That elevator ride fell as if it was going
to last forever. I don’t really know if it stopped in every single floor but it
really did seem to. My hands and my legs kept shaking and I was failing
miserably in trying to control them. I was very nervous. I also kept cleaning
the sweat off my hand with my pants, which wasn’t the best idea to have when
going to an interview. At one point, I felt I was going to faint. The people
there with me seemed completely oblivious to my personal struggle.
When I finally got to my floor, after every
other was gone, my legs seemed to be unwilling to help me anymore. Only a few
step away from the elevator, I felt I couldn’t walk anymore My feet actually
hurt and trying to move my body was very challenging. I have no idea how, but
somehow I got myself to the reception, which was very close by. A woman heard
my name and told me to wait in a seating area. Around me, other people were
also waiting, all younger than me.
I felt as if I wanted to run away from that
place. When I checked every single face in that room, I realized I was way over
my head. I had come thee looking for a job but these people were clearly much
better for it than me. I even bet that some of them had much more experience
than I and had even already worked somewhere else before. Their resume was
quite possibly a long list of names, which they could put in there as a
reference, from a clothing store to a big multinational company.
I had my resume in folder I had brought and I
instinctively wanted to check if I had put everything that was worth written on
it but then remembered there wasn’t that much to tell, so I refrained from
looking at it and instead tried to force my eyes to focus on the window that
was very close by. It wasn’t easy to look out through it but it was much better
to stare and try to imagine and quieter world than attempting to breathe
normally with the typical methods that had never had a any real results.
Looking through the window was my way to escape.
I needed to do it if I wanted to keep
breathing. The only way to make myself relax was to imagine a wide array of
situations that could happen inside that waiting room or outside of it. It
didn’t really matter. The point was that t all had to be happening around me,
so the false memory, the invention, was all about making me feel like someone I
wasn’t, at least for some time until I realized I was being childish and I
needed to breathe a little and just move on. The thing was that it wasn’t
always as easy as it sounds.
Suddenly, the woman called my name. She told
me to go through a door and then walk down an aisle to another door marked
“Human resources”. My interview would be taking place in that office. Before
leaving the waiting room, I had a brief eye contact with another guy waiting
there and I have to say the only thing I could see n his eyes was fear. He
seemed really terrified somehow and I kept thinking about him even after the
interview was over, many hours later.
I walked slowly towards the office and when I
finally got there, no one was waiting for me. The place was empty so I had to
check if I was in the right place. I was. The best thing to do was to wait
outside, by the door. The person that was going to do the interview had to be
very close by, so there was nothing to worry. However, I was shaking so much
that my teeth started to make a very annoying noise that I had to try really
hard to suppress. This was definitely not my element.
The person finally got there and it was a
woman. I was a little bit disappointed because I thought a man was going to ask
me the questions. I’m not saying one is better than the other in the workplace
but it is a fact that men are typically less harsh in interviews, unless you
get a guy that had more in common with a buffalo than with an actual human
male. But whatever, anything can happen so I just sat down, as she did on the
other side of the table. The room seemed to have gone smaller.
There was also a very particular scent but I
couldn’t really point at what it was. She was really trying to be very nice and
that was good because I felt my hands shaking much less than before. However,
she started talking about work and about many things I had no idea about. She
kept talking and talking and I just nodded at some of her comments and then answer
some questions she threw from time to time. It was kind of hard to follow what
she was saying but I did my best to do so.
At one point, she stopped short and offered me
a beverage. My bladder was full because of how nervous I was so it wasn’t an
option to start drinking water or whatever she offered. The other reason I
refused was because my throat felt closed to anything trying to go in. Every
time I spoke, I had to clear my throat because it felt as if I was waking
around the Sahara desert. She clearly noticed something about me but didn’t
comment on it and I was very grateful she decided not to ask. My feet kept
moving and my hands kept sweating profusely.
She then asked me for my resume and I handed
it to her. She looked through it for a couple of seconds and then put it on a
huge pile I had neglected to see. At least some fifty other resumes had to be
there, waiting for something that would probably never happen. She talked to me
then and I feel like she said some important things but I wasn’t listening at
all. The sight of that pile made me realized that I was fooling myself, that
everyone was fooling themselves with this charade.
I had no idea why I did it. I had never done
anything remotely similar. I would normally just wait until the person was
finished to say something, if I did because most of the time I was just a
zombie that shook hands and maybe cracked a smile in order not to look like a
complete mental patient. My mouth would normally be too dry to say a word and
my body too shaky to keep making that moment go longer. So that was one of the
few times I really surprised myself.
My voice cut her off; making her stop her
speech about something I have no idea. I noticed too that my body had made me
stand up, which I even didn’t realize. Slowly, I grabbed my resume from the top
of the pile and told the woman I was very grateful for the opportunity but that
I knew that I had no real chance of getting such a job. I was highly
overqualified in the academics side of it but grossly under qualified as
experience is concerned. So my chances were pretty slim.
I told her I knew of those kids outside would
be getting it because it was just easier to make them do whatever the company
needed and they could even pay them less because they were just beginning, even
if they had worked for ten years already. Age was one of those things that
companies used at will in order to grant or deny benefits around the workers. I
knew that’s how it worked, even if I had never been paid to do anything in any
company, anywhere to be perfectly honest.
The woman had her mouth open and I thought of
shaking her hand but I was shaking so much already and my hand was so sweaty
that I refrained myself from doing it. I excused myself and left the room,
almost running back to the elevator, which filled up once again and seemed to
take years to get to the ground floor. My resume escaped my hands, falling to
the floor. I felt a bit dizzy, probably hungry already. As soon as the elevator
got to its destination, I ran outside, to the sun and the air and the freedom
of a world that didn’t needed me to keep moving.
