My first successful job interview – Fool Fool Fool!

I have so many of these memories when I have felt my heart would absolutely burst out of my chest and run away with fear – fear of losing!

I’ll keep writing them down – these memoirs – for my reference and to share my experiences with all of you beloved readers.

This is about my first successful job interview with Accenture and the story before it that eventually led me to it. Due to the length of this story, I’m gonna break it down into a few short ones for better readability.

This is my trip from Bhopal (my hometown) to Chennai (place of my first unsuccessful interview) but before going any further, let me remind my audience of

I am always home sick – have always been. One of those guys who’ll for example return home from work without any fuss every evening and stay there till apocalypse would set in or another freakin’ day arrives and I have to go to office again. And so during my training, I often used to run away to my home for some peace. Whether it helped or not, guess I’ll never know but it ensured that I remained tired enough to sleep better.

So, this one time after completing 4 out of the 5 modules included in my training, I again ran away to my hometown only to receive a phone call the next day while I was watching ‘Casino Royale’ late after noon. It asked me to return asap so I can attend an interview in Chennai with L&T. Since, the notice was quite short, I decided to hop on to the first available train and reach Chennai directly from Bhopal. The journey in an Indian train can get quite horrendous but nothing can beat this one. In a train overpacked with people and no reservations, were factors that would cause me enough grief to permanently hurt my back for the rest of my life. Sitting on the edge of someone elses side-upper berth with my legs placed across the aisle on the small stairs, I spent the entire journey sitting right there on that one spot so no one else could grab my place. After 22 hours of back-breaking journey, I woke up with a stiff upper back and felt a knot on my lower back that had settled in and wouldn’t go even after some running. Not having time to get rid of the pain, I decided to live with it for another day and forgot about it.

This was my first trip to Chennai and it was an aura of visually ‘different’ people. The station is a dead-end for all rail networks in South India or so it seemed from the way the platforms on the station have been built. Smell of fish greeted me on the platform when I got down and a language absolutely unknown but like many northerners, I too could see in many a peoples eyes that I was not from the crowd, not knowing whether I even belonged here. I think this is a feeling every traveller must get used to. Anyways, starting on my feet after frantically trying to get rid of the knot in my lower back, I got out of the station only to find myself surrounded by three-wheeler drivers (auto drivers) who simply didn’t speak Hindi or English. They failed to recognize it and appeared to have never heard of it and I felt miserable. From the broken conversations I had with around 5-6 drivers, I could make out they were talking about 15-16 kilometers of travel and one of them boldly came and asked me if I would be willing to pay Rs. 350 for him to drop me at the company’s premises. I had to agree!

We started and I started playing Snakes on my Nokia 3315. After around 45 minutes, we stopped and I looked out. I just couldn’t believe that we had travelled the distance in such short interval of time and after paying the amount to the driver, asked the guard  what was the distance between the station and company and he told me, it was around 8-9 kms. Ohhhhhh I was so angry then but I was the fool and had to accept the ditch face first.

Fool Fool Fool!