Right, let's get this over with.

Research Machines - note prestigious two-letter URL. They make software and hardware for educational markets - secondary school IT networks and especially quiet/energy efficient/robust computers and the like. I applied to these guys in September, they invited me for an interview on the 25th. RM are based in Abingdon near Oxford which is a fairly handy place to live relative to London. I couldn't find a hotel anywhere near the place so I plumped for the Travelodge in Reading since the morning commute by train looked manageable.

Right now I'm working 10am to 6pm, which is a super-awesome shift as it means I get out of bed after everybody else has already left the house, miss all the rush-hour traffic, and dinner's ready just as I get home. However, leaving Nottingham for Reading at 6pm gets you there after basically every food-selling establishment is thoroughly closed. Should have eaten en route, I suppose. And maybe listened to something other than awful trance.

The interview was 10am to about 2pm. There were about four other guys there, none of them actually particularly talkative. I'm not naturally talkative myself but I expect a bit of conversation from my fellow candidates, at least. There was your average presentation - RM looked like a fairly bog-standard workplace, all things considered, not a massive step up from other places I'd worked in a temp capacity already. There was what we were told was a "relatively short" interview which was actually 45 minutes, which is 50% longer than the longest interview I can recall having. Here, I guess I made a good impression. See, all the questions they asked me were about my working career. I was asked to go into deep detail about every temp job on my CV and several I'd not put on there due to lack of room. Nobody asked me about my website or my writing career or my extracurricular activities, which, even if they're not strong points, are at least points. You know, aspects of my character. A poor performance from the interviewers, then, in my opinion. All that time and not covering everything there is to cover?

After that I was taken on a tour of the site. Several buildings. As intimated: not a lot to see. Server rooms, cube farms. If I say "laminated kitchen notices", then my future self, at least, will know what I mean. The production line for their custom computers was diverting, though, as was the fact that my two interviewers were apparently already back at their desks and at work, not discussing my interview performance at all. Hmm. And finally, a rehash of that old SHL online test thing which I've done a billion times now (including once during the pre-interview screening process for this very job), and therefore walked.

During this time we were not provided with lunch, which frankly made me quite angry. I bought fast food from a Burger King at Birmingham New Street station - in a railway context, BK represents relatively good value for money. Made it home in time for dinner.

"Unmemorable", then, is the way I'd describe that session, as you can probably tell. Still, it wasn't the final round. I never have problems until the final round.

8th October 2007 was the final round. 1pm start this time, which was enough time to head down by train in the morning.

RM is accessed from Didcot Parkway station. I aimed to arrive there at 12:41pm and take a taxi to the interview, in plenty of time.

Didcot Parkway station is accessed from London Paddington. I took the 12:00pm train.

It turns out there are two trains which leave London Paddington bound for Didcot Parkway at 12:00pm on weekdays. They leave at the same time for the same destination. One of them, however, stops at six or seven intermediate stations and arrives half an hour after the other. GUESS WHICH ONE I GOT.

So I arrived 20 minutes late.

Okay. The timetable for the day began with: 30 minutes to prepare a presentation on a project I'd done recently - situation, tactics, obstacles, result. I am good at this now. I find a strict time limit gives me focus. I did more with less and covered some Excel/Access/Word/course arrangement magic I'd done for the EMHWD and then - ho ho ho - left in the middle of.

90 minutes of 2-on-1 interview. Freeow. Even subtracting the time taken to give the presentation itself - which went superbly smoothly, in my humble opinion - 90 minutes is TWO HUNDRED PERCENT TOO LONG for a job interview.

I felt unconstrained by time and took pleasure in giving some verbose answers. But here's what threw me. It was a different set of interviewers, but the questions were the same, all over again. They asked me about every job on my CV, all over again. Even the exact same question about the prominent gap between finishing my degree and the first job listed (answer: very minor temp jobs of little note). True, they asked me some new, leading questions about my degree. Even my website - I actually went on too long explaining this, to the point where I was, for the first time ever, interrupted by an interviewer to ask another question. Stuff I didn't get to talk about? My programming fun. The PHP backend to this site. HTDTE. My writing. Me! Myself! It drives me crazy. They asked all the wrong questions and I didn't twig until far too late that I wasn't giving them my greatest strengths up front - that I wasn't making these, my prospective employers, want to work with me. And that I'd been fiddling with a pen the entire time.

Right at the end, just as they were leaving, the guy threw me one last question. I'm paraphrasing: "So, given that you've not had any real experience in this area, what makes you think you can do this job? What makes you stand out as a candidate?"

What do you say to that?

"Honestly? I learn really, really fast. I can learn on my own, in isolation - every programming language I've ever learned was like that. And I can learn in a structured environment. You have to be able to learn fast at Cambridge." Given more than five seconds to think of an answer, I'd have mentioned my creative skills. I know: it wasn't a good enough answer.

After that was 60 minutes of a freaky deductive-reasoning-slash-information-analysis board game, more or less, consisting of laying out what amounted to playing cards with information on them, and using them to figure out puzzles. The preliminary test round, I finished in half the required time, so when I was interrupted about 15% of the way from the end of the real thing, to be told my time was up, I was more than a little angry at myself. Myself, and the fact that I wasn't sat somewhere I could see a clock.

And that was it. End. Home.

No, of course I didn't get the job.

I actually realised this - having disconnected my speculative faculties during the interview, as one does - as I was on the train home. Email confirmation was a triviality.

I'm unemployable - this much is now abundantly clear to me. I just wish I'd realised this a year ago, instead of persevering for so long.

I'm unemployable, so now I'm looking for something else.

I'll let you know when I figure out what.