Everything is annotated.

My big interview is in the morning. 9 am.

Ironed a shirt already. Shaved. Cut my nails. Clipped a rogue eyebrow hair. Set three alarms, starting two hours before.

Booked a hotel for it, to be somewhere quiet.

Everything is arranged on the makeup desk. Printed the job description. Annotated it. Highlighted competencies. Underlined verbs.

Made a colour-coded sheet with columns for skills and rows for work examples:

  • Green for technical strengths.
  • Blue for soft skills.
  • Yellow for collaborations.
  • Red for my big wins. Looks too loud. Will change to orange.
  • All on matte paper. No glare. The font is Garamond. Readable, elegant.
A close-up of four highlighters arranged in a row by color (green, blue, yellow, and orange) resting neatly on a stack of printed paperwork. The setup sits on a tidy hotel makeup desk beside a smartphone.

I mapped out likely questions. If they mention initiative, a story about onboarding. Stakeholder alignment, the big Lisbon project I ran with Hugh.

Anything unexpected, I’ve got bridge phrases ready for thinking time. “That’s a great question,” or “Let me apply that to my last role.”

I practised being warm. Confident. Lightly amused, like I’ve heard it before, but still delighted to share. Timed my answers. Three minutes for a story. Twenty-five seconds to close it. No waffle.

Rehearsed all the pauses, too. Breaths. Beats to drink a glass of water. Not too much, don’t want to need the toilet.

Will keep it slow. Calm. Make sure no answer sounds like I’ve memorised it. I’ll talk wearing a smile. You can tell when a voice is smiling. I read it in Harvard Business Review.

“Tell us about a time you worked well under pressure.”

I’ve got three potential answers: The amusing Christmas deployment with no QA, the outage reversal in under thirty minutes, and my humble but heroic tale of saving the intern who froze.

“Why do you want this job?”

Didn’t like my answers. Asked ChatGPT to make something human. “I need work that gives me something back. Not just a salary, but something I can point to and know it only exists because I showed up.”

There’s building work over the road. A guy in a yellow hat with a dirty big drill.

Will open the window first thing to get air in, but shut it five minutes before the call. Close the blinds. Mute phone. Lock door. Sit straight. Hands flat on desk.

I’ll start with “Good morning, thanks for calling.” Not “Hi.” Not “Hello.” Polite. Crisp. Let them speak. Won’t jump in. No babble.

Spent hours talking to the mirror. Reading lines till I sounded employable. Normal. OK.

Should I have stroked Princess the other day? Let her smell me. Or offered friendly advice to the neighbour.

“Try giving her some treats!”, “Close the curtains at night. She might be scared.”

Something kind.

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