two buses and an interview

2 October 2015

In the end I decided not to drive to the interview. For one I thought I might get lost or stuck in traffic and I didn’t want to end up late or panicked. Besides, it didn’t seem prudent to spend my savings on extortionate parking charges when there might not be a job at the end of it.  So I took the bus, after all I still have my free bus pass for the moment. It ended up being an interesting journey.

This was never going to be the kind of job I walked to. In fact the journey meant catching two buses, one to town and another onwards to the office. Luckily both are frequent services and it wasn’t long before I was in town. This was when things got slightly strange. There was a man sitting at the bus stop I needed, a large, elderly man wearing a massive pair of headphones and sunglasses. He was shouting loudly in a broad Scottish accent, a long stream of abuse and swear words. Feeling quite nervous I stepped into the road to avoid him and another man behind me followed suit.
“I’m not sure what his problem is,” the man said to me, “but I’m guessing it comes out of a bottle of one kind or another, either the booze or the pills I’d say.”
“He certainly has issues by the sound of it,” I agreed. “I’m going to the next bus stop, I hope he’s not catching my bus.”
“I shouldn’t think the driver would let him on if he’s going on like that,” the man said. I hoped he was right.

As it turned out he wasn’t. When I got on the bus the man was on there, sitting by the door still talking all the while but a little quieter and with less swearing. It seemed as if every thought that went through his head came out his mouth and I wondered if he had Tourette’s? He seemed to be holding some kind of conversation with himself, like talking to himself man in the Crescent but louder and more fierce. There was a long rant about buses and coaches, then the road system, followed by the government, immigration, cyclists, everything he saw outside the bus window. Finally he got off but as he left the bus the floodgates seemed to open, as if he’d been holding himself in check. All the tics, swearing, even flailing his arms and squawking like a chicken erupted as he walked down the street and I could see people giving him a wide berth. Probably I should have felt sorry for him but it was actually quite frightening.

When I got there the office was nicer than I thought and the people very welcoming. It was a group interview, five of us selected out of the hundreds who’d applied according to the office manager. That much at least gave me a boost. The job sounded just the kind of thing I was after, the chance to organise things and work the way I wanted, a small happy team and a worthwhile cause. There was an exercise designed to see how we worked, who took the lead, what our thought processes were. It was hard to tell if I’d done well or not. They said they’d call back two of us for a second interview on Monday.

Of course, on the way home on the two buses I thought about what I’d said and done and realised I could have done and said things better. It seems that’s always the way with interviews. It took an hour to get there and an hour to get home. I wondered how I’d feel if I had to make that journey every day. Still that seemed to be jumping the gun and, if it came to it, I’d work my way round it somehow.

Not long after I got home my phone rang. It was the office manger. Instinctively, I crossed my fingers.
“Thank you for taking the time to come today,” she said. “We were very impressed with you and would like you to come for a second, formal interview. Would you be able to come on Monday?”
Of course I said yes.