The Ship

I stood in front of the office waiting for a yellow taxi, stunned. I’d just been fired. I’d been expecting this to happen three days later, when my six-month probationary period came to an end, but the bright daylight bathing the street outside – I usually left the office at five thirty – confirmed it was happening now.

The termination meeting had gone very smoothly. We mostly talked, at my prompting, about the €1000 severance cheque, which the director made sure to tell me they weren’t legally obliged to pay.

I gazed at the hilltop opposite, at a newish building which jutted out like a ship. It looked like it was about to set sail, its passengers chosen and the national flag raised aloft – though I could hardly see it from where I stood – and fluttering in the winds of a deluge that would never come, because knowing you’re going to get fired is still pretty different to actually getting fired.

The Interview

I’d arrived early at the company’s offices, having checked the address two days beforehand. I really wanted the job. I was interviewed by the director of the Ramallah office and the manager of the team I would potentially be joining. The interview was in English, even though we were all Arabs, because they needed to check my proficiency in the language I’d be speaking every day with head office in Germany. There were a full two hours of technical questions, and then another hour on my personality; they asked me about my strengths and weaknesses, about obscure aspects of my behaviour, about my hobbies.

I knew what they wanted to hear. The weaknesses had to include strengths, for example, so I told them my greatest fault was my perfectionism, and admitted I sometimes needed to remind myself that perfection just wasn’t achievable. I told them I sometimes used to show up at university in my pyjamas, hoping it would put them in mind of Steve Jobs, who used to go to class barefoot, but I also added that I sometimes dressed in business attire, so as to intimate I was an open-minded guy and didn’t like to be pigeonholed. When the team leader asked why I’d graduated a year late, I replied that I was tenacious and unwilling to accept defeat, and that I’d got my act together in my final year and decided to retake a bunch of subjects in order to be sure I’d end up with the best grades.

When I told them I was also a poet and a short-story writer whose last story had won the all-universities prize, the director asked me if I’d heard of the British writer V. S. Naipaul, so I said that I had, although I hadn’t, and to prove it I added that he’d won that prize (doesn’t everyone win at least one prize at some point?) at which the director nodded: the Nobel.

The Nobel led him to a final question: If I had to choose between a V. S. Naipaul novel and a book about JavaScript, which would I pick? I guess it would depend on what I needed in that moment in time, I mused. I see humans as sailing ships, where one sail represents knowledge and the other art. If I feel that one sail is hanging loose and hampering my progress, I’ll pull it taut. Anyway, I don’t like the distinction between «books about computers» and «literature»; each has something to teach me about the other. Who knows, I said; an image from a poem might help me find an elegant solution to a programming conundrum that would have a less imaginative programmer stumped.