BY JEREMY BLACHMAN
Dear Interviewer Dude,
The Office of Career Services tells us it’s unnecessary to write thank you notes after our on-campus interviews, but I wanted to send you a note anyway, to tell you how much I enjoyed our meeting last week and how much I look forward to getting to know more about your firm should I be invited to come and visit during Sell-Out Week. I mean Fly-Out Week.
I wanted to first thank you for making me wait in the hallway for forty-two minutes while you beat the hotel’s room service attendant with your shoe.
Also, I wanted to thank you for tearing up my transcript into little bits when I handed it to you. Thank you for getting up in the middle of the interview to relieve yourself on the carpet. Thank you for taking a cell phone call in the middle of the interview from your sister with the bumpy rash. Yes, your speaker volume was that high. Thank you for insulting my mom. Thank you for kicking me under the table. Repeatedly. Thank you for smelling like cheese.
Thank you for licking me when I went to shake your hand. Thank you for inviting me to use the bathroom and then locking me inside for half an hour. Thank you for stabbing me with a plastic fork. Thank you for making me sit through a screening of “Gigli” before you would let me leave at the end of the interview. Thank you for removing my left kidney using only the instruments in the hotel sewing kit. I only need one kidney.
But, most of all, thank you in advance for the callback invitation. I look forward to seeing you again soon.
Thanks,
Harvard Student
Dear Harvard Student,
I very much enjoyed meeting with you at the Charles Hotel last week when I was on campus. I especially enjoyed your responses to the following questions:
1. When I asked you why you chose to interview with us, and you responded that you chose exclusively on the basis of the number of syllables in a firm’s name, and since we had fourteen, we made it to your list – but just barely. On my flight home that night, however, I realized that you had miscounted. We only have thirteen syllables. Errors like that are not well-tolerated at the firm.
2. When I asked you what kind of law you were most interested in, and you responded “Lobster,” and then when I expressed confusion, you answered that you thought I’d asked what kind of claw you were most interested in, not law.
3. When I asked you to explain your Torts grade, and you pretended you no longer spoke English.
4. When I asked you what you had enjoyed the most about your experience working in the potato chip factory, and you said “the day my co-worker’s arm got sliced off by the automatic slicer,” because that was the day you got an extra ten-minute break while they cleaned it up. I did not believe your story until later that evening, when I purchased a bag of potato chips and found an arm inside.
5. When I asked you if you were on law review, and you said no.
The answers you gave to those questions, especially (but not limited to) the fifth one, unfortunately have led us to the unfortunate decision that we will be unable to offer you a callback this interview season. However, with your impressive credentials and bright green teeth, I am certain that you will find success in the rest of the interviewing process, and in all of your future pursuits.
With deep and genuinely unfortunate sorrow and unfortunance,
Interviewer Dude
Jeremy Blachman’s column appears weekly. He posts commentary regularly here.