This is a story of the most weird and frustrating interview experience of my life. Even now, I look back on this whole experience and shake my head. 

Many years ago, I was stuck in a customer service job I found to be very frustrating. Dealing with so many angry, abusive customers had taken its toll, and I couldn’t seem to get another role within the company because the competition was fierce. Desiring a change, I applied for different roles. Out of the blue, an agency contacted me because they were interested in forwarding me for an administrative role at a private bank.

The salary wasn’t miles better, and it was a slightly longer commute, but I was desperate to break out of my current job, so I accepted an interview. They gave me the details for the interview, like who to ask for when I arrived, the address, etc.

When I arrived at the interview location, I approached the front desk, which was manned by an old security guard. 

Guard: “Hello, can I help?”

Me: “Yes, I have an interview today with [Interviewer].”

Suddenly, the guard looked extremely angry.

Guard: “OH, THIS HAS GOT TO STOP!”

Me: “Excuse me?”

Guard: “YOU HEARD ME! THIS HAS GOT TO STOP!”

He then stormed off, leaving me bewildered at the front desk. A few minutes went by, and he still had yet to return. Thankfully, a younger staff member came by the front desk.

Employee: “Hi. Can I help you with something?”

Me: “Yes, I told the guard I had an interview with [Interviewer], and he yelled, ‘This has got to stop!’ and stormed off. What is going on here?”

The employee looked annoyed upon hearing this.

Employee: “Sorry, they should’ve explained this to you. There are two different buildings here; [Interviewer] is in the second building. But I really apologize for that guard; I don’t know why he gets so upset having to tell people that. There’s actually a shuttle bus that takes people to the second building; if you’re okay waiting for a few minutes, I’ll get them to take you there.”

This would be my only positive experience of the whole ordeal. I made the interview at the second building, but things quickly began to take an odd turn. Two women showed up to interview me: a taller woman who seemed very polite and professional and a shorter woman who seemed very pissed off. 

The interview started off fine with the usual “Why should we hire you?” questions, but soon, the second woman started asking me questions about family. How many siblings did I have? What did they do? It seemed very off, and already I was getting a bad vibe as none of my previous interviews had asked these sorts of questions.

Then, out of nowhere, while I was in the middle of answering a situational question, the second person blurted this out.

Interviewer #2: “Describe your sister in three words!”

Me: “Err… excuse me?”

Interviewer #2: “Describe your sister in three words.”

Me: “Sorry, I’m a bit confused here.”

Interviewer #2: “You mentioned before that your sister worked in a very successful job. Describe her. Is your ambition to be more successful than her?”

Alarm bells were ringing loudly, and this seemed really unprofessional. 

Me: “This wasn’t related to the question I was asked at all. Why I am being asked about my sister?”

[Interviewer #1] looked at me as if this was a perfectly normal question and seemed to want me to answer it.

Interviewer #2: “I can tell you’re getting a little bit upset now!”

Me: “Well… I’ve literally never once been asked that question.”

Interviewer #2: “But what are your ambitions? Do you want to be more successful than her?”

Me: “Well, yes, I suppose I do!”

They moved on to the next question, and the interview rolled on from there. [Interviewer #2] continued to interject with several asinine questions and gave the whole interview a really hostile vibe. Once the interview was finished, I heard [Interviewer #2] say this as the pair of them walked away.

Interviewer #2: “I enjoyed that…”

I went away from that interview feeling extremely confused and upset; the whole interview seemed to feel like some kind of test to see how much I could put up with.

A few days later, I was informed that I had impressed them in the first interview and I was now invited for a second interview. I was very reluctant to go, and I told the agency person about some of the questions they had asked me, but he seemed to take little notice. 

For the second interview, I was sent to the second building and told they were expecting me so I didn’t need to go to the front desk. When I arrived in the second building, I sat in the waiting room area, but I quickly noticed that there were no staff members around. So I waited and waited… and waited.

It got to the stage where it was nearly forty-five minutes since my interview was supposed to start, and no one had come down. I called the agency, and they said they’d contact the managers. [Interviewer #1] came down to greet me and told me another manager would be with me.

Another fifteen minutes passed, and a bored-looking man in a business suit plodded down the stairs. 

Interviewer #3: “[My Name]? I’m [Interviewer #3]. This way, please.”

He took me to an office and immediately took out his phone and started checking emails. For the entire interview, he asked me the exact same questions as before (thankfully minus the sister questions) and sounded completely bored and uninterested. He either checked his phone or was staring off into space. Not once did he have any follow-up questions about my answers, and he seemed determined to get this over with as quickly as possible. After this, I got the impression that this second interview was a waste of time and that I wasn’t actually being considered.

Sure enough, a week later, I was told I wasn’t being offered the job. Apparently, my answers were “too long” and I “didn’t seem confident”. In fairness, this probably wasn’t my best interview, but I sincerely doubt he was listening to anything I said in that interview, and it made me wonder if they’d already filled the position and were just interviewing me for the sake of it.

I dodged a bullet; that company was apparently extremely toxic with a very high turnover of employees. Mercifully, I got another position for slightly better wages and moved to a much nicer environment. That whole experience still left a very bad taste in my mouth and remains the worst interview experience I’ve had.

Back in the day, our store had PCs that you could rent in-store to do things like resumes and such. They were brand new IBM PS-1s and ran Windows 3.1 They had one three-and-a-half-inch floppy drive for customers to save their work and take it with them.

A lady came in.

Customer: “I need to do a resume quickly. I want a computer.”

I got her one and asked her if she was okay with using a Windows machine, as Windows was fairly new at the time and most people weren’t used to it yet.

Customer: “Yes!”

