I'm kinda screwball in my interview questions. My favorite questions are:
-- What did you do for the most fun on a weekend?
-- What is the best fun trip you ever had?
-- Tell me about the first computer you ever used.
-- Tell me about your computer at home. Did you build it, or buy it? Why?
By the end of that discussion, I pretty much know what I need to know about that person.
IMHO.
Heh, now those are some interview questions I can answer!
Hey...I could handle those.
I guess for the most part I've been spoiled. I interviewed for two positions when I first got out of the military and another two when I got laid off in 2002. None of those interviews were really, truly bad, and both the ones for the jobs I actually got were actually kinda fun. So...here's hoping the trend continues.
Except...I've interviewed for positions here already, and except for the position that went away the week I expected a call, the interviews were excrutiating. Sure hope the extra prep for this one pays off.
Go driving to a new place; or, if it's not a good weekend to drive, settle down with a couple of good books.
What is the best fun trip you ever had?
The summer I was eight, my parents and I drove from San Antonio to California and back. We took our parakeets with us.
Hippies tried to hijack us, and my daddy almost had to pull his gun.
A torrential rainfall caught us in the desert, and we stopped at a motel court in Gila Bend, Arizona; the proprietress came out in curlers and robe to get us settled in for the night.
We stayed in a Holiday Inn in L.A., a round building twenty-some stories high; the bellboy hid the parakeets on the cart by surrounding them with our luggage. We got on the elevator, and the birds woke up and started making a great racket; the other people on the elevator were trying to find the source of the noise, while we had the most innocent looks on our faces.
I found signature jewelry in my name at Disney Land. We drove through a Sequoia, and bought petrified wood. I saw the Golden Gate, and the Grand Canyon.
Tell me about the first computer you ever used.
IBM System 360. A room full of equipment and three shifts of operators. A room down the hall full of cardpunch machines. Greenbar paper printouts, and I had to flirt with the operators to get them to mount the letter-sized paper and the upper-lowercase print train for me.
Did I mention that I'm old???
Tell me about your computer at home. Did you build it, or buy it? Why?
Built it, about 3 years ago. AMD Athlon 1700 processor, MSI KT3 Ultra m/b, 768meg DDR333 mem, two physical PATA HDDs totalling 200gB, CDRW, DVDRom, ATI Radeon 9000 AGP video card. I built it because I knew what I wanted it to do, and I could do it "on the cheap." It does what I need it to do, but the time is coming for me to build another.