Time flies when one’s having fun, but actually time flies whether one’s having fun or not. Suddenly, Thanksgiving is around the corner again. Somehow I feel like I just had the previous Thanksgiving a month or two ago. In a short span of one or two months, a whole year has passed by, leaving me thinking that I am not one bit wiser but very much one year older.
It’s all because I have been doing this and that, worrying here and there, busying catering to one deadline after another like a chicken with its head cut off. Actually I did witness a duck, not a chicken, walking with its head cut off when I was living with my grandma one summer. I was about eight and I was not traumatized at all. There were two adult women screaming around me, obviously frightened but I was not.
I am almost done and now I can take it easy for a while. Well… not really. I still have to help somebody with a tough interview. I remember years ago someone told me about Microsoft’s job interviews, in which interviewees had to solve tricky puzzles to show their smartness. Intrigued, I went out and bought a puzzle book from Barnes & Noble. I came back, did three puzzles and set it aside. I never saw the book again in my life. I wonder where it went. If only everything one doesn’t like can disappear from one’s life…
And the tough interview is going to combine this Microsoft style, some serious quantitative questions, with a demand for an original proposal on an impactful issue. I can help with the language and the basic interview techniques, but other than that, I have no idea how to help. However, years of being in a position to help people and give advice, I’ve formed a habit of putting up an appearance of knowing what I am doing while in reality I have no idea what I am doing.
This word “original” provokes a lot of anxiety. You know whenever I write, I feel unoriginal since whatever I write, I feel like somebody before me, dead or alive, has already thought about it or even written about it. It is so hard to keep my head above the big pool of cliche.
And I wonder if you have heard about the interview scam. I heard about it. It is a sort of fake interviews conducted by companies who are looking for original ideas. So supposedly the company is having a tough time with a project and wants to have some original ideas, which they don’t have. So they put out a fake job posting, asking people to send in resume and starting to interview them. One of the interview questions will be the problem the company is having and the interviewees are compelled to give the best answer they can produce for this question.
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Image by Deborah Hudson from Pixabay
Haoyan Do 