the world spins madly on

The other day I had an interview. My very first interview ever!!! I kid you not. You'd think being where I am I'd have done thousands of these things. I should be an old salt by now, but noooo. Bad things still happen to good people, and the employment system still shuts out some of its best potential talent (i.e. me, haha, I wish :). So it's only natural that I was freaking out, you know. coz asides from it being my first interview, it was kind of a big deal since it's a large company, but more importantly, since it's been my only call back since I started doing this. I've just been sitting in the sun watching everyone else in sharp suits go live their lives as mine passed me by, and now my chance was here.

I agonized over even seemingly small things like what-sized brush to use to polish my shoes. I wanted everything to be just right. I was slated for late afternoon so it was a pretty long morning, and as I found out later, our memory does NOT get better with age - in the one hour I spent in the waiting bay coz we started a little later than scheduled I forgot quite a bit of the material I had prepared! :( But, as it turned out, I didn't even need the stuff. I found that if you're really telling the truth and are really driven by your convictions then you've known yourself long enough that you'll be able to handle anything they throw at you. Maybe not as impressively, but it's gonna be pretty tough for you not to be able to say anything at all. You'd actually have to be actively trying to not get hired (in which case the question begs why you went to the interview in the first place :). Unless they decide to ask you about the budget. Or the East African Community. Or Chad. Ya, interviewers can get mean like that sometimes. So another thing I learnt is to always be a step ahead, answer the question and provide just a little bit of extra information. Little enough that the next question might actually come from your last answer; and then to make sure you stay off Amos Kimunya! Worked for me ;)

I also got my half-year results for the first semester, and they were less than exhilarating. It's a bit dishearting, considering those will form a big part of my average grade at the end of uni, but what can I do? They say the only way to live happily ever after is day by day. I want to be happy, so Im learning to take every moment as it comes. Making the best of a bad situation, that is the one thing you can only learn if you actually have bad situations to work with.

Now Im really trying to stay positive and not interpret it as a bad sign that my interview lasted twice as long as others', and that I wasn't asked any of the standard interview questions like what are my weaknesses and why should they hire me, but it's tough. I have a lot of things to think about, like how Im going to recover from my first semester goof-up, or what else I can do to enhance my employ-ability rating, or what's going to happen if we don't win the SIFE national exposition this weekend. And I would really have liked to be able to go back in time and change a few things, but on and on the clock ticks. Im finding that no matter how apprehensive I get, no matter how much I'd like to undo, time does not stop. The world spins madly on, sing The Weepies.

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