A Bird's Eye Interview

I'm good at job interviews. I don't get nervous, even though I probably should. I am inexplicably talented at saying the right thing to whomever needs to hear it and I never walk into an interview thinking I am anything other than fully qualified and ready to start today.

This isn't a story about how bad I am at job interviews, but about how impossible it is for me to cleanly arrive (literally) at those job interviews.

I'm a ragamuffin through and through. No matter how expensive the suit is that I'm wearing, no matter what products I put in my hair or how long I spend shining my shoes, I'm always under the impression that my immaturity is seeping through my pores and the fibers of my clothes.

Turns out, that seeping sensation isn't caused by my immaturity, but by puss, blood and sometimes food.

Stay with me. Let me explain.

I don't believe in curses, but if I did I'd believe that I was doomed to involuntarily signaling to the outside world that I am not a classy human being. I always try to plan accordingly and prevent creating awkward situations for myself, but I can't.

• Just recently, I went to a wedding, shaved the hair growing on the back of my neck, nicked myself and bled all over he inside of my collar. It didn't ruin the nuptials, but several people asked if I was okay.
  
• I went to church with my girlfriend's family a few weeks back. I prepared myself with the most appropriate church clothes I owned. I even Googled proper church etiquette. I was gonna shine at that Sunday's Mass. I didn't plan on going on a bike ride the afternoon before, having a horrific fall and spending the next five days bleeding and pussing out of the entire left side of my body. Band-Aids, tourniquets and gauze did nothing except slide around my pussing joint wound causing my shirts to become drenched in my body's healing waste. At church, my shirt looked like I had a misplaced sweaty armpit stain.
  
• Whenever I get fast food at drive-thrus (especially if it's Taco Bell), I have to order a third more food than I'm hungry for, because some of it is going to fall in my lap. I can't help it, I can't stop it. Just like painting a ceiling: some of it's gonna get on me.

When my morning alarm rang yesterday at noon, believe me when I say my incident's of messiness were among the first thing I thought about. I had no open wounds, I shaved my face with careful precision and I skipped eating before my interview. I was going to beat this curse like the Red Sox beat the Bambino's curse and the Cubs beat the... oh wait, no. No, just the Red Sox.

I was so wrapped up in thinking about all the things that could go wrong, I left myself no room for creatively imagining all the things that have yet to go wrong, but could.

As I was putting the finishing touches on carefully shaving my face, I forgot that my cell phone was lying a few feet away from me on the top of my bathroom's toilet tank. Apparently, I had my ringer set to "stun" because when it suddenly rang, it scared the crap out of me. I was physically startled so bad that I jumped and sliced off a layer of skin from my ear. Blood.

I had to answer the phone, but when I hung up, a streak of crimson trailed from near my eardrum down to my jawbone. I looked like I had used sonar cannon headphones.

Is this what fans look like when they leave a Van Halen concert?

I put a small circular bandage on the unstoppable bleeding cut with the assumption that I'd take it off shortly before my interview, which was about two hours from the point in which I started bleeding. I looked like someone had ripped an earring from my ear. I looked like Jack Nicholson at the end of "Chinatown." But I had taken care of my ear and I had to face what I've come to identify as the most difficult part of the interview process: getting to it.

I feel like any interview I've gone on has been on the windiest day of the week. Some like the wind-blown hair look, I look crazed. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to identify the direction in which the wind is blowing and walk down the street so that that wind does not affect your hair? I'm walking backwards, or tilting my head 90 degrees to the left.

I looked brain damaged and it ended up not even doing any good. I still showed up to my interview (an hour early) with hair as messy as if I had driven a rocket ship with its top down.

The building to which I was supposed to go had a security buzzer at the front door, so if I went in, the company would know I was there and I wouldn't be able to remove my bloody bandage before greeting them. I walked two blocks away to a burger joint intent on using their bathroom to clean my bandages (and all the sweat I had accumulated underneath my gray suit on this 85 degree day). I should have prioritized when I got to burger joint because I ordered food before checking to see if there actually was a bathroom for which to use.

There wasn't.

I paid for my food and sat in a tucked away corner of the restaurant. There wasn't a visible trash can where I was sitting, so when I pulled off my ear bandage, I carefully folded the sticky side onto the bandage side to cover up the dried blood and slipped it into my pocket. Maybe that's gross, but I used bandages are the most awful thing I can think of and I couldn't fathom leaving it where someone else might find it.

Several french fries later, I felt something slightly cool running down my jaw.

Blood. Again.

I'm bleeding just as hard as I was two hours ago. So this is the situation with which I'm faced: do I want to blot my bleeding ear throughout my job interview and explain that my phone scared me and caused me injury of Van Gogh-ian proportions, or I can dig into my pocket, fish out the my folded up bandage and re-apply it to my ear.

I can't believe I went back into my pocket. It was the low point of my day.

I figured at least by re-applying the bandage I might not have to explain myself to my potential bosses and I certainly wouldn't look as if I had blown an eardrum on the walk over.

By this point, the small circular bandage was caked in blood and absent of much of its original stickiness, which caused the bandage to somewhat pop off the contours of my earlobe. There was no convenience store nearby that I could find, otherwise I certainly would have purchased additional bandages. I was also running out of time. With only 20 minutes left, I had to patch something together and get back to the building I was supposed to have my interview. I used the reflection in my sunglasses to position the gauze portion of the bandage over the bleeding nick, which was as pointless as choosing which of the 200 cracks in a leaking dam to stick one's finger in. The bandage had changed from tan to rusted red. It looked like I was putting on a single ruby earring.

Again, this story isn't about whether or not I had a good interview. I'm good in interviews and I was good in this one. I pretended my ear is always bleeding and my potential employer pretended most people he talks to have bloody bandages loosely stuck to their ears. It worked out well and I even landed an immediate second interview with the COO of the organization.

This story is of what I find myself going through any time I try to appear anything more than arrestedly developed.

If nothing else, it was fun to watch my potential employer's demeanor change when he discussed health benefits. I can't swear to it, but while he was discussing the benefits package, he had to have wondered why my ear was bandaged. I should have asked, "what about ear, nose and throat doctors? Especially the ear doctor, what kind of ear coverage is there and exactly how soon can I take advantage of the insurance? 'Cause I'm gonna need to see someone fairly soon."

All this might have been worth it if I had the balls to ask him that.

But I didn't.

So it wasn't.