An Interview I Remembered Forward

I nearly cancelled the interview; I was under-qualified on paper and knew it. What happened instead is the reason I hold my current job.

The deja vu began in the waiting area and never lifted. Not flickering — continuous, like watching a film I had seen once, long ago, drunk: each scene unfamiliar until it started, then instantly known. The receptionist offering water and apologising for the warm room: known as she said it. The panel of two, not three, because 'our colleague is stuck on a train': I mouthed 'train' along with the apology, behind my folder.

The questions unspooled the same way. Each one, as the interviewer drew breath, arrived in my head a half-second early — not as text, but as the memory of having been asked. And with each came the memory of my own answer, and — this was the strange gift of it — the memory of where each answer had been weak. I had, in whatever previous iteration my head was replaying, rambled disastrously on the third question. This time I felt the ramble coming like a pothole and steered around it.

The final question I remembered whole minutes in advance, while the panel was still on competencies: 'Tell us about your worst professional mistake and what it cost.' A brutal question for someone with my patchy CV. But I had — subjectively — heard it before, botched it before, and spent the intervening non-existent years wincing about it. The answer I gave was honest, specific, and calm, and it was calm because it was, in some impossible sense, my second attempt at it.

They told the agency my final answer swung it.

I do not know how to file this experience. Practice implies a first time that never happened. All I know is that some part of me had already failed that interview once, and walked in that morning determined not to do it again.