Preparation

119

I think I was in bed sleeping late when it happened. After two years of sticking to a daily routine as part of attending College, once it was done I had naturally delved into the pleasure of sleeping late during my otherwise unstructured days. The phone rang, and I had learned from past experience not to answer the moment I awoke but to first shake myself and make sure my voice was clear before I responded by the next or subsequent ring. It was a representative of Rocky Mountain Telecom and they were wondering if I'd be available and interested in a job interview. I WAS.

Date and time set, I was given the instructions of what to do when I arrived at the complex and then the call was done. But I was just beginning to debate what I should wear for the appointment. Given my years of experience not getting jobs through job interviews my mind went to the only time it had worked. In all of my previous occasions, I had dutifully 'dressed-up' for the interviews in shirt and tie, but had found over those same years that doing so only made me look out of place and suspicious, as well as leaving me feeling like a cross-dresser while I engaged in the job interview itself. The one time I had successfully gotten a job from an interview was for a supermarket where I was so uninterested in having a job there, I arrived for the interview in my jeans and tee. Given that I badly wanted a job at Rocky Mountain Telecom, I decided to go with what worked in the past and not with conventional wisdom.

Spending some time in front of the mirror as I picked out which color of my cut-off sleeved sweat shirts I should pick, I settled on the medium blue one but realized I didn't know what to do with my hands. As I had been using a canvas backpack to carry my college books in school, it occurred to me to add that to my ensemble and pop some unnecessary items into it just to give it a little weight and make it look natural. My long hair I would again have in a tail at the nape of my neck and all & all I was going to show up at the job interview looking as if I was doing so between college classes. I thought that would work, even though I had been done with College for a few months by this time.

Remembering that the closest bus stop to RMT had been over a mile away, rather than make that walk and also be at the mercy of late buses and mechanical breakdowns, I told Daina of the news and asked if I could borrow her car. She was thrilled, but immediately panicked when I told her of what I was going to wear for the interview; she felt I should of course be wearing a suit & tie, otherwise in her eyes I'd be throwing this job opportunity away. I assured her I knew what I was doing and she agreed to let me borrow her car for the day.

Dropping her off at the school for her work day, I then got to spend a few antsy hours at my apartment killing time until I was to hop in the car and drive to the RMT complex. As I turned onto the final road to get me there, the road ended at the complex itself and when I pulled closer I discovered that, in the two years since I had last been there, they had finished building four more wings to the complex and were in the processes of laying the foundation for the final wing. I tried not to stare at the behemoth the complex had become and concentrated on pulling around the parking lot and arriving at the 'visitor' parking slots. Parked, I took my last chance to steel my nerves, then got out of the car and walked across the round-about and into the new lobby entrance. Unlike the original entrance of the building which was somewhat cramped, they had made this new entrance large and over spacious with windows all around. I walked to the security desk and signed my name at the visitor log and told them who I was supposed to see. One guard called him on the phone while another gave me my temporary badge.

After a few minutes 'Rich Jones' came down the long flight of steps beyond the security desk and ushered me in. When he saw me a smile spread across his face, I believed from noticing I wasn't dressed like the rest of the interviewees he must have been going through during the day. He then lead me up the first flight of stairs, technically it would have qualified as two flights given the number of steps, and then we were in the cavernous 'spline' area that joined the original IBM building to the right with the many new wings attached to it on the left. In this long walking area was a giant conference room before the two entrances to the new cafeteria on either side of it. Then there was the second flight of stairs, again qualifying as two separate flights in length. We were now to the rear lobby of the building and its associated security desk whereupon there were the doors to one of the old IBM building wings and the multiple, three floored entrance for two of the new wings and the one yet to be completed. We went up a third flight of stairs, though this time not giant sized, and we had reached Rich's floor. If not for my regained health I never would have been able to have made it up all of these stairs in one go without a rest and I wondered if Rich, himself, was using this journey to assess my physical well being if he should hire me.

We entered upon a floor of hundreds of office cubicles and thankfully his was just a row or two in. Being a manager, his cubicle was half again larger than the typical space and he had me settle down as he poked his head over the edge divider and asked an underling in the next cubicle to join us. Along the grand walk Rich had engaged me in a little chit-chat about if I had ever been to the complex before, and the fact that, given the way I was dressed, I had clearly just come from College. To avoid stammering I kept my answers brief so I didn't have to reveal my stutter to him until this interview was about to commence. Fortunately, the long walk through the immense space to this point had so engulfed my mind, I didn't stutter much at all during the interview.

I then discovered this was a job interview for an IBM mainframe based job. Given my over a decade of experience with personal computers and some minicomputers, I didn't have a clue about mainframes. Still, I had taken some mainframe related computer language courses in College so when it came to the technical portion of the interview I thought I'd do fine... Only to discover with my wrong answers that the COBOL programming language had undergone a major revision since I had learned it ten years earlier. Admitting that I had no mainframe experience nor had stayed afresh of programming language changes, Rich asked me what experience I did have? I then noted my time working with the X400 messaging group two years earlier using Digital VAX machines and the 'C' programming language. He asked me the most elementary question about the 'C' program language: ''If you don't define the return value of a function what type of return value do you get?''

I didn't need to ponder this long and answered, ''An Integer.'' He seemed happy with that answer and the interview was soon over and it was left to the underling to escort me all the flights of stairs back to the front entrance of the building. Along the way was when I had the chance to ask him when the COBOL language had changed and shared a little more chit-chat about the job needs they had and how I lacked experience in them. Turning in my temporary badge and signing-out, I left the building feeling like I had blown the interview and decided that I should brush up on the programming languages I had learned in the nineteen eighties to discover how many of them had since changed. Picking up Daina at her job, we went out to eat and I told her how it had gone. She consoled me that I was sure to get another job interview sometime soon.

The following week, I was puttering around my apartment when the phone rang. It was Rich from RMT and he asked for someone whose name I didn't know. I was about to tell him he had the wrong number but, having recognized his voice, I told him who I was instead. After a moment's confusion, he explained that he had been distracted when dialing the number and lost track of who he was calling. But since he had me on the phone, he told me that I had a job and asked if I could start by the end of October. I agreed, and that was that.

I would start out at Rocky Mountain Telecom at twice the annual income I had ever made in my life, about the same level my father had reached after decades of managing the the ski area. In another eight years I'd be making two and a half times that and worked my way up from an entry level position to Senior Software Engineer at times in charge of some of the most critical systems the company had.

Apparently, while I had been barred from the higher tier educational path in High School and all of my friends who had entered it to one day become 'Engineers' only to wash out by College, it was I who reached that professional marker. Go figure.

And with this 'dream job' I knew I would live a long and happy life!^*

Yeah, right.

(^* It's a whole other book...)