So 2 weeks ago I was offered a job with the title of (wait for it)…”web master”, which I accepted.
However they gave me the wrong start date, telling me that i’d be starting on the 1st of October, which is a Sunday.
A few days later I got a call regarding a web design job that I had applied for way back in February asking if I was available to work. I told the guy that I was actually about to start a job but that it was only 3 days per week. He said he could offer work to cover the other 2 days.
The job is based in a pretty unique location, on a farm in the countryside on the opposite end of Glasgow to me, so rather than have me travel all the way there we agree to meet at a hotel in town and so on Thursday I headed off to meet the guy for a chat.
While waiting at the train station I received a phonecall from the same woman who offered me the other job asking me if she had told me that i’d been offered the job, to which I told her that of course she had, then she told me that she was really really sorry but she had made a mistake and that I didn’t have the job afterall, I was actually the reserve candidate, I asked how this had happened and she said because our names looked alike!
So I head off to meet the other guy. When I get there I tell him about what had happened. The interview does not go well, i’m not really in the mood for it, I keep umming and erring and screwing up my replies. He asks me why my CV is so bare. I graduated 3 years ago yet have little listed on my CV since then, I tell him that I’ve just been unlucky with jobs. Because employers look for experience but no one is willing to give me experience.
The copy of my CV that he has is outdated, from before I started 6 months of work-based training. He asks me what I’ve been doing since then, I tell him briefly about the training. It was for an Autism related project, I wasn’t directly involved with the field of Autism but I was responsible for the web/IT work within the project.
He tells me that when they take on work for a client they like to know a bit about what they do, so he asks me “What exactly is autism?”
Argh, I hate questions like this…how to explain it? It’s very complicated I tell him…
i waffle and meander, my brain isn’t thinking straight, I can’t get my words out so under pressure I basically give him a crap bullshit answer just so we can move on to the next question.
“I see” he tells me, “is that what autism is? I didn’t realise”.
A few more questions go by and then the interview ends and i’m glad its over as I can’t see any job coming from this but he tells me that he hasn’t made any decisions yet and that he’ll choose who to take on in about a weeks time.
The very next day I receive an apology letter for the web master job…and they even manage to get the job title wrong!
I go into my old work (where I did the training) later that day and tell them about what had happened. They all feel sorry for me and say they’ll help write me a letter of complaint if that’l make me feel better.
One of my ex-collegues then asks me if I’ve applied for anymore jobs, I tell her about the interview from the day before and mention that the job is based on a farm of all places.
She says “Oh my god, his name wasn’t Billy Brown (name changed) was it?”
I tell her that yes that was indeed his name.
She then tells me, I know his wife. His son has Autism.
The funny thing was as soon as she mentioned his wife’s name, I recognised it too. Part of my training involved working with a large database of names…i double-checked his wife’s name in the DB and sure enough her address was the same as the web design job.
And so once again, what might have been, what could’ve been…