As a followup to the “Prejudice, cynism in the IT sector? Impossible!” thread, I thought it might be fun to share the most humiliating ageist interview experiences we’ve had. I had so many to choose from — the two HR girls who told me stories about their fathers all through the interview, the guy who asked, “There’s a lot of walking in this job, would you be OK with that?”, and a host of others — but my favorite happened while I was a 50-year old Master’s Candidate.
One of my professors had a call from the Telephone Services office on Campus. They needed someone to munge a file from Excel to another format for import into some program they were buying. He recommended me, and sent me over.
When I told them why I was there, the head of the department said, “Oh we were expecting someone….” and then just stopped and got redder and redder. I finally suggested “Shorter?” (I’m 6’4″). Then we both started to laugh — she was about my age, so she knew from both sides what the joke was.
