All State

Medina, OH

I once interviewed at the wrong company. It was one of my better interviews.

 

There are two ways to talk someone at the wrong company into interviewing you:

a) be so charming they feel they must talk to you further even though they have no idea who you are; or

b) be so uninformed—so incapable of providing any of your details—they cannot be sure if perhaps someone somewhere in this organization did actually schedule an interview with you.

I fell into the latter category.

I like to arrive at interviews with as few details as possible. In fact, I usually only write down the street address and the time of day; that’s it. I don’t write down the name of the company, nor the person interviewing me or even the position I’m being considered for. I go to a job interview armed with only a time and an intersection, the same way one would go to pay off a ransom demand.

Believe it or not, there is a plan behind that strategy. And, yes, my strategy is an overcorrection to a terrible weakness of mine: I am terrible with names but, worse even, is that I still loudly gamble that I might have the right name when greeting people.

If I see a person who’s name I think is Kevin, I will confidently walk up and say, “Kevin! Great to see you again!” and he will usually reply with, “Actually it’s Bill.” Ninety percent of my introductions are countered with the word “Actually,” which is not the mark of a smooth conversationalist: “Actually I’m Allison.”; “Actually I’m married to Joel, not ‘Sven.’”; “Actually we have met, but you were very drunk,” and so on.

I am a high risk/low reward greeter and it has caused problems with countless job interviews because I was making so many errors on names.

Then it hit me: if I never learn the name in the first place, I can not get it wrong!

Thus, I purposefully omitted names from the details of upcoming job interviews. I only wrote addresses down, then walked into whichever building I found at that address. Usually, there was someone waiting for me in the lobby. That person would see me—a young kid in a suit holding a manila folder—entering around the time of our agreed appointment and would yell “Sean? Hey, it’s Jamie! We talked on the phone!” But the “plan” falls apart when you walk into the wrong building.

I had arrived inside a small, shady parking lot with many small offices around it and began to realize my usual procedure was kind of flawed when it came to strip malls.

But I noticed one office in the mall had an “Allstate” sign and I had scheduled an interview with them for a quasi IT/actuarial position; where I would help create risk algorithms for their mainframes. Allstate must be the right business, I thought.

I walked into the Allstate office and lingered for just a bit, hoping someone from would walk through the office doors and greet me, but the person behind the information desk noticed me before any of that could happen:

“Can I help you?” she asked.

“Yes, hi. My name is Sean Flannery,” I replied, “I have an interview at 11 a.m.”

“Oh, really? Hmm, who is it with?”

“I’m not sure. I’m embarrassed to confess I left my day planner at a coffee house.”

This was, of course, a lie. I didn’t have a day planner; plus, I don’t think I had ever even been inside a coffee house at that point in my life.

“Hmm, OK, nobody mentioned a job interview today,” the receptionist said.

“It would be an IT position if that helps.”

“And you don’t remember who you talked to?”

“Well, Luke from Digital Solutions set up the interview.”

“OK. Well, if it’s in IT, it must be with Dave.”

“That sounds right,” I assured her.

She called Dave. As she was dialing, I started to realize that this particular building seemed smaller than I was expecting, given that the job was supposed to be with corporate Allstate. This looked more like some regional office. While the receptionist called Dave, I walked around the lobby, admiring the view of the forest behind the parking lot. Then I heard the inner doors open and Dave came out, apologizing profusely.

He explained that corporate HR had been setting up the interviews for him and there had been a lot of confusion and somehow this particular interview wasn’t on his calendar, but he had a free hour before lunch and he felt we could do it in that time.

“Sure,” I responded, and he took me back to his office where I was given a technical quiz.

The quiz was mostly made up of questions on network administration which surprised me since I was expecting this to be more of a software/math role, but I answered each one solidly and we moved on to more personal questions which were also going well until he asked, “What’s your greatest weakness as an employee?”

“Probably the same thing as my greatest strength,” I answered, “I am not a details man.”

“How is not being a details man a strength in network administration?” he pressed.

“Well, Dave, I look at details a bit like speed bumps. Why do speed bumps exist Dave?”

“To slow people down.”

“Exactly! But who do they slow down Dave? Who do they really affect?”

“People who drive too fast.”

“Exactly! Idiots! Speed bumps, just like details, are for idiots, Dave.”

Dave took a moment. I think he was trying to figure out if he was more troubled by how little that analogy made sense, or how troubling it would be as an ethos if it did make sense. I sat back confidently in my chair and crossed my right foot over my left leg. That’s when I noticed the pair of shoes I was wearing did not match; that is, a different type of shoe on each foot. It also bears mentioning, at this point, I was incredibly hung over.

I like to interview while hungover. I believe you should always interview for a job in the same state you will be working it in. Most candidates will put their best clothes on, and give their most careful, eloquent responses during a job interview; but they probably won’t work that way once they’re hired.

When I interview, I like to give you an honest representation of the kind of employee you’re going to have the Monday after a holiday weekend: bags under the eyes; lots of “Whoa, you need to give me a minute on that question”-type responses.

The interviewer, Dave, squinted at me. I think he had just noticed my mismatched footwear, and asked, “Well, in my experience, details are very important in IT, particularly in networking.”

I burst out in a loud, fake laugh and started my response by calling him by the wrong name, “Bob, I don’t think anyone here is saying details are not important! I’m just saying, if you’re already heading to the right destination via your instincts, aren’t details slowing you down?”

“So, you’re saying,” he said, his tone changing to one of disbelief, “you’re an instinctive network administrator?”

He had now mentioned network administration about five times so I was pretty sure I was interviewing at the wrong place.

I decided to go for broke and be fully honest with him on the off chance he was looking for a jackass, “Phil, I am recklessly instinctive.”

He showed me the door.

After Phil, or Dave or Kendrick or whatever I called the Allstate employee who interviewed me finally showed me the door, I walked out to the parking lot and sat down in my car, noticing that I had parked in front of his office. I saw him looking out the window, so I gave a wave—no hard feelings on my end I suppose—before I pulled out, turned and drove off.

When I got home, I walked around the car and saw my passenger side for the first time. The entire side was covered in dry car wax; it looked like I drove through a giant, uncooked cake. I had washed the car the previous day and I must have become distracted and only taken the wax off one side of the vehicle.

I started laughing as loud as an alarm. I realized that it was the side of the car that would have been facing Dave as I drove off. His last visual of me, as he still processes the odd frankness of me saying “I am not a details man,” would be seeing me oblivious to the fact that one whole side of my car was slathered in dried car wax.

My dad, who had been working in the yard, noticed me laughing. He came over, and quickly spotted something out of place.

“Are you wearing two separate pairs of shoes?” he asked me.

“I am, Dad.”

“Where are you coming from?”

“A job interview.”

“Do you think you got it?”

“Dad, even if I did, I don’t think I could find the place again.”