Maybe everyone is going to the rock n roll hall of fame.
Back in 1995 or 1996, I replied to a display ad in the classifieds section of my local Sunday newspaper from a company that claimed to have contracted out about 80% of the exhibit display electronics for the then-under-construction Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. They were looking for someone to oversee their involvement in the project. That struck me as puzzling because this was the largest A/V contractor in my market, Washington, DC, and it was known to have the largest and most prestigious clients here.
The guy who called me for the interview sounded like he wanted to hire me on the spot, which surprised me since, even though I'm a can-do guy, that quality cannot be discerned from my resume, which was "thin", since I have basically worked for myself for about 90% of my working life.
When I came in for my interview, the same guy looked at my resume and basically asked, "What in hell are you doing, applying for this job?". At first, I thought this was being conducted as a stress test interview, where the interviewer is using the interview to see how the interviewee handles confrontations. I handle them quite well, thank you, but it did me no good. This "interview" lasted less than five minutes. There is a saying that when it doesn't take much for someone to fall in love with you, it won't take much for them to fall out of love with you, either. Within minutes, this interviewer cut me off in mid sentence and said I clearly wasn't the person for that job, but that they were going to have another opening for another job in engineering and installation and he would have someone else interview me for that job instead, so he called in someone to interview me for a job that didn't exist. About three minutes into that interview, it was my turn to interrupt someone and I said, "Look. I don't know what in hell is going on here, but that other guy decided that, for whatever reason, he wasn't going to consider me for the job he had called me in to interview for, and now you're stuck trying to cover up for his screw-up. I can see that there is no job for me here and so there is no point in wasting my time or yours." He half-nodded, and I left.
A year or two later, I read an article in a trade journal that was apparently written by the project supervisor that had been hired instead of me, bragging about her company's involvement in the project. I was pleased to observe that the writer of the article was a moron.
of the week"
