So I mentioned quite a while back that I had been reading The Daily WTF.  Well a little over a year ago I sent something in.  Not bad code, but a funny story about an interview experience I had.  Last Friday (on my birthday, ironically), Alex (who runs the site) decided to run my story along with four other interview stories.  He also decided to take a poll of which story was the best, and the submitter of the winning story would win a bean bag chair from Sumo Lounge.  Well my story won (seen here, the one titled “Are You An Astronaut?”).  Be forewarned:  the version of the story shown on the site has been edited a little bit from what I sent in (which will be faithfully reproduced at the end of this post).  I kinda feel bad that I stopped reading the site a few months ago because I got bored with it... but I got an e-mail this week saying that I won an Omni bean bag chair, I just needed to pick a color (I went with Charcoal Green).  These things are supposed to be pretty nice (and at $150, they’d better be!); I’ll be sure to let you, o faithful reader of my blog, know what I think of it.  Hopefully the blonde comes with it.

As promised, here is the original version of the story that I sent in:

Fresh out of college, I was interviewing for a junior programming job at a company that develops software for aerospace/automotive companies.  So far the day was going well.  I interviewed for about an hour with someone from HR, then interviewed for another hour with the person who might be my manager, and that interview went really well.  Then to close the day I interviewed with the project manager (the previous manager’s manager).  Again, things were going well.  There was a lull in the interview where the guy was looking up something on his computer, so I started looking at the things he had up around his office.  On one wall he had a collage of NASA stuff.  Without thinking, I guess to make conversation or something, I asked him if he was an astronaut!  It was one of those situations where I was regretting it even as it was coming out of my mouth.  He looked at me like I was retarded, then said “no, I was a project manager at NASA.”

As it turns out, I was somehow still offered that job, and it’s where I’m working now (a little over a year later).  I don’t know if the guy remembers me asking that or not, but he’s my manager’s manager so I don’t really see him that often.