• mozz@mbin.grits.dev
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    8 months ago

    I was invited to give a speech to all new hires to get them fired up, and said sure. I think I was picked because I was a known weirdo; not that they were expecting great things out of the speech but more along the lines of “well it definitely won’t be boring.” It was a rowdy company and someone threw a roll of paper towels at me basically right when I walked out. I caught the roll in the air with both hands, held it for a moment, and put it on the table next to me and started in with my speech. I honestly couldn’t tell you most of what I said. I didn’t have any particular plan or preparation beyond the first few sentences. I mostly talked about teamwork and dumb stuff I had done and what I’d learned, and everyone fucking loved it and little turns of phrase from the speech entered into the company vernacular for a little while. I have no idea where it all came from; I had no particular public speaking experience, but I had a blast with it. Someone told me it was like a sermon.

    Another one: I got an interview with a FAANG company back in their heyday, and studied my absolute ass off for the interview. I wrote out solutions to programming problems on paper, then once I was satisfied, I typed them into the computer and saw how they ran and identified problems with them, then once I was pretty practiced and comfortable with that, I bought a whiteboard and started doing the same on the whiteboard, on my own or in real time and explaining the problems to my girlfriend. (I was on a plane doing the on-paper version and typing solutions into the computer, and the guy sitting next to me asked about what I was doing and I explained, and he offered me a job.) I smoked the interview and they offered me a job and a bunch of money, which I actually turned down for complex reasons, which confused everybody.

    What the fuck why are they both work related… I have others, some of which I wouldn’t want to share on Lemmy, but it bothers me a little bit that the ones that came right immediately to mind were of that nature. Counterbalancing ones:

    Sat on an airplane next to a massage lady who brought her own alcohol on the plane and she talked with me while drinking quite a lot from her bottle and then once she was drunk she gave me a long massage. She invited me to lunch with her, but she was married so I decided against it.

    My friend got himself confused driving at night and was in a wrong lane head-on with another car and I calmly told him he should shift to the right, and he did, and he told me after that me being very relaxed about it helped him to react smoothly and calmly and not freak out or do anything that would delay us not dying.

    Gave someone else’s ID to a cop and then when he looked at it and looked back at me and said “That ain’t you!” I convinced him that it actually was.