The Interview (A True Story)

I have a tiny, annoying scar on my brow bone, just below my right eyebrow. It’s small and thin, so it looks like a stray eyebrow hair that badly needs to be plucked. Super annoying. And, in fact, doubly annoying, because it was part of a cruel hoax perpetrated on me by the universe.

Here’s the story: on the day I got the injury that resulted in the scar, I had a job interview. I wasn’t really looking for a job, but I’d seen the posting, it was well-written (you know how important that is to me), and I felt like I fit the bill for the job. So I applied and got an interview. I dressed up in my big-girl suit, put on a fresh face of makeup, and even broke out pantyhose for the occasion, which I almost never do because pantyhose are stupid. I drove over to the interview site, careful to not wrinkle my suit or mess up my hair, and before I got out of the car, checked to make sure everything was perfect. It was all good: both ears had earrings, my resume was tucked inside my portfolio, the pantyhose hadn’t gotten any rogue runs in them, I had all my brilliant stories lined up, just waiting for me to tell them, and my breath was fresh and minty. I exited my car and started to make my way into the building, when I stopped suddenly, remembering that I’d forgotten to stick a pen inside my portfolio. For a moment, I considered moving on. There would be pens inside. But then I thought to myself, “Well, what if I don’t have time to get a pen inside? And what if my interviewer asks me to write something down? If I don’t have a pen, he’ll think I’m an unprepared jerk, and I’ll never get a second interview!”

My purse was in my car, tucked inside my gym bag. I was going to the gym after my interview, because I’m hard-core like that. I knew there were pens galore in my purse, so I opened the passenger-side door to get into the gym bag, which was on the floor on the passenger side. I don’t know if the passenger door was lighter than the driver’s-side door, or if I just wasn’t used to opening doors on that side of the car, but for whatever reason, my face got in the way, and I grazed my eye with the top corner of the door.

“Oh drat,” I thought, annoyed, but unconcerned, “That’s probably going to make my eye a little red.” My biggest concern is that my makeup might appear less than perfect. I reached into the gym bag, opened up my purse, got a pen out, and stuck it in my portfolio. When I closed the door, I saw my reflection in the passenger window.

It looked like a scene from a horror movie.

My eye wasn’t just a little red. It was gushing, and I mean gushing blood. It’s no lie that head wounds bleed like a stuck pig. I had rivers of blood gushing down my eye and dripping on to the rest of my face, like Sissy Spacek in Carrie. Desperately, I looked around. Of course, today was the only day that I forgot to put a towel in my gym bag, so that was no help. No spare tissues, no band aids, no nothing. I considered briefly using one of my gym socks, but I have a terrible fear of Athlete’s Foot, and the last thing I need is Athlete’s Foot of the face. I finally ripped a piece of paper out of my portfolio, and used it to wipe up the blood as best as I could. By this time, I was growing concerned about time, so I ran into the building, and checked in with the security guard.

“Do you have a tissue?” I asked the security guard.

“No,” she said, “All I have are these paper towels.”

“Oh, um, I’ll take one if that’s okay,” I said.

“No,” she responded, “you don’t want a paper towel. It’s too scratchy.”

Seriously? Stunned into submission by the fact that I was being denied a paper product, I said, “Well, I bumped my eye just a minute ago, and it was bleeding a little.” A little! Ha! “Can you tell?”

“Well, it’s a little red,” she said.

I looked at the clock and saw that I had about seven minutes until my interview. Quickly, I raced to the restroom, and looked in the mirror.

A little red? It was total chaos! I had blood smeared all over my eye, in my eyebrow, on my forehead, and on my cheek. I looked like I’d taken part in a Native American initiation ritual. With a tiny shriek, I grabbed the closest PAPER TOWEL THAT WAS EXACTLY LIKE THE ONE I’D JUST BEEN DENIED BY THE SECURITY GUARD, wet it, and mopped up the damage as best I could. I felt like I’d gotten things pretty much under control, and I headed off for my interview.

I was right on time, and greeted my interviewer with my usual fake confidence and winning smile, despite the fact that I knew that I probably only had makeup on one eye, a la Malcolm MacDowell in A Clockwork Orange. We settled down into the interview, and I started answering questions. About three minutes in, I noticed something: the field of vision in my right eye was diminishing more and more with every passing second. Fabulous.

Now, you may be wondering why this was an issue. Well, the issue was this: I’d come into the interview having already made the decision that I wasn’t going to confess to my inability to open a car door properly. My rationale was that no one would someone for a high-pressure job who couldn’t even navigate the intricacies of opening a car. So I said nothing, and now had an eye that was starting to resemble Carl Weathers at the end of Rocky I (also the beginning of Rocky II). By the way, that’s now the third movie reference from the 1970s that I’ve made today. I’m on a roll.

More questions, more eye swelling. In addition to being swollen, I could now feel my right eye starting to droop. At this point, I made a decision: if I saw the interviewer, even once, glance at my drooping eye, I would confess everything. But he was a wily character, and looked nowhere but directly at my eyeballs the entire time. Meanwhile, my ability to filter what I was saying had thoroughly escaped me, I was confessing that I’d never even thought of doing the work that he was proposing, and in fact, my real love was something completely different. It was my eye. My eye was making me say these things.

Forty-five minutes later, we concluded our interview, and shook hands, both knowing that there was no way I was ever getting a second interview. Instead, I got a highly complimentary rejection letter (with no mention of my disfigurement), a black eye that lasted over a week, an annoying scar, and this story. Hope you liked it.