Fire in the Blood Read Free

like you did. The rest don’t. I’ve always relied on word of mouth, personal recommendations and referrals up until now. But I must admit over the last couple of years they’ve begun to dry up.’
‘Yeah, it looks like your cleaner hasn’t made it up for a year or two either.’
‘Yes, I’m sorry about the mess. But I work alone and most of my clients these days, frankly, aren’t too fussy about the standard of housekeeping. To be honest, it’s a long time since I did any interviews. I suppose I should ask you some searching questions.’
‘Please ask me anything you want, but I hope you’re not going to try any of that psychometric testing crap.’
‘Well I might, if I knew what it was.’
Annie seemed relieved and said, ‘Thank God for that. It’s an interview technique that a lot of companies use to find out about the real you. Believe me, I’ve had a lot of interviews lately and it absolutely does my head in.’
‘Sounds clever, how does it work?’
‘But that’s the point, it doesn’t work. What they usually do is ask completely mad open questions that don’t have a right or wrong answer, or any answer really, just to hear what you say and how you react under pressure. Occasionally, if the interviewer is bored, you can be asked to sing, dance, or role play, even if the interview is just for some rubbish zero hours, temporary gig in a call centre or a shop. The really annoying thing is that totally unsuitable people seem to be able to sail straight into the top well-paid jobs, like the guys who run some of the big banks. While all the poor sods like me, who are scrambling around for shitty, entry-level jobs have to jump though endless hoops of screening and interview. I don’t get it. It’s completely mad.’
Jack was both intrigued and amused by her rant and said, ‘I knew things were tough out there for young people looking for work, but I didn’t think it had got that crazy. Tell me a bit more.’
‘Okay, I went to an interview for a call centre job last month and the HR guy I was there to see asked me to imagine that I’m walking along a beach on holiday. This is true, I swear. So he says, in the distance you can see three women. Two of them are wearing white swimsuits and the third one has a skimpy black bikini on.’
‘That’s amazing ,’ said Jack, ‘I have that same dream all the time. Sorry, please go on.’
‘Anyway, he tells me that as I get closer to them I will see that the two swimsuit chicks have worried sad expressions on their faces and bikini girl is rolling around in the sand, laughing like a drain. But she also has floods of tears running down her cheeks at the same time. So Mr HR asks me what I think the “group dynamic ” is down on the beach, to cause such “polarised emotions”. In plain English, I have to try and explain what the hell’s going on.’
Jack scratched his head and said ‘Jeez, that’s a tough one. I mean it could be just about anything.’
‘Well I’d been to loads of interviews just like this recently, and I’d just about had enough of the stupid questions, so I told him that I honestly couldn’t see what this had to do with a poxy job, working to a set script in a call centre selling car insurance. So then he got the hump big time and said that it didn’t matter if I saw the relevance of the question or not, because his boss drew up the interview questions and everyone has to answer them, without exception. End of.’
‘So, he was just following orders, eh?’ said Jack, smiling.
‘Exactly. So then I told him that was perfectly obvious to me what had happened on the beach. Bikini girl had just farted. She’d dropped an absolute bomb. Her two mates had just caught a whiff and they were both about to bring up their breakfasts.’
Jack, something of a serial farter in his own right, laughed out loud and then asked, ‘So did you get the job?’
‘Funnily enough, I didn’t get that one. The personnel dork said I wasn’t taking the