For this entry I'm going to spend most to all of it preparing for tomorrow's interview. And perhaps indirectly prepping for the first day of the job. You know, that other minor thing happening tomorrow.

The lady related to this interview I have apparently forgot to send me some minor details about tomorrow's interview so I had sent her email mentioning that if there was anything left to send to be sure and send it before 7am California time since that was around the time I would be leaving (I happen to know she's on the east coast). I sent that email either Saturday night or Friday night, can't remember now. Probably Saturday. In any case she responded tonight with some details. Namely that the interview would be of the "behavioral" variety. She also mentioned a link to a web site that kind of summarizes and explains what to expect in a behavioral type interview. 

Keeping in mind it's not as though I have never been in a behavioral interview in the past. In fact I think I have done relatively well with them. My interview performance the last several months has prompted me to want to prepare, so lets go through some things here. Also, I should probably think of some questions for them for the inevitable do you have any questions for us? that will come up.

I'll just go through the included bullets points one by one as best I can. The first one is integrity. I'd like to believe I have some fairly solid integrity traits some where inside. I think I would define integrity as holding to principals even in the face of adversity or an obvious easier and quicker way out. Right?

Lets see, examples... well I did for instance screw something up at the place I worked with a particular batch file. And this just so happened to have corresponded with a network outage. So the people that ended up calling me were asking about the thing I screwed up as well as the network outage. I could have said it was all the network outage although it seems obvious that would not have held water for any length of time or I could have just come clean right then and there. Which is what I did actually. Okay I'm not sure if that's a good story I want to bring up in this particular interview or not. Not sure they'd let me use batch files after that. Not sure they would let me any way. 

Another example? 

I'll move on now to some form of question about a bad situation I was able to resolve or otherwise turn into a positive. I think I know this one. I was manually installing applications on literally a thousand PCs and was extremely frustrated. It was one of the most frustrating things I have done for the longest period of time probably in my entire life. I did learn a lot about silent installs and launching applications via HTML hyper links that I don't think I would have. I turned something incredibly frustrating into something that ended up teaching me a lot in other words. Not sure that's a good example.

Or on a more positive version about a success story example I could talk about those batch files I wrote that would register an ocx then install some MSIs all one-after-another. The OCX of course being a dependency on which the MSIs depended. Actually I also wrote a batch file that would do a DIR command on three different folders, re-directing them to a text file then set up a scheduled task to run said batch file once an hour every hour 24 hours a day. Also deleting the old text file if it was there. That was definitely a success story I think. At least, the guy I wrote it for seemed to appreciate it quite a bit.

The next bullet point actually was "personal accountability" which I think is some how connected with personal responsibility which I suppose if they use the term I could bring up in an effort to draw a distinction but I would not mention any politics directly of course. Just that the two concepts are related in some subtle way and that my "personal philosophy" I make every effort to live up to is that of personal responsibility. 

I would say personal responsibility is more something you do yourself voluntarily, whilst personal accountability is the result or consequence of an action. In other words if I screw up personal accountability is my being held responsible for the screw while personal responsibility would be my one-hundred percent truthfulness readily admitting the screw and accepting the concequences. It's a subtle dinstinction (in my my mind) but it is still there.

Next, bullet-point-wise is Passion for excellence. I don't actually know what that is. Other than simply stating I'm going to be "balls to the walls" amounts of effort every day to provide the best possible customer experience (in some many words) I don't really know what they want to hear out of that one.

Next is teamwork. Well I did create that way of converting a thumb drive into a bootable PE environment via the WAIK. I created and made available a Ghost image of it then created a word doc explaining how to re-image the thumb drive. There was the above mentioned installation of software on the thousand PCs as a team effort. That was a tough thing actually, everyone having separate excel spreadsheets and then having to combine them all. Actually there's lots of instances in which I attempted in some way to benefit the team at multiple jobs. Although those efforts were not always noticed by the ones that mattered most.

Track records of success? I guess I kind of mentioned that with some of those examples.about batch files and so forth.

Well I could probably keep writing for another hour but it's getting late so I think I'll just go to bed now instead. Obviously there will be a post of some relevance tomorrow.