Saturday 29 March 2008

There are no prizes for coming second

I had an interview for a job on Friday, I spent all day Thursday putting various pieces of work together to talk about and mentally got my self ready. I ended up wearing a new skirt I had bought from H&M a few weeks ago, it was dark green, double breasted, high waisted which meant all my cardigans were too long, so in the end I found an old short frilled black fronted top that looked good and felt good too. There were four women and one man, three of the women had pony tails so I got that bit right, but they ALL wore the dreaded jacket, so may be I should invest. I did feel unnerved when the Executive Head Of Faculty walked in and told me she knew me from my previous job, first as a teacher and then as a colleague, I could not for the life of me place her, although we are talking nearly twenty years ago. The woman who walked into the room was wearing a tightly cut pencil skirt, matching jacket with a large fur trimmed collar sans anything underneath, high heeled boots, a Mrs Beckham bob and long french manicured nails. She was slim with a wide Audrey Hepburn jaw, the best adjective is vamp and this is in a boys school! Interestingly despite the outwardly cool self assured exterior her body language was slightly more highly strung, brittle even. She played with her nails constantly, a habit I dislike, she also kept twisting her hand around her wrist as if to give her self a Chinese burn. Later despite not having seen me for many years she managed to give me her life story, which was amazing because it now began to dawn on me that when I knew her she was a rosy cheeked frizzy haired plain little dumpling of a dance teacher. She said she had, after a couple of years realised that she was going nowhere in England so got herself a job in an international school in Geneva teaching diplomats children returning seven years later to take an M.A in Drama, and so completing a transformation of Sabrinaesque proportions. So it was unnerving to imagine her as my online manager, but still the job looked good. The interview went well but when things are going well I have a tendency to gush. If you have ever seen that old Steve Martin film L.A Story I turn into the S.J. P character, its painful, the woman who got the job was so much more serene and calm and I suspect a little less gushing. So at 7.30pm I was told I was good but I came second.

4 comments:

materfamilias said...

I'm sorry you didn't get offered the job. Do you have Paris coming up soon as a consolation prize?

Vildy said...

I don't think it had anything to do with your being voluble and the person who got the job being more self-contained. I think you weren't going to get the job because of the happenstance that you knew her when, in her other incarnation. I think when she started telling you more of her life story she wasn't going to hire you. None of it means you're second or second-best in any way at all.

indigo16 said...

I do have Paris next Tuesday, Yeah.

La Belette Rouge said...

I am sorry you didn't get it. I am sorry to say I have had a similar interview. I actually had an interview where the interviewer cussed incessantly and at one point asked me to do a guided visualization.
And, as second place prize, Paris is a better than a job where you would have to tolerate a boss with bad boundaries.