Remember, you are an
engineer, and engineers know ‘stuff’ that these filthy muggles don’t. You sit
back and think about all this ‘stuff’. You are probably thinking, assuming that
you belong of the mighty mechanical engineering class, that you know the
maximum stress points on the drive shaft of that Mercedes that your, illiterate
but filthy rich neighbor, drives. Or, considering that electrical engineering
is your sorcery, you may ponder over your knowledge of the current rating of
your friend’s new PlayStation. You may smile to yourself once you think of the
robot you made single handedly as a mechatronics engineer or may pat yourself,
with a tear in your eye, seeing your final year programming project’s AI code
running perfectly. But then you remember your present posture. You look down
and see yourself in your pajamas, sitting idly, reading this and think over a
few things. One of those few things might be the fact that you are (still)
unemployed.
You sluggishly open
Google Chrome to check your email. There’s one from your college’s alumni
group, another from Coursera telling you about the latest courses that might
interest you, a couple of emails from twitter and some from linkedIn. You
refresh the page in a hope that that ‘one’ email from the HR department of that
company didn’t get downloaded or something. As expected, nothing exciting comes
up, so you check the spam folder instead, and to your utter surprise, there it
is! The magical text full of invitation to an interview. Finally! You punch the
air, let out a whooping sound and say Alhamdulillah.
But it’s your first
interview, you are naïve and do not know what the interviewer has cooked for
you. So you prepare hard. You read their website thoroughly, rehearse your
answers to pet questions, list down your strengths and weaknesses and cram
them. Now the day has come. You shave, shine your shoes, take a thorough bath
(like the one you take for Jummah), get all dressed up, use some hair cream,
comb your hair well and may also apply some perfume, ready to ace that
interview.
As your name is called,
you stand up and head towards the door, that
door. The door that parts you from your first job. You step in and are
taken aback to find not one, not two, not three and absolutely not four, but
five fully grown men sitting across a huge table, on the opposite side of
which, is placed for you a small chair. You hesitate and for an instant even
think about running away from them as fast as your feet may permit you. But
instead you get hold of your nerves, as a result of which your legs start
shaking. To save yourself from the humiliation you hastily move forward and
without thinking, hold your hand to shake the interviewer’s hand sitting
nearest to where you are standing. In no time you realize your mistake but with
no other option in your mind you walk to the back of their seats to shake hands
with the remaining four. Well what do you know; the last man in line to shake your hand has sneezed right in his hand. Cursing yourself, you give him a disgusted smile, grab his hand and shake it with teeth clenched. All this happens in about a half minute but for you, thanks to Einstein,
time has slowed down and it takes a lifetime to reach and sit on the chair
designated to you.
But you tell yourself
that it is not the end. So you sit straight with legs crossed and wipe the
little beads of sweat on your forehead, loading the answer you prepared for the
most common initial question asked in interviews: Please tell us something
about yourself. But life jumps in with its unfairness and the interviewer on
the extreme right shots at you with: Why did you choose engineering? You open
your mouth but words do not come out. Instead you make a noise that makes the
interviewers frown and write something down. Your mouth goes dry. You clear
your throat to search for your lost voice, in answer to which the interviewer
sitting right in front of you pushes a glass of water towards you. You take a
sip and set the glass down, all the while desperately thinking of the reason
you prepared. A ray of hope emerges from the depths of your brain as the reason
finally clicks. You clear your throat again and blurt out the ways and means
science fascinated you in high school. Either this is not the answer the
interviewer is looking for or the interviewer sitting right next to him has had
beans for lunch, but the face he makes and the way he scribbles on that piece
of paper makes your stomach lurch and makes you feel sick. The interviewer who
resides in the seat right next to the amputee clears his throat. You,
anticipating a question from his side, face him instead but at the same instant
the interviewer on your extreme left asks you something that you don’t quite
get. So you face him with an empty expression for about five seconds and then
request him to come again. As in turns out the mysterious question is a technical
one: Why is a diesel engine bigger in size than a petrol engine? For a glad
moment you think you know the answer but as your river of knowledge starts
flowing across the table in the form of words, you realize what an idiot you
are. As by now your mind has gone numb, your answer makes the interviewer twist
his face and inquire: Are you really an engineer?
You hope, you pray, you
literally beg for the interview to end but it doesn’t. Questions after
questions keep pouring in from all direction. You answer some, pass others with
a ‘sorry’ and maintain silence on the rest, all the while glancing now and
then, on the interviewer whose sole purpose of life seems to be to stare at you
with an unreadable expression, without uttering even a single word.
When you finally hear the
words ‘Thank you’, you rise from your seat without making eye contact with any
of the men in the room and head towards the door with doomed footsteps.
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