Too young to die

Yesterday I had a moment where I very briefly but very seriously considered jumping out of a window.

My office is in the process of hiring new people to join our staff. We have several openings that we're trying to fill and a list of about 15 potential candidates. We are giving everyone a 30 minute preliminary phone interview, and we will invite the people who impress us in for an hour-long personal interview.

Yesterday we conducted 5 of these interviews. It's really true what they say - almost everyone on the interview panel makes up their mind about the interviewee within the first 3 minutes. This oftentimes results in the next 27 minutes being quite painful. Bad interviews aside, allow me to recount a moment of Government ridiculousness:

One of the people applying for the permanent Federal job (lets call her Tami) currently works in our office as an outside technology contractor. Tami sits about 8 cubes away from me (she could hear me right now if I were to shout her name). I thought - "Oh great, at least we get to do ONE of these interviews in person rather than over the phone". Au contraire... In the Government hiring process, everything has to be fair and equal! The same staff members have to sit in on all interviews. The exact same list of questions must be asked to all candidates. And yep, if you're doing phone interviews, ALL candidates must be interviewed by phone.

So at 2 p.m. the 4 other members of the hiring panel and I filed into my staff director's office and called up Tami (who was sitting no more than 40 yards away, seriously) for her phone interview. When the half-hour phone interview was up, I walked out of my staff director's office and at the other end of the office suite, I saw just-interviewed-Tami walking out of her office. This moment of absurdity left me completely flustered. I quickly looked away, saw the window, and for 0.00001 second pondered hurling myself through the glass. I imagined myself falling towards my death screaming "Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!"

Instead, I went to Starbucks. MUCH more on the Federal hiring process coming soon...