Having been told that I am being ‘terminated’ (like an unborn child?) from my current ‘job I use to pay the bills, but really I’m a writer’, I have had the joy of finding myself in numerous interviews for jobs I couldn’t care less about, but could do with my arms tied behind my back whilst baking a cake. Sounds arrogant, but it’s not really – due to my ‘other interests’ of ‘writing’ and ‘going to the pub’, and my staunch requirement to only work three days out of seven (any more is un-natural), I have failed to climb to the top of any particular career ladder so am now languishing at the bottom with the detritus of people, fresh out of media studies at Bognor Polytechnic.

Anyway, an interview I attended yesterday proved particularly humorous. It was for the role of ‘expenses administrator’ at a rather large bank in Canary Wharf. I was told that the job involved a significant degree of maths, and that my skills would be perfect. Super. The agency had also sent me a crib sheet of potential answers including, and this is verbatim, ‘When asked for a negative, take the most positive thing about you and turn it into a negative. For example ‘the best thing about me, is that I’m really organised’, becoming ‘my main fault is that I’m really organised’’. Having put this advice in the rightful receptacle, I headed down the road.

There were two guys in the room, one was the boss of the team, and the other a recent recruit. He asked me how I ‘felt’ about maths. I don’t really have a feeling about maths, but I went with it – ‘I feel good about maths’. ‘Great, well we’ll throw you in at the deep end then’. Hmmm. Maybe I didn’t feel so good about maths. He pushed a calculator and a phone bill towards me as the tension in the room increased. ‘Right. Don’t worry if you can’t, because there is training, but I’d like you to use the calculator to get 50% of that total bill (the total was already there), write down the figure, and pass it over for me to check’. Was he serious? Yes. I divided the number by 2 and passed it over. ‘Well done! But could you do 25%?’. He asked that question as if we were on Mastermind. I divided the figure still on the calculator by 2 again. This was met by a ‘wow’, from his colleague. I stifled a giggle. ‘You’d be amazed but most people can’t do that’. Yes I am. And if that is the case, I never want to bring up children in this country.

Secondly, they went on to describe the job. It involved being given a pile of phone bills in the morning, assigning them to different cost codes, and then going home. Sounded pretty boring, but that was until the colleague piped up ‘you do get to see different types of phone bills though’ pause – I was confused, he sought to clarify, ‘I mean, most of the bankers are with Vodaphone, but y’know, you might get the odd O2 bill.’ And if that wasn’t exciting enough – ‘And sometimes there’s even a foreign one in there and it’s like where the hell did that come from?!’. None of this was said in jest.

Finally came the questions that the boss had prepared. These included ‘if you won 5 million pounds tomorrow, what would you do, and why’ – to my response he merely said, disheartened ‘not expenses then’. Err. No. Another gem was ‘name your top three weaknesses’. ‘Err..oooh this is like blind date!’ (no response) ‘I’m fairly crap at power point’. ‘Don’t worry, we have a team for that, it’s not quite what I’m looking for’. ‘Oh, ok, well my desk at work is really messy’. ‘Again, not quite what I’m after’. Racking my brains I remembered the advice I had received from the agency, proudly I retorted ‘The worst thing about me is I’m really helpful’. ‘That’s more like it – too helpful, hmm yes, that can cause problems’. Really?

Having explained at the beginning of the thing that I was looking for part time work so I could write and do NLP coaching as well as volunteer at the local youth centre and do drama workshops, he asked me if I had any hobbies. ‘I’m not super-woman!’. Silence. ‘Err…going to the pub?’. Finally a laugh. I was winning!
Some more inane questions and it was over. I had to show myself out so they could ‘discuss’ me.
I suppose the joy of being a writer is that you can take something positive out of these situations, namely, material. The sad thing for me though, is that creative people, who could be excellent at other more important roles, are being forced to process invoices due to an inflexible system that requires you to work every day, and allows no time for the soul; corporations, and more widely, the world, is missing a trick. Here endeth the lesson.

http://www.sarahhenley.co.uk/