The Interview

Sana got to the building at twenty past nine for an interview at ten. She had planned it that way, because she had once been late for something important and had never forgotten it. She sat in a café across the road with a folder on her knees and read her notes for the fourth time.

The job was on the third floor: two days a week at first, then perhaps more. She had written in her application that she was organised and patient, which was true, and that she worked well in a team, which was true on good days only.

The lift was out of order, so she walked up. On the second landing she met a man carrying a box of files, and she held the door for him. He asked whether she was lost. She said she was early, which is a different kind of lost.

The panel was two people: Helen Prosser, who had worked there for nineteen years, and a younger colleague called Dev, who wrote everything down. The room was small and too warm. Sana left the jug of water alone, because her hands were shaking a little.

The first question was the one she had prepared for most carefully, and she answered it badly. She heard herself using words she never used: strategic, proactive, solution-focused. Halfway through a sentence she realised she couldn't remember how it had started, so she stopped and said, "Sorry. That wasn't an answer."

Dev looked up from his notes. Helen Prosser put her pen down and said, "Then give me one." It didn't sound unkind. It sounded like somebody who had sat in that chair a great many times and had heard the word proactive more often than she wanted to.

So Sana told them about the index. In her last job she had inherited a paper index that had been kept by four different people over eleven years, each with their own system, and none of them had written anything down. It had taken her seven months to rebuild it.

She described the shelf where the oldest cards were kept, and the two weeks she had spent being sure the whole thing was hopeless. She said that if she had known at the start how long it would take, she would probably have refused. Dev laughed. Helen Prosser did not, but she was listening.

The rest of the interview went the way such conversations go once somebody has been honest: faster, and with fewer complete sentences. They asked about hours, about her experience with two systems, about whether she minded working alone. She said she didn't.

At the end Helen Prosser asked whether Sana had any questions. Sana asked the one she had told herself not to ask: "Why is the post free?" There was a short pause. Dev looked at Helen. Helen said the woman before her had done the job for twenty-two years and had moved to be near her son.

"She left us a note," Helen added. "Three pages. Most of it is about which drawer sticks." Sana said that sounded like the most useful document there. In the corridor afterwards she was almost sure she had not got the job, and almost sure she had enjoyed the morning anyway.

Two weeks later a letter arrived. She had not got that job; somebody with more experience had been chosen. But at the bottom of the second paragraph there was an offer of a different one, three days a week, starting in June, sorting the material in the boxes she had seen on the stairs.

Sana read it twice at the kitchen table. Then she rang the number and asked for Helen Prosser, and while it was ringing she noticed that she wasn't nervous at all. She said yes before either of them had said anything about money, and she never regretted that either.