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.
4 comments:
interesting
so where are you now?
hey forgot to add one thing in the book "Adventure Capitalist" one of the author’s conclusions is India, like many other large nations, will break into several countries . what do you think about that ?
WOW so that is supposed to be for ppl who dont get sleep......are they supposed to go to sleep with this very INTERESTING INCIDENT in ur life?
Tell Me are u and ur BOSS who as u tell is Microsoft Project Manager are both without Work?
Tell me One thing......just one thing.....WHAT is so interesting in that........In Chicago that happens to me everyday......I guess that is why u r searching for a job again.....Hmmmmmm keep it up,,,,,,any more INTERESTING incidents?
Post a Comment