Will I Get the Job (my job, that is)?

I had my interview today and now await the results. I actually treated this quite seriously since I have no reason to believe I will necessarily get this job – the one that I have been doing for the past 12 years. A lot of other people obviously want the job. According to my boss, she has to interview 16 people for the first round.

It seemed so strange to prepare myself to sit on the other side of the desk and be the one answering the questions instead of asking them. I dressed up today, just like the new college grads that I often interview do. I wore my best pants suit, my pink silk blouse, real heels, jewelry, make-up, and more-carefully-than-usual blew dry my hair.

At precisely 9 AM, I showed up at my boss’s door for my appointed time. She actually had a multi-page Xeroxed form that she filled out as we talked. The only levity was skipping the “introduction to the ACS”, since I had built the survey from the ground up, starting out in the original staff of 10 in 1994. Let’s see – at that point my boss was exactly 22 years old!

The interview lasted an entire hour. It included some classic questions and a few others like: Describe your management style. I never thought of myself as having a management style! Greatest strength – delivering on-time, within budget, every time I said. Greatest weakness – being stubborn sometimes. The concluding question was “Why do you think you are the best candidate for the job?” Actually hard to answer without knowing the other 15 people who have to be interviewed. But I said, “Because I have been doing it for the past 12 years and we have never missed a production deadline or had an embarrassing error.” Fortunately she didn’t ask me what I intended to be doing in 5 years, in 10 years.

It was impossible to know her real reaction to anything I said. She smiled and looked pleasant, but there was not a hint of “You’ve got it, but I just need to talk to all the other candidates before announcing.” Instead, she said that she intended to complete round #1 by March 6. Then the two leading candidates would be interviewed by her boss – a Puerto Rican woman hired by my husband probably close to 30 years ago.

So I’ll just continue to solve tomorrow’s problems while I await the outcome of this hiring process. If I don’t get it, I will probably stay for a while just because I like what I am doing. If I do, I will know when it is time to leave. That is one thing I am getting to be good at these days.

To everything there is a season,
a time for every purpose under the sun.
A time to be born and a time to die;
a time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
a time to kill and a time to heal ...
a time to weep and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn and a time to dance ...
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing;
a time to lose and a time to seek;
a time to rend and a time to sew;
a time to keep silent and a time to speak;
a time to love and a time to hate;
a time for war and a time for peace.

Ecclesiastes 3:1-8