Of course, I'd love being interviewed by your grandpa. Say "hi" to your mom for me as well!

#recruitinghell #dumb #jobhunting

I never tell this story but what the hell. It's about the time where, for 43 seconds, I had a job with the fake locksmith mafia.

So I get referred by a friend of a friend to this "call center". They ask how's my English and this is college freshman me so of course I answer in too-excited over-indulgent English like an insufferable showoff. They say fine, let's sit you down and see how you do.

Very soon the phone rings. I pick up and there's this haughty boomer on the other hand, you can hear he reads the Drudge Report from his tone of voice, and that's when it strikes me I have no idea what I'm supposed to do. All the instructions I got were "answer calls and assign locksmiths" and now I realize I'm sitting in front of some 90s-era proprietary piece of software with 500 radio buttons, knobs, switches and drop-down menus, that I am seeing for the first time in my life. I say "uh excuse me for a moment" and rummage through the menus for anything that will assign a locksmith for this guy.

I click some button and of course up pops another dialogue box with 50 knobs, radio buttons, etc, so I steel myself and dive into the first one and it's a choice between a "commercial" and "residential" customer. I'm a wreck, I'm not thinking anymore. I'm on "this is a disaster" auto pilot. I ask "uh would you say that your building is a commercial building or more of a residential building" and at that point Mr. Boomer, with infinite condescension that I have to concede must have been justified, says "Never Mind" and hangs up.

The guy who interviewed me walks in, for some reason says "uh we'll call you with your shifts" and I obviously never hear from him again. Only weeks later I start wondering why exactly we have a locksmith calling center for the US situated in a non-English-speaking country, and I look it up and find out about the fake locksmith scam.

To this day I cringe and shudder whenever I see the word "residential", like that poor dude who Marvel's Emma Frost cursed to vomit uncontrollably for 48 hours whenever he hears the words "parsley", "intractable" or "longitude".

#scam #recruitinghell #storytime