passenger about directions to another train!! Sounds interesting... read on.
It all started on a Tuesday when a consultant scheduled a telephonic interview for me with some one called SG (initials will do..) next day at 3 pm. Well Wednesday the interview happened at 8.30 pm and continued till 9.20 pm with a promise of another in-depth probing of me the following day (Thursday) at 3 pm. Thursday I was supposed to take the 5.05 Amtrak train to return from Springfield to Chicago. So 3 pm seemed good. At 3pm I got an email that the interview has been rescheduled.
The interview started at Thursday 8.05 pm when I was travelling in the double decker train; I was reading "Adventure Capitalist" by Jim Rogers till 8 pm when I discovered that the train was crowded and everyone was speaking with someone on their phone. So I took the stairs down and found myself a low, bright yellow colored stool (with few dark patches) that is used for passengers to get down at stations. I dialed into the conference number to find my interviewers;SG, the Client Project Manager and a Microsoft Project Architect. Intial questions from them lasted for about 25 minutes when the train entered the Chicago Union Station and the Tmobil bars in my cell got to zero; the phone got disconnected from the network.
Once I alighted the station, I found my self a small corner to dial in again. They were there. We started where we got halted. Before that I plugged in my phonecharger as the battery was going down. For next 55 minutes I was grilled by the Architect on anything and everything that is .Net. He was paused thrice; once when my ear was all hot and sweaty with holding the phone so long, second time my friend called up and third I had to provide directions to a guy looking for a particular train. During this time, I also had pull myself and my luggage to a new corner as someone also wanted to share the plugpoint for his laptop.
Once the interview was over we all marvelled at the uniqueness of our experience; we got disturbed by so many things but we achieved what we wanted to do. They questioned me relentlessly and mercilessly and I answered them obligingly, the environment and the circumstances just added a new paradigm to the concept of telephonic interview. SG knew of my blog and told me to write up the experience. I was amazed that they were doing background research about me, however I didnt write the story till now as I was still working with IBM. But now that I have resigned I couldnt hide the greed to share this with the world.
