Bitch Please..

I recently attended an interview and it went quite well, that is until the woman started asking me questions from my own chosen branch of engineering.

After the customary ‘tell-me-about-yourself’ for which I had a well rehearsed custom-built answer, I was starting to feel very much at ease with the interviewer. But then she stumped me with a question about DC motors. After almost four years of slugging it at the Electrical and Electronics Department, I should’ve known the answer. I’ve never been ashamed of saying ‘I don’t know’ and so I went ahead and said it.

She was not one to give up. She started helping me find the answer giving me clues and all. I should’ve been relieved, even thankful that she had chose not to lecture me or aggravate my deep-seated sense of inadequacy regarding my own branch of study. Surprisingly, I felt offended that she would try to help me find the answer… as if she was helping a blind man cross the road.

‘Ma’am…’, I bit back condescension and cut her short, ‘I honestly don’t know the answer to that question.’

‘Okaaay’, she said.

‘Infact… If you are planning to go down the road of DC or AC machines, I’m pretty sure that I won’t be able to give a proper answer to any further questions.’

‘That’s too honest an answer for a job interview.’, she was smiling ear to ear clearly amused at the specimen sitting before her.

‘I am a strong proponent of radical honesty.’, I countered with a grin to match her smile.

‘But, isn’t it a failure on your part that you don’t even know the basics of what you’ve been studying four years..?’, now she was going below the belt.

From there on it became like a therapy session and she had trapped me with that question.

‘Totally…. It’s my fault……. But um….. in my defence, we don’t have the best of teachers.’, I managed a pathetic explanation. Then I started bitching about MGU, MACE and Engineering in general and she was prompting me with ‘hmmm’ and ‘how do you feel about that…?’

‘Where does that leave you with regard to B.tech…?’, she asked me after sometime.

I thought for a while and said, ‘I am fed up of what I thought I was supposed to be doing… I am not very good at what I enjoy doing... And I hate people telling me what I should be doing...’

She flashed a sympathetic smile, extended her hand for a shake and said, ‘Well…. this was fun.’. I shook her hand(so soft…) with a perplexed expression as if trying to say, ‘ Over already…?, I was just getting started’.

The list of selected candidates came and sure enough I was not there on it. Bitch please…. As if I needed your validation…(Read ‘Why didn’t you take me..? you were so pretty and I liked you very much’)