In to view

Spent the day interviewing people. Quite odd to have the power of someone having a job in your hands. To prepare me for this, and the previous three times I have done it, I have received no training and no guidance from anyone on the protocols and methodology of interviewing people. I have asked for said guidance, it’s not something I have shirked.

I have however had to spend several hours of my life doing courses where I have to ‘learn’ things like ‘Don’t pour petrol on a computer if it’s on fire’; ‘Get out of the office if a robot from the future is killing people with the fire extinguisher’, or, ‘how to use Microsoft Office’.

Fortunately for everyone concerned I am pretty fucking good at doing things. Turns out this also applies to interviewing people. To make the people I interviewed be more relaxed I asked questions related to the skills of the job they were applying for. I would prefer to ask questions like:

• Have you got an example of a time where you watched the same film more than three times in a week?
• What would hurt more – if I threw a dog at a heavyweight boxer or if a horse was thrown at a giant?
• How many flavours of soup can you name in a minute?
• Can you think of a number?
• Can you talk me through a time you emotionally blackmailed someone to ensure you got something good out of a situation?

Social Status

I occasionally make a social network statement of which I am proud: the old hypothesis about infinite monkeys with infinite time producing the complete works of Shakespeare is surely proved by Twitter and Facebook occasionally offering something interesting. I would like to think I am one of them monkeys occasionally making sense due to the probability of random words being thrown at the internet shaping themselves into a coherent word-structure.

I thought this was a lovely observation. Really lovely. I’m not saying it’s like Michaelangelo’s David or anything. Just like if I was just some random sculptor who made basically the same thing every day, that wasn’t that good, but then one day made something that was basically the same as the things he normally sculpted but he felt it was really what he was trying to make, whereas the other ones were all close  – but didn’t make him feel happy. Do you understand how I feel about this tweet now?

Someone asking “can you still hear me?” into a phone is generally intoned with a perfect balance of optimism and pessimism.

— Classic Phil (@house78) May 23, 2013