And away she went. Fifteen minutes later, she angrily came back to me.

Customer: “Your computer is not working!”

I went with her to the computer and had her sit down and show me what was wrong. She then proceeded to grab the mouse AND LIFT IT FOUR INCHES FROM THE TABLE, yelling that it didn’t work.

I leaned over, gently pushed her hand holding the mouse down, and moved it, showing her that it now worked. She mumbled a thanks, and I went back to helping others.

An hour went by, and she came back to me.

Customer: “I’m done. How do I save my work so she can take it with me?”

Me: “You would have to save it to a disk; we sell them.”

She bought one. I again asked if she knew how to use it, to which she replied that she did, and away she went. Ten minutes went by.

Customer: “I can’t get the disk out of the computer.”

I assumed it was a gate issue and went over to where she was working. The gate was up, and I looked into the drive, only to see the WRONG SIDE OF THE DISK GLARING BACK AT ME!

Me: “What happened?”

Customer: “I went to put the disk in, but it wasn’t wanting to go in easily, so I held it with one hand and balled up the other and punched it into the slit!”

I hung my head and politely informed her that the drive was probably ruined and that, because she had forced the disk in that way, it was probably jammed and couldn’t be removed.

Customer: “This is all your fault! I need that resume and want it off your system right now!”

Me: “That is now impossible, and you will have to start all over again. I’m going to need a security deposit to rent another system as you’re responsible for this damage.”

Customer: “That’s unacceptable!”

Me: “I could do a rush job on receiving your resume and saving it for you, but you’ll have to pay us to do that. And I am still billing you for his broken computer.”

In the end, I did it for her, saving it to disc and providing her with printed copies she could distribute.

What should have been like a $15 charge ended up being over $250 by the time all was said and done. I never found out if she actually got the job.

I work as a beach lifeguard. I am ending my shift and signing out at the office for the day. Meanwhile, my manager is being confronted by a member of the public at the door. She looks livid.

Woman: “My boyfriend applied to be a lifeguard, and you said no!”

Manager: “We get a lot of applicants. What was his name?”

Woman: “[Boyfriend].”

Manager: “Oh, yeah. He was not… suitable for the role.”

Woman: “You failed him for his drug test!”

Manager: “I’m not permitted to—”

Woman: “I don’t take drugs! So you’re lying about that!”

Manager: “Wait… you… don’t…”

Woman: “He’d done, like, maybe a couple of joints the weekend before. It shouldn’t be a big deal! He used my pee instead for your stupid drug test, and it was clean, and you still said no, so you lied!”

Manager: “Ma’am, we didn’t reject him because there were drugs in his drug test. We rejected him because we knew he wasn’t using his own urine.”

Woman: “And how did you know that?!”

Manager: “Because it’s very unlikely that he is pregnant.”

The woman’s face goes pale. An eternity of silence passes between the two of them.

Manager: “Congratulations?”

Related:
¡Que Embarazada!, Part 3
¡Que Embarazada!, Part 2
¡Que Embarazada!

I was looking for work, and I interviewed with the hiring manager of a company. We clicked and loved everything we talked about. He said I was a much better fit than the last two guys he had interviewed. He said he was excited to get me into the Human Resources office for a final interview, but it would be a couple of days.

A couple of days passed, and the manager called me.

Manager: “Your second interview has been set up for [a couple of days from now]. Come back at [time] for your final interview with [Human Resources Lady] from HR. We do have one other person we’re doing a final interview with, as well, but honestly, I don’t like him and requested that we don’t bring him in.”

On the day of the second interview, I arrived fifteen minutes early. I had all the stuff I was told to bring, and I was dressed up and ready to go. I waited an extra ten or fifteen minutes before the HR lady even came out of her office and invited me in.

We entered her office, we sat, and she looked at me and at my resume and didn’t ask me anything. She just stonewalled me. I tried asking about the job and expectations, but I got nothing out of her. All she did after a couple of minutes of mostly awkward silence was thank me for coming in and tell me they would let me know.

I spent about two minutes in her office. It was the fastest interview I had ever had.

I didn’t hear anything back after a few days, so I reached out to the hiring manager. I told him of what had transpired.

Manager: “[Human Resources Lady] decided to hire the guy I didn’t want; she met with him about an hour after meeting with you. I’m really sorry; you weren’t even given a chance.”

He reached out to me a couple of months later asking if I was still looking because the guy they’d hired had flaked out on them, but by that time, I had found employment.

I used to work a part-time job in a library with a not-so-nice boss. She was extremely demanding, my wages were ridiculously low, and the work was extremely hard since the library had a skeleton crew and we were barely enough to run the library. Just a few months after I started working there, I quit for a full-time job.

One of my friends came to know of it thanks to social media. She asked me some questions about it, and I didn’t lie; I told her it was pretty awful. Since she really needed a job, she applied. I gave her information about the dress code, what she needed to know, the tasks, and so on. She got an interview very early in the morning (before sunrise in January).

I offered to coach her in the morning before the interview. However, when she arrived, she was on the verge of tears.

My awful boss had called her while she was on the train to tell her not to bother coming for the interview. 

I invited her home for a coffee. I told her about my worst days there, what my boss had asked me to do, the back-breaking tasks, the lack of training on the tasks, and my extremely low salary (from which my boss once deducted around 10% for a mistake I made, which is extremely illegal in Belgium), even though my meager wage was barely enough for me to live. I spared no details.

I tried my best to lift her mood. Since I had followed a job-searching training course after I left college, I gave her my notes. We also pimped up her CV. When she came home, she was in a much better mood.

She found a full-time job in a toy library closer to her place. I was much happier at my new job.