Part III: The Most Disastrous Job Interviews People Ever Had

Brad Dickson • Managing Editor

Jul 30, 2022 11:00 AM EDT

The worst job interview I ever had occurred shortly after I received a concussion after getting hit by a car. Unluckily, I had applied to the job the day before being run down like a cane-toad on my road bike and received a call shortly afterward. Somehow, I made it through a short first-round introduction and into the second-round panel-based interview. To complicate matters further, my partner and I had an extensive holiday planned at that time, which involved me driving a Juicy campervan some 1,500 miles across the South Island of New Zealand.

Quick-tip for concussed travelers: Don't.

If you're determined, make sure you aren't committed to long days of driving, intense hiking, or overnight cruises. Else you will be in for the most motion-sickening, brain-melting experience of your life. Still, I wouldn't trade it for anything.

So, this interview was to take place while we were traveling. We arranged to stop at a holiday park (campground-type places in New Zealand) on the day of the interview to ensure we had an internet connection.

Honestly, I don't remember much of the interview or what was asked. What I do remember is having a terrible connection from the less-than-modern campground wifi that guaranteed a lot of awkward pauses and a robotic flow of conversation. Not ideal when the expressed purpose is to make a likable impression. I also remember being flat-out unable to answer multiple questions that were asked of me, despite having a vast amount of experience in those areas and having explicitly prepared for those questions. Now, I'm not great at speaking directly to a subject at hand at the best of times; my ADD-addled brain loves a good tangent from a tangent, from a tangent -until it has created a Fibonacci spiral of conversational topics. But I find it hard to look back and ascertain whether or not I was making any sense or saying much of anything at all for that entire conversation.

At least the interviewers got to experience the breathtaking views of Lake Wanaka while I either incoherently rambled or sat in suffocating silence, even if those views were so incredibly pixilated from the aforementioned poor connection that they could hardly see anything at all.

I didn't get the job, but at least the experience gave me a story to share on this post. That's what I'll tell myself anyways.

See the other parts of this three-part series here.

Part I

Part II