That boy ain't right

Just before we were about to leave the Bay Area, I get an email from friend Kevin, who works with friend Max at a small startup where they do unspeakable things with DNA.

It seems they had a niche I could fill: April Fools' Day was coming up, and they wanted to play the ultimate prank on several managers: have someone come in with the dream resume for a series of interviews, for a position that desperately needs to be filed, but this person should turn out to be the worst, most amazingly bad interviewee on the planet.

Given the fact that my improv skills were a little rusty, I hadn't done any acting in a while, I was leaving the area anyway and this was as perfect a way as any to say goodbye... shit yes. Or maybe it was the fact that I'd be pulling out all the stops in front of people who had zero idea what they were up against.

However, as April Fool's was on the weekend, and Friday I'd previously set aside to go to the deYoung and the Grand Lake on a long-anticipated date night with my wife, so Thursday it was, which made it even better.

STEPS TO SET UP FAKE JOB INTERVIEWS

1. Having someone on the inside is required. Otherwise you'll be popped in the ass with a Taser, and nobody wants that.
2. Get permission from the HR professionals at the company to be pranked, as high up as you can go. The VP of HR helps. This is also good because HR can come up with the dream resume far better than you can, as well as the interview schedule you'll follow.
3. Your marks should all have healthy senses of humor. Duh.
4. Set up a "dry run" interview with someone who's already in on the joke, who will ask you as many real sorts of interview questions as possible.
5. Set up a dress rehearsal of sorts: a second interview with someone who's not in on the joke, to better gauge if you should tone the "performance" down, or even dial it up.
6. We decided to err on the side of versimilitude/hoaxing rather than comedy; I wanted to be able to make it through all three interview sessions without someone either finding out I was fake or simply ending the interview because I was too much of a nutbar to continue wasting anyone's time.

Now, the fun part.

COSTUME

1. Thrift store ladies' watch, giant clock face, numbers all grouped down on the bottom of the face in some crazy-ass jumble
2. Thrift store silver glitter
3. Thrift store men's white dress shirt, slightly see-through
4. Thrift store men's belt, with giant belt buckle saying "SOCCER", complete with a soccer ball
5. Thrift store women's perfume
6. Thrift store tie, blue, with I HEART PERTH AMBOY on it
7. Elizabeth Taylor's White Diamonds, from Walmart -- (There is nothing quite so satisfying as asking a WM cosmetics clerk to point out the single nastiest women's perfume she hates in the store for you to wear.)
8. Blue cargo pants
9. Ratty sandals
10. Nice bottle of Chianti (Gabbiano), in a Walmart gift bag
11. Corkscrew, stolen from hotel
12. Foot-long deli sandwich, with plenty of mustard, from Safeway
13. Revlon eyeliner, also from Safeway
14. Bottle of Coke
15. Tic-Tacs
16. Bag of peanut M&Ms
17. Book: More Best Answers to the 201 Most Frequently Asked Interview Questions
18. Cell phone, with an extremely tinny (and loud) version of Marvin Gaye's Let's Get It On set as its ringtone
19. TiVo backpack to contain most of the above

I hope it's as funny on DVD/internets as it was doing it.
I've saved the watch, the belt and the tie for the memories. The tie especially.

There was a checklist of "don'ts" at a specific page in the book, and I tried to see if I could nail a fair percentage of them. I'll scan that page in later as well.

NOT SEEN ON VIDEO

1. Both Max and Kevin had seeded the fertile interviewing ground by saying that they'd already interviewed me, found me to be slightly weird but extremely qualified and desperately needed, and that these interviews were just there to see if I could be a good "cultural fit". In theory, this was to add extra insurance against anyone ending the interview prematurely -- it would be a mark of disrespect against a colleague, especially in a startup environment as this.
2. The smell of perfume was overpowering. By the time of the third interview, I'd been allowed to stew in my own smell in the same room for upwards of three hours. I was supposed to have a warmup practice interview with Max before my three marks, but he had to leave the room it was so bad. God knows what my interviewers must've thought. Speaking of which -- it's very hard to thoroughly prepare a dress shirt to have an overpowering perfume scent. I eventually settled on taking a large cooking pot, stuffing the shirt and tie inside, using up about 80% of what was in the bottles, clamping the lid down and stowing the pot under the sink to soak. It still overpowered the hotel room.
3. With some help from my wife and Max, I produced the ultimate weak handshake: shake someone's hand like a dead fish, but clutch a piece of ice in your hand beforehand for the ultimate feel in corpse handshakes.
4. Another brilliant idea from Mer was to stare 5 or 6 inches to the right of the interviewer's head at all times. This was relatively easy to do, as I could just pick a point in space (say, the top of the interviewer's ear for example) and just focus on that while talking to them. In the abstract, it doesn't sound like much, but making eye contact is a human need: not doing it will drive someone fucking bats if that person is purposefully trying to talk to you face to face. My first interviewer was cocking his head to insert himself into my field of vision. My second intervewer just avoided looking at me entirely once she got too creeped out by it. I mixed it up with the third -- I chose to make sudden, staring eye contact with him at inappropriate times, but otherwise avoid eye contact with him just like before.
5. In light of the foregoing, it's especially creepy to be talking with someone in a job interview setting who is wearing eyeliner and streaks of glitter down his face. Yet, NO ONE ASKED ABOUT THIS, PERIOD.
6. It may not show up on the video, but I was barefoot for half of the second interview and all of the third. I think I took my sandals off during a discussion of poor social graces. I greeted my third interviewer with bare feet and my shirt almost out of my pants. I think he gave me the biggest double-take I'd ever seen anyone give me.
7. As the third intervewer showed me out of the building, he held out his hand for a handshake in the lobby, and I gave him an enveloping hug complete with my head on his shoulder. I don't think he'll ever forget that.

THINGS I LEARNED

1. People really want to believe. Either that, or the eccentricity mean in the Bay Area has increased significantly over what I expected. Or, people (especially brilliant scientist-type folks) are really more polite than I initially gave them credit for. Or, they just kept talking to keep me from talking and embarrassing myself. Or all of the above.
2. Kevin and Max really work with a bunch of goddamn weirdos, since I actually got the job. Granted, it was with caveats such as "well, he's insane, but he has such good skills -- if you think your group can handle him, I say we hire him", but the fact that I got the job even after saying that I coded robots in HTML, went to Africa to teach robotics in remote villages, or got my programming inspiration from the Terminator movies... either that speaks very well of my abilities as a bullshit artist, or not very well of the skepticism in Max & Kevin's company. I hope it's the former :)
3. My first guinea pig, the "dress rehearsal" interviewer who wasn't in on the gag, thanked Kevin profusely for including him -- and he's already planning revenge.
4. The company wants me back, whenever I'm in the Bay Area again, to prank some other managers -- maybe even the CEO. They want me to come back as someone they've already hired, to sit in on meetings. Heh.

I suppose the video will be up soon. Who knows -- maybe I can add it to a demo reel.