I was interviewing with a company to do graphics design and marketing work, or so I thought. They said I seemed to be a good fit and told me to come by the next day for a job shadow.

I showed up in my best business suit and a pair of nice confident heels. They told me I’d be “riding along” with another girl.

To my surprise, we got into a car and drove a long way — about an hour and a half to a small residential neighborhood. I was starting to suspect ax murderers until they gave me the pamphlets; the position was actually door-to-door sales.

The humidity was nasty, and my suit was not the right clothing for this. A few hours in, one of my heels got caught in a grate, and I lost my balance, went down, and heard a snap. My foot started swelling up.

I wanted to go home, but my ride-along was scared that she wouldn’t make her quota and that she’d be fired if she didn’t.

I called my dad. He drove out to pick me up from his home, which is in a different town from where this happened… which was also a different town from my home. This was about a three-hour drive. Dad drove me back to my car, and I drove my car home — which did not help the pain in my foot. I took a bunch of pills and went to bed.

The next day, my foot was even worse, swollen, and purple. I went to urgent care and found that I had an articular fracture.

At first, the people I had been interviewing with tried to weasel out of paying my medical bill, so I had to contact an Employment Attorney. That fixed it; I got my medical bills covered, the lawyer’s fees covered, and some shut-up money to cover rent and necessities while I recovered.

Eventually, I did find a job doing actual graphics design work for advertising, but the break never did heal correctly. I can’t wear anything but orthopedic flats anymore, no more heels (I used to love heels), and I bring a cane or a walker with me wherever I go in case the pain flares up.

Fun fact: the girl I was riding along with did not make her quota, got fired for it, blamed me for it, and sent me a nasty message about it. The attorney and I used that as proof that I was in fact riding along with her when the company attempted to deny it.

I was talking to a friend about some weird and unusual experiences I have had job hunting over the years, and I would like to share these.

The first story happened in 2019. I had ten years of administrative assistant experience by then, and I had been in my current position as an administrative assistant for two years. I had a new manager who treated everyone like crap, so I started looking for another job. 

I found an ad from a staffing agency that was hiring an administrative assistant with two years of experience. “Great!” I thought. “I have ten years total.” 

I emailed a cover letter, my résumé, and a reference letter I had received from a previous employer. I had all the skills they needed.

Two days later, the staffing agency sent me an email.

Staffing Agency: “Thank you for your interest in the administrative assistant position. We have carefully reviewed your résumé and, unfortunately, we will not be able to offer you any positions with our staffing company. The reason is that you do not have any work experience. Once you have obtained work experience, please feel free to reapply.”

I was shocked by that response. I went back and checked the email that I had originally sent to make sure that my résumé and the other attachments were included. And yes, they were. I don’t believe they “carefully reviewed” my résumé. I mean, how could they have missed ten years of work experience and the reference letter?

I was tempted to send an email back and ask them this very question, but I decided just to look somewhere else.

My second story happened in 2009. I was at the local grocery store and they had a “Now Hiring” sign for an office assistant position, so I went ahead and applied for the job. I spoke to the store manager, and he was very impressed by my experience and skills, and he said he wanted to hire me. I thought this was great. This grocery store was only about five minutes from my house, and it sure would beat the hour-long commute to work every morning.

The store manager said that he couldn’t hire me until his district manager interviewed me first, so he set up an interview with the district manager.

It was a forty-five-minute drive to meet with the district manager. My interview was at eight o’clock, so I got up at 5:30 and took my time putting my makeup on, fixing my hair, and making sure my clothes were pressed. I wanted to make a good impression, so I went the extra mile to do so.

I arrived at the district manager’s office at 7:55 that morning. I went inside, spoke to the receptionist, and let her know why I was there. I was very friendly and polite.

Then, at 8:00, the district manager came out. He took me back to his office without so much as a hello.

District Manager: “Have a seat. Oh, [Store Manager] speaks very highly of you.”

I smiled at him. The district manager sat down and said he wanted to look over my résumé. He spent about three seconds on it, and then he abruptly stood up and started walking toward the door.

District Manager: “Okay, that’s it. Thank you for coming in.”

He did not give me any chance to ask any questions, and he did not ask me any questions. He also did not offer to shake my hand, and he never smiled at me.

When I got my phone out in my car, I saw that the time was 8:03 am. 

I went into that store a few days later, and the store manager came up to me and asked me what happened. I told him of the interaction with the district manager.

Store Manager: *Confused* “Well, [District Manager] did say not to hire you, but when I asked him for a reason, he said he didn’t have one.”

I shopped in that store still for a couple more months, and that same “Now Hiring” sign for an office assistant was up for the next two months.

I am still puzzled about what happened with that one.

