Job Interview

I was invited to a job interview (many years ago) by the University of Chicago Circle (sounds like University of Chicago, but it isn't, it's the university where the author of a book about Zen and Motorcycles was teaching when he decided Zen and Motorcycles would be a MUCH better career).

I was met my an Indian (NOT of the Red variety). He said he had to take me to dinner and watch me eat. I said, 'I can't eat while a hungry person is sitting, not eating, and staring at me.'

'What we do, then?'

'Why, exactly, are you going to take me to dinner and watch me eat?'

'Boss say I must take you to Steakhouse. I Hindoo. I not eat meat. So I watch you eat. OK?'

'No, not OK. Take me someplace we can BOTH eat!'

'My boss say I must take you Steakhouse.'

'OK. I'll say we went to the Steakhouse. Now take me somewhere we can BOTH eat.'

'But place I can eat, you cannot eat.'

'Try me.'

So we went to a Hindoo restaurant. He ordered something bland for me, and bindhi massala for himself. 'Bindhi' is Hindoo (or Urdu) for okra. As it says in the Iowa farm journal (or so I was told by a Texas newspaper article), 'Okra is a very important fodder crop. You won't believe this, but in some very primitive cultures, okra is used for human food.'

As it turned out, I ate most of his bindhi massala, and he had to eat whatever it was he ordered for me.

The next day, I met the staff. I already hated them for the way they'd treated the poor Indian (whose name I've long forgotten). Their Phd in Computer Security made a bunch of statements that, while I'm sure they've been published in bad journals, were 110% false. The usual, 'Make users pick passwords that are random sequences of characters and make them change their passwords every week.' Either the users will forget and lose access to their accounts, or they'll write down their passwords where anyone can find them. Bad idea.

They wanted me to teach Pascal. I went to a lecture by the idiot who invented the Pascal language, and he convinced me no one would EVER use Pascal to write a program that actually did anything. They knew I didn't know Pascal, but needed someone with certification to teach it for a semester (they had to have someone with accreditation, or they'd be in big trouble), and then they planned to lay me off. I declined their generous offer.