Part III: The Most Disastrous Job Interviews People Ever Had

The worst job interview I ever had occurred shortly after I received a concussion after getting hit by a car. Unluckily, I had applied to the job the day before being run down like a cane-toad on my road bike and received a call shortly afterward. Somehow, I made it through a short first-round introduction and into the second-round panel-based interview. To complicate matters further, my partner and I had an extensive holiday planned at that time, which involved me driving a Juicy campervan some 1,500 miles across the South Island of New Zealand. 

Quick-tip for concussed travelers: Don't. 

If you're determined, make sure you aren't committed to long days of driving, intense hiking, or overnight cruises. Else you will be in for the most motion-sickening, brain-melting experience of your life. Still, I wouldn't trade it for anything.

So, this interview was to take place while we were traveling. We arranged to stop at a holiday park (campground-type places in New Zealand) on the day of the interview to ensure we had an internet connection.

Honestly, I don't remember much of the interview or what was asked. What I do remember is having a terrible connection from the less-than-modern campground wifi that guaranteed a lot of awkward pauses and a robotic flow of conversation. Not ideal when the expressed purpose is to make a likable impression. I also remember being flat-out unable to answer multiple questions that were asked of me, despite having a vast amount of experience in those areas and having explicitly prepared for those questions. Now, I'm not great at speaking directly to a subject at hand at the best of times; my ADD-addled brain loves a good tangent from a tangent, from a tangent -until it has created a Fibonacci spiral of conversational topics. But I find it hard to look back and ascertain whether or not I was making any sense or saying much of anything at all for that entire conversation. 

At least the interviewers got to experience the breathtaking views of Lake Wanaka while I either incoherently rambled or sat in suffocating silence, even if those views were so incredibly pixilated from the aforementioned poor connection that they could hardly see anything at all.

I didn't get the job, but at least the experience gave me a story to share on this post. That's what I'll tell myself anyways.

See the other parts of this three-part series here.

Part I

Part II

 

Manager Gaslights Owner Into Giving Employees More PTO

An employee, who had found themselves circumstantially in a management role, took it upon themselves to rewrite the terms of their employment when they set out to create a new employee handbook. Their ultra-wealthy and volatile boss thought nothing of it and accepted that this must have been the way things always were.

How is it possible to own a company, be responsible for a group of people, and have no idea how you're treating them? It just speaks to the fact that these employees are just numbers on a board to the owner, dehumanized to the point that they are just the means for accumulating more wealth. 

The thread was posted to Reddit's r/antiwork subreddit by user u/blatanttrees, who shared their story to the applauding masses. 

"Ahahah, I pulled this sh-t when I was creating our employee handbook too," shared judyvi. "I had negotiated my PTO prior to starting (and everyone automatically got the same as I did) so that wasn't an issue, but sick time and holidays. I put down every holiday and added sick time that didn't actually exist."

"Yesss!!! Well done! Way to bark up and not down - very important in management!" responded Vegan_4evah.

"Shitty managers are the worst, but good ones are often in a really tough spot," said TWAndrewz. "They have responsibility but often no power to change anything, get their teams more money, time off, or other things."