My Facebook friends might know that I have decided to elevate my search for employment to an art form. Yes, why not? I might as well enjoy my, as yet, fruitless search.
So we’ll start with this story. I went to an interview for an interaction design position at a major publishing firm in Amsterdam. This was my first interview since returning to Amsterdam from Iran, and I was a bit nervous, especially since I had not yet gotten accustomed to being on-time for appointments. The Dutch are on-time when they arrive 5 minutes early. Iranians are on-time when they arrive 2 hours late. After four years of living on Iran time, Dutch time was proving a bit of a struggle for me. But I managed to arrive just a couple of minutes late despite a delay on the metro.
I was led upstairs where two baby-faced young men waited to interview. Here I am interviewing for a tech-design job, and my interviewers have barely read my resume, let alone googled me. Not only that, they felt that our time was best spent discussing my college education. Uh. College? I graduated 17 years ago. Seventeen. (valedictorian, btw.) S e v e n t e e n.
In the end they told me that I was too “American” for the job. What does that mean?