Part III: The Most Disastrous Job Interviews People Ever Had

The worst job interview I ever had occurred shortly after I received a concussion after getting hit by a car. Unluckily, I had applied to the job the day before being run down like a cane-toad on my road bike and received a call shortly afterward. Somehow, I made it through a short first-round introduction and into the second-round panel-based interview. To complicate matters further, my partner and I had an extensive holiday planned at that time, which involved me driving a Juicy campervan some 1,500 miles across the South Island of New Zealand. Quick-tip for concussed travelers: Don't. If you're determined, make sure you aren't committed to long days of driving, intense hiking, or overnight cruises. Else you will be in for the most motion-sickening, brain-melting experience of your life. Still, I wouldn't trade it for anything.So, this interview was to take place while we were traveling. We arranged to stop at a holiday park (campground-type places in New Zealand) on the day of the interview to ensure we had an internet connection.Honestly, I don't remember much of the interview or what was asked. What I do remember is having a terrible connection from the less-than-modern campground wifi that guaranteed a lot of awkward pauses and a robotic flow of conversation. Not ideal when the expressed purpose is to make a likable impression. I also remember being flat-out unable to answer multiple questions that were asked of me, despite having a vast amount of experience in those areas and having explicitly prepared for those questions. Now, I'm not great at speaking directly to a subject at hand at the best of times; my ADD-addled brain loves a good tangent from a tangent, from a tangent -until it has created a Fibonacci spiral of conversational topics. But I find it hard to look back and ascertain whether or not I was making any sense or saying much of anything at all for that entire conversation. At least the interviewers got to experience the breathtaking views of Lake Wanaka while I either incoherently rambled or sat in suffocating silence, even if those views were so incredibly pixilated from the aforementioned poor connection that they could hardly see anything at all.I didn't get the job, but at least the experience gave me a story to share on this post. That's what I'll tell myself anyways.See the other parts of this three-part series here.Part IPart II