So I had a cunning plan for last weekend. My second IBM interview was in Portsmouth (Cosham actually) at 8:30am on Monday. But also, my friends James, Dan and Julian were holding a Christmas party at their house in London on Saturday night. My plan was - go down to London on Saturday, stay the night. Go to Portsmouth on Sunday, stay the night. Interview on Monday and head home that night.

We met up in the pub inside King's Cross station. I hadn't realised there was a pub in King's Cross station and I'd looked everywhere except where it was when I eventually phoned Julian and requested direction.

This was the first time I'd seen any of these people (except Rob and Ching) since graduation and it surprised me how easily I just slotted back into my traditional social role. The pub was pretty crowded - although I'm not sure how crowded I expected it to be, it's one of the largest railways stations in the UK and people who are travelling need alcohol. I certainly did when I got there.

That all went down okay, then we took a selection of tube trains to their home on the Isle of Dogs. Now, from the maps, the Isle of Dogs (which is, as they say, not an island but actually a peninsula) looks a whole lot smaller than it actually does when you get there. Moreover I had thought (from years of reading Alex cartoons) that it was filled entirely with big financial buildings. They are there - Canary Wharf is the tallest building I have ever seen, although, as I haven't left the United Kingdom in over a decade and it is also the tallest building in this country, this is not surprising. I can say it was spectacularly impressive but that doesn't really capture it. As I've said, I'm not well travelled - London is the biggest thing I've ever seen. It is a vibrant and bustling metropolis, so to speak. Never had I been more angry at losing the Goldman Sachs gig.

But there are also residential areas there. And what residential areas. The flat where we had the party was spectacularly large - it easily had the floor area of my home. But while I dare say it was expensive, it was nothing compared to what we saw later in the evening when we went for a wander on the riverside and looked at the apartment complexes (complices?) with, you know, bay windows with expansive river views. Blocks twenty or thirty stories high with penthouses at the top.

We visited a pub, but then wondered why we were paying money for alcohol when there were large amounts of already-bought alcohol waiting in the flat, so we went back.

I think the best way to put it is we wrecked the place. Well, I personally didn't, as I am the kind of person who, even when drunk, doesn't wreck things. But this pristine white and beige executive apartment ended up with a lot of bottle caps and crumbs all over it. There was curry and pizza. Frankly, it wasn't how I wanted things to go. I dislike it when people make a mess. I hadn't realised that the primary aim of this Christmas party was going to be to get drunk and drop rubbish. That's not really my idea of a good time.

Elliot turned up, somewhat unexpected, halfway through the night, and left (we think) some time in the morning when everybody was asleep.

Saturday afternoon - that was a mistake, I really should have got up earlier - saw the beginning of the second part of my cunning plan. IBM had asked me to bring a presentation on "What I.T. means to me" and "Why I believe I have the aptitude for a career in I.T.". Now, I don't own Microsoft Powerpoint and at this point had no experience in using it. So while I had the presentation written, I still needed to create it. So, as previously arranged, I used Dan's computer to construct the slides. People say "It only takes a minute to learn Powerpoint" and while this was correct that wasn't what I needed. I needed time to tinker with the, well, the presentation of the presentation. Colours and graphics and so on. That was time I didn't have. I had to rush it, and even so I was by a long way the last person to leave the flat after it was all over. This was a mistake.

The sun was setting (HOW early?!) as I took the tube (and the Docklands Light Railway, which I'd actually ridden once before on a geography field trip to the Docklands when I was in secondary school) to Waterloo station. Now, King's Cross is big, but it's two different stations separated by a short walk - King's Cross, and King's Cross St. Pancras. Waterloo, however, is about sixteen platforms providing access to the entire west and south of England. It is enormous and full of people and highly connected and awesome. (Not quite as impressive as Canary Wharf station where I changed tube trains, though - descending the escalators into there is like travelling into the future.)

The train ride to Portsmouth was by far the worst. Not only was it jam-packed, not only did the automated announcer never once announce the correct set of destination stations, but it also had to take a detour around some engineering works AND it got stuck behind a stopping service which meant it spent the entire journey moving at a relative crawl. I changed at Fratton - in my sleep, I can only conclude - and arrived at Cosham at early evening. Or late night. You can never tell at this time of year.

The bridge across Cosham station was broken, meaning I had to walk across the railway line at the nearby level crossing (which, excluding trams in Nottingham, is something I haven't done in an extremely long time, now that I think about it). Cosham seemed to consist of a single empty high street with a lot of run-down-looking shops. I stayed at the Red Lion Inn, a bar which had recently become a hotel as well. They asked for my credit card number to put into the computer. I never actually asked them why, exactly, they were storing my credit card number. There seemed to be only two staff and the room, while comfortable (I got a twin bed to myself, which was a world first), had no waste paper basket. A curious place to stay, to be sure.

