Today is an odd anniversary of sorts as it marks twelve years since my first ever “proper” job interview. I was a fresh faced seventeen year old and my parents, acting in my own best interests it has to be noted, made me apply for a position as a apprentice electrician with East Ayrshire Council which had been advertised in the Kilmarnock Standard.
It was about three months since I had finished sixth year and left the school, and only a couple of weeks till the Higher Exam results were due to arrive. I had pinned my hopes, and my future, on a conditional offer that I had from the University of Glasgow. With the youthful arrogance of a teenager I was black affronted by the very suggestion that I wouldn’t manage to get the results required to get into university. I naturally assumed that the universe itself would bend to my adolescent will and everything would work out exactly as I had planned. At best I thought my folks were being overly pessimistic about my future, and worst I actively considered them to be trying to insult my abilities and ambitions.
There was no way I was going to be just an electrician.
I filled in the forms under the hawk-like eyes of my Mum who made sure I dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s in my best handwriting. To my folk’s credit they both chipped in with suggestions and advice on what to write in the various boxes on the ten page form as well as what to put in the myriad of smaller additional forms that came along with it. I remember cursing under my breath when my Mum lifted the completed application form and posted it for me before I “conveniently” managed to lose it somewhere.
I guess she knows me better than she lets on...
I kept my fingers crossed that I wouldn’t hear any more about it, but unfortunately for me, my Standard Grade results were more than enough to automatically short list me for an interview. Much to my annoyance the letter duly arrived at the end of July inviting me to come along to the the Council’s depot on Burnside Street in Kilmarnock. I remember that I remained belligerent about the whole affair right till we stopped outside the place. My Dad gave me some simple, sound advice to be polite, be honest and try to be enthusiastic no matter what I felt about the situation.
“It’s good to have options, just in case,” he told me as I got out of the car.
The interview itself was fairly typical of local government. To start with I was left sitting in a room, which looked for all the world like a broom cupboard, with a dozen other prospective apprentices who shuffled nervously and looked at their feet. Nobody said much, and I recognised a few of them as younger brothers of people who were in my year at school. I guess in my snobbish way I looked at them and believed it confirmed everything that I had been thinking. My folks were lumping me in with a the can’t does/won’t does. The sixteen year old school leavers with a four in standard grade woodworking and a certificate saying they turned up for the required number of days in the school year.
I sat in that broom cupboard for nea nearly three hours, sayuing nothing, and avoiding eye contact. Everyone else did the same. Looking back I wonder if that was part of the interview, an attempt to see what our personalities were like and if we mixed well with strangers in new environments. I don’t think the council is that Machiavellian, but the possibility did occur to me afterwards.
Finally after several false starts I was led into a large meeting room with tables on three sides and half a dozen men in women dressed in suits looked down their noses at me. Interviews are intimidating enough when they’re one on one and you’ve got years of experience under you belt. It’s a pale choice of adjective when you’re only seventeen and the closest you’ve ever been to a hard hitting interview was that time you sat too close to the TV when Roger Cook was chasing a used car salesman down the street.
The interview started out as most do with questions about why I wanted to work for the council and what I knew about being an electrician and so on. One of the other interviewers seemed less than enthused by my candidacy and was quite brusque in his questioning. He obviously had taken the view that I wasn’t a suitable candidate as I had been more academically than inclined with no technical studies subjects or any indication. I put up with it for the sake of making a good impression and even managed to properly describe how to wire up a plug to his visible annoyance.
It was about then that the whole process took a strange turn. The lead interviewer pulled out my application form and scanned it for things to ask me about. His eyes settled on my hobbies and interest and he looked up at me and asked what I meant by role-playing games. I explained as best I could to him while trying to avoid sounding like a complete weirdo. I was still suffering from the crippling appearance conciousness that afflicts all teenagers, the creeping fear of being seen as “different” or “geeky”. Someone who like playing pretend with dice and elves was all that. The lead interviewer seemed genuinely interested in my hobby, but many of the others started mentally marking me down on their sheets.
Too weird for the council I guess.
I left and got into the car with my dad and he asked me how it went. I said OK, but that I didn’t think I was what they were looking for, and he said it didn’t matter at least I had tried.
In the end my Higher results came through a couple of days later and I had the grades I needed to get into the University of Glasgow’s Computing Science course. A Dear John letter from East Ayrshire Council followed soon after which thanked me for attending the interview but that I had been unsuccessful this time.
I felt smugly vindicated with my “victory” and would cast it up to my folks on several occasions in the future. I can see now with hindsight of course that my folks were just doing what they believe was in my own best interests. At the time though, and for a long time afterwards if I’m honest, I believed that their urging was motivated by a lack of faith in my ability. For many years I harboured a deep seated grudge for this perceived lack of faith, even when I was the beneficiary of their selfless support and all too real sacrifices I still held onto the idea that they had at one point lacked faith in my ability.
So I suppose that this post is an apology of sorts, and a thank you to them, for their unwavering support over the years, even if at times I lacked the wisdom, experience or even the humility to understand that support.