The second interview

I withdrew my application on the Friday morning, by email, with one polite line about career alignment.

It was for professional reasons. The role was a coordination job at a mid-sized logistics firm, fifteen per cent above my current salary and with worse health cover. The sums didn't work.

That is true and it is not the reason. Let me tell it again.

The first round was with HR, on a Wednesday, by video, forty minutes. All normal. The question about conflict with a colleague, the question about where you see yourself, that piece of theatre both sides know is theatre and neither has the nerve to stop.

The second was in person, with the head of the department, the following Tuesday at seven in the evening.

Seven in the evening because it was the only slot he had, and I said that was fine, because people looking for a job say that's fine.

The building is out on the ring road. Eighteenth floor. When I got there half the office lights were off, on the end-of-day automatic setting, and there were three people left in a floor of about a hundred desks.

The meeting room has a glass wall onto the corridor. That is going to matter.

He is called Otacílio, is forty-one, and hates his own name in a way that became clear in the first ninety seconds, when he said "call me Otto, please" with an emphasis that was almost a distress signal.

The conversation was good. I need to be fair: it was technically good. He knew the sector, asked things nobody had asked, and when I talked about a project that went wrong in 2023 he didn't do the face of a man logging a negative.

It lasted an hour and twenty. It was booked for forty-five minutes.

That's the fact. I'm not going to dress it up: a meeting booked for forty-five minutes that runs an hour and twenty, at seven in the evening, in an empty office, is a fact.

I said above that the conversation was good and that my reason for leaving the process was the health cover.

Let me redo that.

At fifty minutes he stopped looking at the printed CV. At fifty-five he put his back against the chair and folded his arms, which is the posture of a man who has stopped assessing. Somewhere after that the conversation stopped being about the job and became about a Japanese restaurant that closed during the pandemic and which we both missed.

I let it. I could have brought us back to the agenda and I didn't.

At seventy-five minutes he asked if I wanted water and went to get some. He came back with two bottles and closed the door of the room on his way in, which he hadn't done before, and said it was because of the cleaners in the corridor.

There were cleaners in the corridor. I saw them.

It is also true that the door was glass and held back no noise whatsoever.

What happened in that room was this: nothing.

That is literally accurate and it is the most dishonest thing I have written so far.

Nothing happened in the sense that nobody touched anybody. What happened was that, while he was out getting the water, I changed chairs. Not closer. To the end chair, which sits side-on to the glass door, and which is the only position in that room where the corridor cannot see your face.

I moved because the ceiling light was hitting my screen.

I did not have a screen. I had a printed CV and a pen.

He noticed the change of chair. He sat in the one opposite, which is also side-on to the corridor. And he stood there about four seconds with the bottle in his hand, not opening it, looking at me in a way I am going to describe as professional because that is the adjective that suits me.

It was not professional.

We stayed in that room until twenty past eight talking about absolutely nothing of consequence, a bit over a metre apart, with a glass door that showed everything and a cleaning crew that went past three times.

I counted the three. Each time I held the subject mid-sentence and picked it up afterwards, which is a thing people only do when they have something to hide.

There was nothing to hide. Two people talking in a lit room.

I held it anyway.

At twenty past eight he looked at his watch, said he had a seven a.m. meeting, and we went down in the lift together with a building security guard inside it, and in the lobby he shook my hand and said HR would be in touch by Thursday.

His hand was cold from the water bottle.

I left, got into my car in the basement car park, and sat there fourteen minutes with my seatbelt on without starting the engine.

On the Wednesday HR emailed to say I had got through and that they wanted to arrange the offer conversation.

On the Friday morning I withdrew.

I said at the start of this that it was the health cover. I wrote that and reread it twice before carrying on, which should have told me something.

The truth is I withdrew because I knew exactly what would happen if I accepted, and it was not a risk of harassment, and it was not fear of him. It was the opposite. I knew what I would do, inside three months, in a room with a glass wall, with a man who would be my boss.

And I like my career enough not to do that to myself.

He wrote to me on the Sunday. A short message, saying he respected the decision and asking whether I fancied a coffee, no agenda, given there was no process between us any more.

The coffee was the following Tuesday, at seven in the evening, which is not an hour anybody picks for coffee.

It lasted twenty minutes.

Then we went to his flat, which is four streets away, and I am not going to describe what happened there because that part is nobody's business and because, frankly, it isn't the interesting part.

The interesting part is that I wrote all of the above knowing about the coffee from the first line.

I lied about the health cover. I lied about the chair. I lied when I said I had nothing to hide from the three passes of the cleaning crew.

And I would lie again, in the same order, if you asked me tomorrow.