I go in, and one of the men leads me to the conference room (or as he called it, the "conference slash storage room"). The room is filled with various boxes holding chunks of Compaq hardware, from rack-mounted Alpha-based servers down to Deskpro bits. The walls are plastered in large sheets of paper covered with colored state diagrams, port addresses, pseudocode, scrawled notes, acronyms, and your basic geek mental state captured in a physical form. I find it slightly heartening that I can look at some of it and understand what's going on, and even realize some of the rationale of some of it, like portions that connect to localhost rather than using something like a pipe or shared memory to do interprocess communication - if you connect using the TCP/IP stack, then if anything in that whole chain is broken then you know that your server is in a crazy state and it's time to do an orderly (as possible) shutdown and restart, for instance.

This might not be so bad.

I ended up interviewing in reverse order that I was supposed to. I was supposed to talk to the Director of e-Services first (documentation, customer relations and support, I figured), Director of Technology and then the company president, but I went the other direction.

Ethan, Oop!'s president is somewhat evil. Well... amusingly evil. Smarmy? Perhaps that's the right word. White-toothed and always impeccably dressed, he's what Karla calls a "killer nerd." For some reason, he's paying a lot of attention to me and keeps giving me all sorts of confidant-type information. I'm not sure whether to be flattered or to consult an exorcist. Sitting next to a burning Tiki torch spiked into the ground, beneath an orange tree, Karla said to me, "You know, Ethan's been a millionaire and filed for Chapter Eleven three times already -- and he's only 33. And there are hundreds of these guys down here. They're immune to money. They just sort of assume it'll appear like rain." While decoding Ethan's existence we were removing stray grass seeds from each other's Clockwork Orange thug costumes. I said, "There's something about Ethan that's not quite oxymoronic, yet still self-contradictory -- like an 18-wheeler with Neutrogena written on the side -- I can't explain it. The whole Silicon Valley is oxymoronic -- geeky and rich and hip. I'm undecided if I even like Ethan -- he's definitely not one of us. He's a different archetype." From Microserfs by Douglas Coupland

The president looked not entirely unlike how I picture the character "Ethan" from Coupland's Microserfs, albeit crossed with a much younger Ricardo Montalban.

He gave me the whole rundown of the company. Two-and-a-half years old, write this, supply that, lots of interest to buy, going to grow another two years to increase the valuation, very energetic group of people, hire people smarter than we are (right there I knew I was screwed), yadda, yadda, yadda. Whole song and dance, and I groked, so he left and sent in the Director of Technology.

Ohmigawd, I thought to myself. He looks just like Larry Wall.

When he told me his first name was Larry I nearly fell over.

He started out, right to the point. "So, they tell me that you've done a lot of software testing."

Who told you that? I thought to myself. "No. I haven't." We talked about it a while, talking around it, and how I doubted I'd have any problems picking up the scripting languages for automated testing tools, I have experience coding so I can classify most errors I'd find, the requisite debugging experience, etc.

"Well, they also told me that you have experience doing technical writing."

Grr. "No." And I talk around that, given my technical background, other writing ability, familiarity with such documents, etc.

He asked me something else at this point - something I can't quite remember, but this is when I cracked. I laughed nervously, gave him a goofy grin and said, "I'm just not doing too well on your list of requirements, am I?" Stamp "IDIOT" on my forehead again, since it seems to have rubbed off.

Like any good interviewer, though, he made a token effort to absolve me of such notions and I could see the look on his face that said "make a mental notation that this guy is about useless."

Finally, he left and sent in the last guy, the Director of E-Services, who looks like no one I know of in particular. He wanted to feel me out for how I'd fit with the general group, I think. In general, he was looking towards me with the most critical eye, so I have no idea what he was thinking. We didn't seem to "click" though, because I think he had a wall up. He tended to scribble a lot on the pad in his dayplanner, too.

All in all, I was there for eighty minutes. I don't know what to think. Sure, I'd like to work there. I'd get an inside track in a startup, I'd get to see operations from the inside. Unfortunately, when I asked when I might hear something, they told me two weeks, and also I that they had many, many interviews to do for two positions.

I don't like my chances.

At least I'm keeping my dance card full. Today somebody called me to interview for a position tomorrow morning, which is good. She had this sound in her voice like... fear, like they really need somebody, which could be good, since that gives me more wiggle and negotiation room. That could be bad because it might be a job that nobody wants and they've been through a host of people.

It's for an aviation company, and it sounds more clerical, but somebody with a lot of computer skills. Maybe that's for me - I don't know. She didn't tell me much, but I'll have lots of questions tomorrow, then, I guess.

The thing is, I hate to take a job and then turn out not to like it, or take it until something better comes along. I don't feel like that's fair to them, but then, when did a company ever do me any favors?

Anyway, they might need a generalized computer geek. I might be able to change a lot of things to the better for them. I might be able to make a real impact.

We'll see.

restlessmind