Tuesday (8th May) saw me attending an interview for a graduate role at Ericsson. The interview was in Basingstoke which is a cool four hours plus from Nottingham on the train so I went down on the Monday instead.

Travel down was fairly stressless. Once I got to Basingstoke station I set off in a likely direction in the hopes of striking fast food and succeeded after wandering through the nearby shopping centre for a while. It was 6pm on a bank holiday so the place was totally dead apart from itinerant school kids and the Burger King. It's true that sometimes you just want warm grease in a bun, but not a dry and crispy bun, oog.

I had attempted to research public transport in Basingstoke but seemingly failed. There were plenty of buses, considering, so I took a bus to the hotel. Having intently studied the fares, I handed over 70p and gave my destination. "No," says the driver, "it's £1.40". Fine. I forked over the extra cash. He gave me a return ticket. Idiot. If I'd wanted a return, I'd have asked for it.

Hotel room was kind of like the one at the Four Seasons, but with lower quality furniture and less... well, stuff. Towels and freebies, I mean. Booked a taxi for the following morning. The hotel and the train ticket between them had costed £99.55 out of the maximum £100 expenses for the day. I figured as long as the taxi cost me less than 45p I'd be fine.

Taxis! Ah, now is when I get seriously irate.

My interview was at the Ericsson building on the Chineham business estate. 9:00am for a 9:30am start. Receptionist said the journey would take 15 to 20 minutes. Fine, I said, book it for 8:30am to be on the safe side. I did this on Monday evening, remember.

8:40am comes: no taxi. Go to the desk (different receptionist), she calls the company again and they confirm he's on his way.

8:55am. Still no taxi. Reception voluntarily books a second taxi from another company.

9:00am, the first taxi finally turns up. "Sorry I'm late, mate!" Yeah, thanks. Apology accepted. After all, I only booked it twelve hours ago. What the HELL can excuse a taxi arriving half an hour late? Maybe traffic was heavy, maybe there were road works: fine, but isn't taking traffic conditions into account a taxi firm's ENTIRE JOB? I would have denied the company - Alpha Cars of Basingstoke, consider yourselves named and shamed - my business and waited for the second taxi but by this time I was in serious danger of being late.

"So where are you going?" "The Ericsson building on Chineham estate. I have a job interview. I was supposed to be there at nine." "..." I could have said any amount of snarky things to the driver, but I decided to play it passive and let him figure out how angry I was. On the way there I noticed absolutely no significant traffic trouble. You know what happened? The company just ignored my booking and only sent a car once they were prompted. Cretins.

Now, this interview was not one I was actually particularly nervous about. There were about 10 of us. The briefing beforehand had said that it would consist of a presentation on the Ericsson graduate programme, a verbal reasoning test, a group exercise and a numerical test. The verbal and numerical tests were provided by SHL. SHL seem to provide tests for a lot of companies and I'd had experience with their brand of multiple choice questioning many times before - those two tests proved straightforward and unchallenging - except in terms of the time limit (roughly 35 questions in roughly 35 minutes, with comprehension of the question taking much more time than the answer? It's a tiring pace).

The group exercise was more interesting: five us were "crashed" in 30 miles off course in darkest northern Canada and told to rank 15 items in order of importance to our survival. Clues in the briefing are always seemingly contradictory and misleading in such exercises but we came to the conclusion that it would be better to try to make it to the nearest settlement 20 miles away than to try to survive more than two weeks on icy tundra with only maple syrup to eat (yes, seriously) and almost no signalling equipment, until somebody came and tried to find us. I argued this point fairly convincingly, I think, and between us we reached a fairly swift consensus. The SAS, according to the interviewer later, would recommend staying put. Had the SAS read the briefing, I wondered? Because the SAS could hop 20 miles across frozen tundra. I stand by my decision.

Anyway, I'm nothing if not confident about the outcome of that particular interview. The REALLY scary one is the next round, where it becomes necessary to actually interact with Ericsson employees (our interviewer worked for an independent company, would you believe), and to give a presentation, the importance of which has been heavily emphasised to us. Having given maybe 4 presentations in my whole life, all of them at failed interviews, you can understand my trepidation.

In unrelated news, I'm working on a new site design. Stay tuned!