The Interview

Nadia had rehearsed the answer so many times that when the question finally came, she almost missed it. "Tell us about a time you failed," the man in the grey jacket said, and for a second she heard only the hum of the air conditioning and the scratch of the woman beside him writing something down. She had a story ready. It was a good story: a project that had run late, a client who had been unhappy, lessons learned, growth demonstrated. It had the shape interviewers liked — a dip and a recovery, with the recovery taking up most of the time. She had told it in three previous interviews, and each time it had landed exactly as intended. What she found herself saying instead was something else entirely. "I was twenty-three," she said, "and my father asked me to help him write a letter to his landlord. His English was fine for conversation but not for that kind of thing, and he was embarrassed about it. I said I would do it at the weekend. Then I had a deadline, and then a friend's birthday, and by the time I remembered, he had already sent something himself. It was polite and it was wrong in about six places, and the landlord used that as a reason not to take him seriously. It took months to sort out." The woman had stopped writing. Nadia was aware, distantly, that this was not going well by any of the measures she understood, and that she could still steer back towards the client story if she chose to. "The point isn't that I was busy," she went on. "Everyone's busy. The point is that I'd decided, without noticing I'd decided it, that his thing could wait and mine couldn't. That's the failure. Since then, when someone asks me for something small, I try to ask myself whether it's actually small for them. Usually it isn't." There was a pause of the kind that in her experience preceded a polite change of subject. "And did it work?" the man asked. "The asking yourself?" "Not always," Nadia said. "But more often than before." She did not get the job. The letter that arrived a week later was gracious and said that the panel had been impressed by her candour, which she took to be a way of saying that candour had not been what they were looking for. She was surprised to find that she did not mind very much. The client story was still there, still good, still true in its way. She simply no longer wanted to be the person who told it.