Nanook of the North
About fourteen years ago I worked for a graphic design company in the North West of England. A colleague and myself were asked one day to carry out a series of interviews for a secretarial position that had been advertised. Quite why they thought I would have any expertise in conducting interviews escapes me, but as usual, I digress.....
We'd seen two or three prospective candidates when our receptionist announced the arrival of our next one.....
In she came....wearing a thick overcoat with a pack-a-mac over the top......those black suede boots with a zip up the front and a provocative glimpse of sheepskin round the ankle, as favoured by the more discerning Russian Grandmother......woolly mittens......and - I swear this is true - a balaclava.....FFS!!!! She looked like a geriatric member of the SAS, although if memory serves, according to her CV she was only in her mid-forties....(which would probably explain why she didn't smell of piss....)....
Any offers to take her coat/balaclava/dog-sled were politely refused with her claiming she'd just come back from South Africa and hadn't acclimatised to the English weather yet (it was October, so hardly the time of year for chipping dogs off lamp-posts). I bet Ranulph Fiennes never has this much trouble...
Myself and Les, the other guy I was interviewing with, didn't dare look at each other as we'd both just have pissed ourselves on the spot, so we proceeded with the interview as if there was nothing untoward about a middle age woman dressed like Captain Oates, sitting clutching her handbag in the middle of the room. Of course it could only go downhill from here.....
At her request we ran through what the main duties of the job were - although if you were applying for a job with the title 'Secretary' you'd think you'd have some idea of what was going to be involved. It's not as though we were trying to sneak anything unusual in...."type invoices, open the mail, dispose of any bodies in the MD's car boot, filing.....".
When we mentioned that she would probably have to answer the phone at some point she virtually came out in a cold sweat (luckily she was dressed for a cold snap in Siberia) and insisted that she "didn't like talking on the phone", and the horror she expressed when informed that she would occasionally have to take some work orders upstairs to the studio - "oh, I don't do stairs", finally convinced us that maybe, just maybe, she wasn't the right person for the job.....in fact it was about this time that I had to very strongly resist the urge to jump up and tear her balaclava off in the mistaken belief that she was none other than wacky funster Jeremy Beadle attempting to use us as objects of ridicule....
Fortunately, I didn't, and she left without revealing herself to be the well-known and dextrously-challenged prankmeister.
We waited weeks for someone to come forward and reveal that they'd set us up, but it never happened, so I guess she was the real McCoy....





The job went to the one with biggest norks, obviously......

No apologies for length, girth, or being the REAL gunman on the grassy knoll.....
(Desolation Angel, Wed 26 Jan 2005, 12:49, Reply)