‘Do you think I could pass for a millennial, Katie?’ I asked hopefully.
‘Well, millennial is quite a broad term, isn’t it?’ said Katie kindly.
Friday, 9 September
The Big Day dawned. The day on which it all hinged. I escaped the house without getting anything sticky on me, which frankly was a miracle.
I had carefully factored in time to stop at a suitably artisanal and ethical coffee shop on my way, so I could swish in brandishing my soy chai organic latte, thus demonstrating my hipness and also how caring I am.
I sashayed over to the receptionist and gave my name, and was bidden to stare into a camera and issued with a lanyard with my hastily printed photo on it, which made me look like a serial killer and also made me wonder what the fuck had happened to my hair on the way in from the car park.
A Youth in too-short pants binged out of a shiny elevator to collect me and shook his head in disappointment at my extortionately expensive virtuous coffee. (What is it with the too-short pants, especially on men? And no one seems to wear socks with them either. I wonder if this trend has caused a downturn in the sock industry?)
‘Oh!’ he said in surprise. ‘Did you forget your own cup? I didn’t even know they still did takeout cups.’
‘It’s biodegradable,’ I bleated hopefully. ‘Non-chlorinated cardboard. Recycled.’
‘Mmmm, but do you know how much energy it takes to recycle it?’ he reproved me. ‘Much more than just washing a reuseable cup, you know.’
Fuckety fuckety doodah. I had fallen at the first hurdle. I had been convinced that as long as something could be recycled it would be approved as suitably sustainable and twenty-first-century, but obviously I was wrong. I discreetly abandoned the cup on a window ledge as the Youth whisked me along shiny glass corridors, before depositing me in a white room with artificial grass on the floor.
‘This is our Thinking Space,’ he informed me. ‘We brainstorm and throw concepts around in here. The walls are designed to be wipe-clean, so we can just throw ideas up on them to run past everyone else. I’ll just go and tell Ed and Gabrielle and the others that you’re here.’
I nodded solemnly as the Youth gestured round the extraordinary room, and tried not to notice that the only thing currently drawn on the walls was a large dick and balls. I wondered if I should wipe it off before the interviewers arrived, in case they thought I had done it? But what if they arrived while I was in the process of wiping it off, and then they really thought I had done it? Or what if it was a test, to see how broadminded one was, and wiping it off would reveal one as repressed and bourgeois? But on the other hand, what if it was a test of initiative, to see if one would have the wit to whip the dick and balls off the wall before the officialdom came in? Literally all I could think about now was the dick and balls.
As I stared gloomily at the genitalia on the wall, which seemed to be getting bigger before my eyes, the door opened and four people came in.
‘Hi, Ellen, sorry to keep you waiting,’ said one of the women, who was totally pulling off the cropped trouser and ankle boot look, without a hint of having got dressed in the darkness. ‘I’m Gabrielle from HR. This is Ed, who would be your line manager.’ She gestured to a morose but otherwise perfectly normal-looking man, who more importantly was not young and perky, but rather looked in his late forties, which gave me hope that they might be open to employing someone who was old enough to remember Ozzy Osbourne for something other than his family. ‘And these are Tony and Gail, who’ll be sitting in too, if that’s OK.’
I beamed, and mumbled something that hopefully sounded like a greeting.
‘We keep it very informal here,’ said Gabrielle. ‘We don’t like the traditional panel approach of you facing us across a table, so we’ll all just pull up a seat and have a chat.’ She gestured around at the ‘eclectic’ mix of furniture, which I was sorry to see did include the dreaded beanbags, and various squashy-looking cubes and foam shapes that I presumed we were to perch on. As she waved at the ‘seating’ she noticed the drawing on the wall.
‘Oh, for God’s sake, what is THAT doing there?’ she exploded.
‘It wasn’t me, it was there when I came in!’ I put in quickly.
Gabrielle looked at me slightly oddly. ‘I didn’t think it was you,’ she said. ‘I mean, why would you …? Anyway, never mind. Tony, find out who had this room last and have a word, will you? That’s really not acceptable. Anyway, let’s take a seat and get on.’
Cunningly, I grabbed one of the squashy cubes to perch on rather than a beanbag, which I definitely wouldn’t have been able to manoeuvre out of with dignity as my new pants were a bit tight, and I was worried they might split if I had to heave myself up from a beanbag. It didn’t seem the sort of place where flashing your bits in the interview would secure you the position. Unfortunately, that meant that Ed, who would be my boss, should I get the job, was relegated to a beanbag. He didn’t look impressed and muttered something that sounded distinctly like ‘FFS’ as he gingerly lowered himself down. I fear that was possibly not a good first impression to make.
The rest of the interview was all-rightish, I think. I don’t know. Ed asked various questions about my skills and experience, which I answered perfectly well, but he just sort of grunted after each reply and frowned more, so I don’t know if he had already decided he hated me and couldn’t work with me because I had made him sit on a beanbag.
Gabrielle asked the usual HR questions, which I never know how to answer – do you go for bland and generic and try to appear normal, or do you attempt to be quirky and unique to try to stand out from the other candidates? Also, I am never sure which questions are genuine questions about yourself, and which are trick questions designed to tell if you are a psychopath. Tony and Gail didn’t say much at all, but kept making notes during certain questions, which made me suspect that they were the ones doing the psycho-assessing.
No one asked me what sort of tree I would be if I were a tree. I had already decided on a silver birch, as they are shiny and stand out from the crowd, but also birch is a very multipurpose and useful tree. Maybe it was just as well no one cared what sort of tree I would be.
I have blisters from the new shoes, and also there was an unlucky moment when Ed was asking me a complicated question when I realised I had toast crumbs in my bra and they were chafing my nipple. I didn’t even dare try and wriggle discreetly to dislodge them in case Tony and Gail thought I was twitching in a psychopathic way.
I suppose I will find out in due course how it went. It wasn’t completely awful, like an interview someone I was at university with had, where they accidentally set the interviewer’s desk on fire, but it definitely could have gone better. I still suspect the dick and balls was some sort of psychometric test, and I have almost certainly failed it.
Saturday, 10 September
Tonight was the now-traditional pop to the pub for the first week of term debrief with Hannah and Sam. I hoped they might reassure me that it didn’t sound like the interview had gone that badly, but Simon just shook his head and said, ‘Why on earth did you feel the need to tell them you hadn’t drawn on the walls? What had you done that would make them think you had?’
Katie, alas, was unable to join us and listen to our grumbles about homework and packed sodding lunches. (I can’t work out why I hate packed lunches so much, and find them such an utter chore – they take literally five minutes to make, yet they loom over my mornings like doom-laden black clouds of horror. Maybe it’s the tedious inevitability of having to make them every single term-time morning, or maybe it’s just because my precious moppets refuse to deviate from ham sandwiches for Peter and cheese