I Rehearsed the Interview in My Sleep

Job interviews are performances, and for the role I actually wanted I got a week of unasked-for rehearsals.

Every night, the same dream staging: a grey meeting room, whiteboard on the left wall with a half-erased spiral doodle in the corner, three interviewers. A silver-haired woman in the centre who tapped her pen twice before every question; a younger man to her right whose chair squeaked; a third person on the left I could never focus on, a smudge in a suit jacket. And every night, among ordinary questions my sleeping brain could plausibly invent, the woman tapped her pen twice and asked: 'If you were a bridge, what load would you refuse to carry?'

It is a ridiculous question. That is why I remembered it. By the fourth night I was answering it in the shower, refining, out of pure irritation.

The real interview was in a grey room. Whiteboard, left wall — and I sat down and there in its corner was a half-erased spiral, and something in my chest went very calm and very loud at once. Three interviewers came in. Silver-haired woman, centre. The man on her right sat, and his chair squeaked, and he winced the exact wince from my dream. The third interviewer arrived late and sat to the left; she was perfectly distinct in person, for whatever that detail is worth.

Forty minutes of normal questions. Then the pen: tap, tap. 'Odd one now,' the woman said, smiling. 'If you were a bridge, what load would you refuse to carry?'

I gave the shower-polished answer. The squeaky-chair man wrote something and underlined it.

I got the role. Months later, comfortable enough, I asked her where that question came from. She looked genuinely puzzled and said she had never used it before our panel — it had come to her, she said, 'that morning, out of nowhere.' I decided not to tell her where it had spent the previous week.