It being 9pm on a Sunday, they were no longer serving food so I went to the Pizza Hut I'd passed on my way through town, and snuck a medium margherita back up to my room. After rehearsing my presentation and preparing as much in advance for tomorrow morning as I could, it took me until 3am to get to sleep.

I'd called a taxi for the following morning. It took only 5 minutes to get to IBM North Harbour from where I was staying, not the 15 I had estimated, but such is life. The IBM building there is immense, mostly grey concrete on the outside, polished grey and blue and glass on the inside. A nice place to work, I decided, although the ground floor, with its shiny waxed floor and echoey halls, reminded me somewhat of a hospital. I was sleepy in reception and I don't think I ever totally got it together during the day. Altogether there were eleven of us (a twelfth guy didn't make it, for reasons we never discovered. Unfortunate). Here's how the day went:

• Group exercise: Once again (this happened at the last IBM interview) we were split into groups of six and given bits of paper from which we had to solve a problem. It actually turned out to be one of those logic problems where they give you bits of information like "The project architect is sitting next to the man from Birmingham" and "Jeffrey Palmer is sitting in the middle" and you have to work out everything about everybody. We didn't do very well, mainly because we approached the problem in entirely the wrong way. Not all the information got shared properly and I personally underestimated how hard the problem was going to be. This was immensely frustrating.
• Negotiation exercise: we were split into fours and given a list of five inventions, with the intention of arguing for their position in a top ten with another group who had a different list of five. Here I think we had a bad list - we had "refrigeration" and "compass" against "wheel" and stuff. And in the negotiations I think we did badly - especially as we didn't come up with a complete list of ten by the end of the allotted time.
• Presentation: My presentation was different from how I expected it would be. Instead of me having a big screen in front of two people as it was a Data Connection, it was me and an interviewer in front of a laptop, with me pressing buttons now and then. I think I expressed myself okay, but I really wanted to spend more time on the presentation than I managed.
• Biodata: a code word for "Fill in these boxes about times when you used leadership and teamwork", something we were given half an hour for and which I usually spend up to a week doing. This was just to provide material for the interview (later) though so I couldn't say how important this was. I didn't get a lot written down.
• Group interview: This was really interesting. It was four of us in front of two interviewers. One of us got a question and a few minutes to answer it. Then it was opened up to all four of us. I enjoyed this part although, annoyingly, during everybody else's questions I was thinking of loads of things to say, whereas during mine I dried up completely and forgot something important which one of the others came up with instead, which I was kicking myself over afterwards.
• Solo interview: this went okay. I wasn't as confident as I had been at Goldman Sachs and I wasn't showing nearly as much flair. I answered the questions as best I could but there were some really tricky ones - "How do you think your friends think of you?" is one I should have had a prepared answer for, but didn't, and "What do you think leadership is?" had me attempting to form an opinion on the spot. Demoralising.
• Communications exercise: So there's this (imaginary) company called "Warmer Fur" which sells microwaveable coats for dogs. They want to start selling their Warmer Furs on the internet and are planning to do all this in-house. I represented e-Solutions Commerce or e-Commerce Solutions or something like that, and had to persuade their representative that paying us to do it for them was cheaper (which it was, according to the (hugely inflated) figures we were provided with). We had some time to write out notes on what we were going to say, then the chat (it was an easy sell, to say the least, but I suspect that wasn't what was being examined). Lastly we had a written exercise which was writing a response to the Warmer Furs CEO who was expressing doubts over the whole business. I think the thing I might have done wrong on this bit was getting a bit too far into character - spending too much effort on acting like a salesperson than focusing on the technical issues at hand. This is something I've done before at Data Connection.

I left IBM North Harbour with the feeling that it could go either way, but the more I write here the less confident I become. Ten working days to wait...

We'd had numerous breaks during the day and we candidates had managed to get to know each other pretty well, so afterwards - I had an hour until my train - we went to a pub, where (cunningly) I had some dinner - something hitherto unnaccounted-for in my plan. There was a girl who seemed to like me among them, but indecision and inexperience prevented me from doing anything constructive to follow up on this. Again, such is (my) life.

I came home via Winchester, Waterloo, and Oxford Circus and King's Cross. I slept most of the way. I waited twenty minutes for a bus in central Nottingham (it was almost ten o'clock by this point) - longer than I'd waited at any of the stations along the way. My family was already in bed by the time I got home.