Panel game

So anyway I went for this interview. And you know what it's like when you just don't click with the interview panel but it seems a bit melodramatic to walk out so you dutifully go through the motions?

Question, answer, question, answer, and you really don't care any more because you know you don't want to work there, so you recite the answers in a sort of Dalek monotone, slotting the words together like bits of Lego.

You know exactly what I mean, don't you? That's how it was when I shot up to the ninth floor of a swish office block with an eye-popping view across the city of Belfast.

It was a government quango called, shall we say, the Monitoring and Supervisory Agency. You don't need to know what it actually does, but I'm sure it's frightfully useful.

So for starters there was the interview by numbers routine. It also didn't help that one of the female interviewers reminded me uncannily of a woman I once worked with who (allegedly) was heavily into bondage.

I looked disbelievingly at the blonde hair, the thin lips and the beady eyes and it was a supreme effort of will not to imagine her in a pair of handcuffs or tied to a bed post. People who start these unforgettable rumours should be horsewhipped.

If that wasn't distraction enough, all the interviewers were scribbling like people possessed, their red-hot biros scratching away feverishly as if I was confiding the meaning of the universe. I mean, how much information do you need to decide if candidate number six is a little treasure or a total goofball?

So anyway I stoically did my bit, everyone thanked everyone else and I rushed out into a biting Arctic wind that practically stripped off my clothes, my body hair and my eyeballs. What I have to go through to earn an honest crust.

PS (Thursday afternoon): Would you believe, I've been offered the job! But I have another interview next week for a job I really want, so I'm still going to turn this one down and take my chances. Brave or what?