Snoqualmie

If playing cellphone Tetris on the train on a Monday morning is wrong...

...then baby, I don't want to be right.

I think I can say without any fear of inaccuracy that this is the largest number of interviews I've ever had for a single job. In fact, the interviews-to-jobs ratio today is nine times what it was the last time I was interviewing for a job, which is fairly astounding.

What happened was this: on Friday, I talked to D-blank at the architecture office in question and we scheduled an interview for this morning at 9:00 with the office manager, C-blank (note similar pronunciation of names). D was distracted and forgot to put the interview on the calendar, so she forgot to contact C and tell her to be in the office this morning. I didn't know any of this when I walked in at 9:00 this morning, nor did I know what either of the people in question looked like. So, I had a lovely half-hour chat with D, and didn't realize that it was D with whom I was talking until she gave me her contact information at the very end of the interview. I walked out in a state of confusion and headed home. Two blocks from home, I got a call from my roommate Katie, saying that D had just called and asked if I could come in for another interview this afternoon. I called back, figured out what had happened, realized I had to go back and trade my lovely informal conversation experience for an actual, stressful, sucky interview, and was generally less than pleased about that. I threw on some comfier shoes and went anyway.

C turned out, to my boundless joy, to be incredibly sweet. We chatted for about 40 minutes or so (ding), one-on-one (ding), in a friendly and not very stress-inducing fashion (ding), and she only threw one (ding) of those horrible "tell me about a time when blankity blank blank blank and how you dealt with it" questions at me. She was even apologetic about it and admitted that it was one of those canned questions that I'd probably answered a hundred times. What, you ask, am I dinging about? I'm dinging about ways in which this interview process was vastly more enjoyable than my other recent interview processes. I'd like to give this woman a prize for Surpassing Non-Ogreyness. I'd like, in fact, to give her some chocolate. She alluded to her mention of chocolate in the job posting; I grinned and told her that it was what made the listing stand out for me; I decided against mentioning Zap-a-Gap fumes and 22-hour workdays.

Basically, I'm feeling decidedly less feudal today than I've generally been feeling in my job search. You mean someone actually wonders whether I'll mind tending to the office plants, rather than assuming I'd happily feed them with my own blood for the privilege of getting the job? Wonderful. You mean you're interested in whether the commute is all right for me (it's great), how I feel about the salary (holy lord it's great), the hours (splendid), and whether the temporary-or-permanent-depending-on-need nature of the job is convenient for me (I can deal with it)? You don't just want to know whether I'm a highly efficient robot desperate for employment?

GREAT.

So after that lovely interview, and meeting the owner of the business (which involved being enthusiastically introduced by C as, "this is Dianna, and she has a green thumb!"), I left the office and wandered up the street toward my transportation home. It was sunny, yet breezy, and I was dressed just warmly enough. The street sloped away invitingly to my left, just happening to be the direction I was going, so I huffed my way up over the hill grinning like, well, someone who just had a job interview go well for a change. Somewhere along the way I decided that if there is a better place in the world to be than stomping up a hill on top of San Francisco on a beautiful sunny afternoon in April while wearing comfortable shoes, I can't imagine where that might be.

And that is why I called Jacob from Dolores Park at 1:45 to tell him that this might just be the best day ever.