Give the shy boy a chance

No matter what the cynic might say, time and place play an important part in the scheme of things. How one comes to be at a certain place at a certain time is sometimes purely random. There are times, however, when it is planned but a third — a human element — helps make that formula work.

In 1993, when my Sydneysider friend Allan, then just 21, pulled aside the curtain one Monday morning, his eyes confirmed what his ears were already informing him: It was pouring cats and dogs outside.

The street was awash with water. A faint mist-like quality hung about, shrouding visibility so much that Allan wasn’t able to clearly see his car — a maroon Ford — parked only metres away on the driveway.

It was 6.50am, he was just making up his mind to roll over and go back to sleep when two things happened: The alarm on the bedside table went off and his mother entered the room with a discreet knock only to remind him about what the alarm had already just done: “Don’t forget you have an interview today, Allan. Your first job!”

The butterflies that had been put to rest sometime in the sleeping night returned to his belly and the nervous fluttering started up all over once more. He’d spent the last three days — ever since he’d received the invitation to ‘come over and have a chat regarding the job’ — in a bubble of stress and tension.

He memorised the job description. He read up on the history of the company. He drew up lists of possible questions, ‘anticipating the un-anticipatable’ as his college professor had advised a few years earlier. If you can get yourself into the minds of the panelists beforehand, you’re as good as there, it’s been said often.

Then the night before the interview — perhaps due to the intensity of preparation — once his head hit the pillow, his brain shut down so completely that he found sleep immediately — deep, undisturbed sleep that wiped the interview and its accompanying stress load clean from his mind.

An ice cold shower did nothing to quell the nerves that had returned. A breakfast of cereal, scrambled eggs and toast and piping hot coffee was of no help either. If anything, the nervy butterflies appeared to thrive on the food, multiply in number.

By the time he arrived at the company — a 15-minute drive that stretched to 25 in peak hour traffic — Allan was lathered in sweat and thankful for the inner vest he had decided to wear.

When he was eventually called in — after four others — five serious faces gathered in a row across a long table greeted him perfunctorily, expressionlessly. Then the grilling began. Questions like bullets fired on a rainy day so that it was hard to see them quickly enough and duck. ‘Why did you ...? ‘What led you ...?’ ‘Do you think ...?’ ‘What if you ...?’ ‘How would you ...?’

Twenty years on, working at the same firm in his one and only career job so far, Allan himself is preparing to interview a series of candidates on the Monday coming up. “Do you know they actually turned me down? Four of them. While they all felt that I more than met their criteria and ticked all their various boxes, I had two qualities that they felt might act as impediments: They felt I was too humble and too meek. They felt because of that I’d get taken advantage of. Four out of five is a majority not easily overturned,” says Allan.

What then worked in his favour? Time and place. The fifth panelist — who’d actually called in sick that rainy day, but somehow decided to attend. This panelist had read a saying of Swami Sivananda and was on hand — and on time — to quote it: “Humility is not cowardice. Meekness is not weakness. Both are indeed spiritual powers. It separates him from the others. Give the boy a chance.”

Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.