The Interview

As I greeted him and sat down, he leant back into the depths of his old swizzle chair with a knowing yet equally curious expression. The deep-set wrinkles in his sagging face were smoothed only slightly, by the sleezy snarl that he then glared at me with. He had weighty bags under his tired eyes that were full and puffy and I wanted to puncture them, just to watch the oozing off-white liquid slowly drain out. Like most other well fed CEOs, he was grossly overweight, and dressed in a tight suit he’d clearly bought when he could still touch his toes.

Un-surprisingly, he hadn’t got a copy of my CV, and as I shifted in my chair to disguise my discomfort at this news, something told me to expect the kind of interview where I would feel relieved to be blonde and middle class. Superficial, yes, but I knew that was what he wanted and why not play the part?

“ Now, what do your parents do?” was the first question. The bluntness of his tone appeared to make my ears repel each word back outwards before he repeated himself and they finally powered through to hit the drums.
“I’m sorry?” I remarked, assuming I had mis-heard.
“I said what do your parents do? What does your Father do?”
“Um, he owns a property company,” I said rather on edge, wondering what exactly he wanted this information for. The clock on the back wall was ticking loudly, and the silence in the room was unnerving yet sharply pierced by his inappropriate questioning.
“Did you pay for your schooling?” was the next.
“Well, yes” I said, again wondering how this information was relevant.
“Excellent, excellent” he replied, rubbing his fingers together like he were counting a wad of fifty pound notes.

I could tell by the sudden beam in his blackened pupils I was set to be the perfect candidate. I mean put it this way, who cares about qualifications when you’re from a wealthy family and spend summers in the South of France? (I don’t as it happens, but you get the point.)

Throughout the interview he stared at me intently, and I wondered if the whole thing was simply a test of my tolerance. Could he really be this grotesque? I couldn’t believe shallowness existed like this, and there were moments when I honestly thought the real CEO was going to burst out of the cupboard to announce it was a set-up and congratulate me for passing. I almost wished the whole thing was a huge joke, but unfortunately it wasn’t, and I felt even more depressed.

A colleague of his, ‘Richard’, who prior to his introduction had been prowling the office like a preying vulture, was invited in half way through, and he perched on the same side as the CEO, looking at me with the smug expression of a successful bidder at auction.
“This is Steph,” said the CEO, “her father’s in property”.
It was at this point that I considered leaving the room and arranging for my Father to come in with a copy of his latest bank statement, although I worried that if I made such a suggestion he would indeed take me up on it.

“Perhaps you could tell me about the role” I suggested. Sarcasm was screaming its way out from my tongue, but I held it back with an affirm gulp and a hard bite.
“The role? Oh yes, well it’s PR. You know, writing press releases and that sort of thing”. His eye contact had averted, and he was drawn to the dirt underneath his nails, which he cleaned using the corner of his American Express.

The clock continued to tick, and the interview dragged along like nails down a blackboard. An hour passed. After pronouncing he was going to ask me four questions that began with a ‘D’, which included how much I Drank, whether I took Drugs, and if I had Disease or Depression in the family, I wearily shook his hand and left, feeling drained and craving the fresh air to revive me and remind me that I was indeed alive. As I left I looked back, to find their eyes fixed on me, at which point I wished my jacket had, “keep the job” sewn onto the back of it, with “fuck you” emblazoned onto the rear of my trousers.