Even bad interviewers want to hire good people. Good, of course, varies from job to job and company to company.

You're too kind. I've seen enough interviewers not know what good is, because they're not familiar enough with the position and there's an essential disconnect there.

You don't have to be glib or fake, but you do have to be smart and able to roll with the punches. In essence, interviewing is having a conversation with a stranger and trying to show off your best traits--something that is not natural but is worth practicing and learning to do well.

It's great if you can have a good conversation with a stranger and show yourself off, but it might also be irrelevant to your job duties.

Your points, Robin, jibe well with my rather limited experience interviewing for academic jobs.

So I was reading a week-old CSMonitor, and came across this story mentioned: [link]

Sounds sorta familiar.

and show yourself off, but it might also be irrelevant to your job duties.

But the stuff you want to show off is stuff that IS relevant to your job duties. Whether that's knowledge of Sanskrit or an ability to schedule or a great sense of humor, that's what you want to show.

Moving to how things go once you have the job, I guess some things are universal, like everything going to shit right before your vacation. Over the weekend, I got a notice that my super is going to be gone for three weeks starting tomorrow, so I got home from work tonight to find water dripping out of my bathroom ceiling! I felt really bad calling, but he was his usual lovely self. Turns out, the guy upstairs is installing a new sink. By himself. In what I can only believe is a rental apartment. Seriously?? So the super went to help him finish and try to stop the water. @@

It seems that everytime I take a vacation since...um...2005? Something cataclysmic happens AT WORK. Layoffs, new jobs, family emergencies that take key people out of town suddenly, system meltdown....this one, well, there's already two. But they were talking about replacing the server this week, but I haven't heard anything further. So it may get closer to when I'm gone.

Um.

I have these issues with wanting to please people in authority that always trips me up in interviews. This has absolutely nothing to do with how I teach, since I'm not concerned with pleasing my students in the same way.

That's not me disagreeing with anyone, I'm just bemoaning it.

For several years, every single time Minion went on vacation - even a long weekend - he'd come back to find someone either quit or got fired.

But the stuff you want to show off is stuff that IS relevant to your job duties.

Yes. All I'm saying is that the ability to show stuff off may be missing entirely, while you excel at your more strictly job-related tasks.

I see tech people interviewed by non-tech people way too often and some very strange decisions reached. Either they prefer the nerdy ones because tech people are nerdy or they don't like the nerdy ones because they won't talk, when all they need is someone who sleeps, eats, and breathes OSI levels.

A while back I posted a link to an article about women active in the pro-life movement who have secret abortions themselves and yet continue to actively work to ban abortion. It was called "The Only Moral Abortion Is My Abortion" and was an infuriating look at hypocrisy.

Today I stumbled across the article again, or maybe a longer version of it. Part of the article was more hopeful - this letter really touched me.

Some anti-choice women who have abortions do make peace with their decision and even become pro-choice, or at least more forgiving of other women seeking abortions. A Louisiana patient who was anti-choice before her abortion, wrote a warm and grateful thank-you letter to the clinic, admitting that she had been a hypocrite:

"I never dreamed, in my wildest nightmares, that there would ever be a situation where I personally would choose such an act. Of course, we would each like to think that our reasons for a termination are the exception to the rule. But the bottom line is that you people spend your lives, reputations, careers and energy fighting for, maintaining, and providing an option that I needed, while I spent my energy lambasting you. Yet you still allowed me to make use of your services even though I had been one of your enemies. You treated us as kindly and warmly as you did all of your patients and never once pointed an 'I told you so' finger in our direction. I got the impression that you cared equally about each woman in the facility and what each woman was going through, regardless of her reasons for choosing the procedure. I have never met a group of purely non-judgmental people like yourselves."