When I first went job searching, I knew very little about what to look for in an offer. My mother offered little help during the process of applying — our vastly different tastes in jobs led to both of us thinking her input wouldn’t be useful — but when I did score an interview, she gave me several points of all-purpose advice.

Among them, she asked me what the offered salary was, which led me to realize that they hadn’t actually included that in the ad. When I mentioned this, my mother advised me to broach the subject at the interview.

Despite my inexperience, red flags went off when I did attempt to bring up salary and the interviewer kept “setting it aside” to talk more about the job itself. When it seemed like the interview was wrapping up, I asked about the salary again, and the interviewer seemed to be annoyed.

Interviewer: “You need to stop bringing that up. This whole time it’s been ‘salary’ this, ‘salary’ that. Why do you care so much about what you get paid?”

Me: *Dumbfounded* “…Because that’s what a job is. I do work for you; you pay me money. That’s the entire point of getting a job. If you’re not going to pay me a good salary, why would I work for you?”

Interviewer: “Look, we’re running late. I have another interview coming up. We’ll call you.”

Me: *To myself as I leave* “I’m not going to answer.”

Once I got back home and shared the experience, my mother agreed that any workplace that refused to give me an answer as to what my salary would be was not a place I should be working. When I went back to browsing job offers, she was a little more willing to offer input for the search.

I never heard back from that first place.

This happened a few years ago when I was applying and interviewing for teaching jobs. A common question in teaching job interviews — and in basically any job interview — is, “Where do you want to be in five years?”

My standard answer to that question is pretty generic: I want to be teaching at a school I enjoy being part of and to keep improving my teaching methods and strategies to help every student as much as possible.

This wasn’t enough for one school, who — very surprisingly — actually called on the phone to tell me that I didn’t get the job and to give me a chance to ask for feedback. By this point, the principal had given me some basic pointers to improve my interview, and then we got to the above question.

Principal: “I also want to address your answer about where you want to be in five years. Your answer just didn’t make you seem like a very motivated or ambitious person.”

Me: “Can I ask what you mean by that?”

Principal: “Well, at [School], we expect our teachers to always be trying to improve.”

Me: “I understand, but I feel I addressed that with my answer already.”

Principal: “Well, being ‘the best teacher you can be’ is a good start, but we expect more than that. We want our teachers to do things like getting an Administrator license, getting a Master’s degree or two, taking as many of the offered training seminars as you can — that kind of stuff.”

Me: “Okay, but… I don’t want to be an administrator. I want to be a teacher, so having my administrator license wouldn’t do me any good. I also don’t feel like I need a Master’s degree to be a good teacher, so if it’s not required by [State] education laws, I just see it as a waste of money and energy. And all of the training seminars would take time away from my lesson planning, if not taking me out of class entirely, because most of them take place during school. Really, all of these things sound like they would actually make me a worse teacher because I would be focusing on checking them off the list instead of focusing on my actual teaching.”

Principal: “You just have to be motivated about it.”

Me: “So, you’re saying that having meaningless paper accomplishments is more important than actually helping students learn and achieve goals like graduating and getting into college?”

Principal: “These are the things we expect from our teachers at [School]. I apologize again, but we’ve made our decision to hire another candidate, so good luck with your job search.”

At that point, the principal abruptly hung up.

In hindsight, I’m pretty glad I didn’t get that particular job.

While I’m now an executive, this happened when I was still a manager at my airline. A man in his early twenties applied for a vacancy for a Ramp Operator, commonly known as a baggage handler. He went through the various stages: CV analysis, psychotechnical tests, background check, and security questionnaire. Then, he reached the final stage before training and hiring: the interview.

At the interview, there is always a panel of three interviewers: the station manager, a supervisor, and a Human Resources representative, with at least one of the same gender as the candidate. Even though I was not the station manager, I was filling in for him, so I had to preside over the interview.

Me: “Why do you want to work for [Airline]?”

Candidate: “To prove a point.”

Me: “Oh, and what is that?”

Candidate: “You see, ma’am, there’s no such thing as an ‘airplane’.”

Me: “Excuse me?”

Candidate: “Yes. They are, in fact, trains that travel at the speed of light. The so-called ‘takeoff’ is nothing more than a distortion of the visible wavelengths, caused by the engines stretching the laws of physics to their limits.”

There was silence, as my fellow panel members and I stared at him, dumbfounded. Then, finally, the HR rep questioned him.

HR Rep: “So, once again… Why do you want to work for [Airline]?”

Candidate: “By working here, I can expose, once and for all, the air travel conspiracy.”

We thanked him for his time, told him we’d give him an answer soon, and waited for him to leave. As soon as he closes the door, the supervisor just said:

Supervisor: “We’re not letting this guy come anywhere near our planes, right?”

At that, the HR rep and I broke down laughing, and we reassured the supervisor that we were never hiring him.

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