The Job Interview

Valeria Ortega had planned the morning of her interview down to the minute. She would leave her apartment in Walthamstow at half past seven, take the Victoria line to King's Cross, arrive by twenty past eight and buy a flat white at the little cafe on the corner, which she had already visited twice, as a rehearsal. The interview, for a senior data analyst role at a health-tech company, was at nine. Nothing, she had decided, would be left to chance.

Chance, as it happened, had other plans. As she turned away from the counter, a man in a gray suit stepped back from the queue, and her flat white went all over his sleeve and most of his shirt. For a moment they both stared at the spreading brown stain. "Oh my goodness, I'm so sorry," Valeria said. "Are you all right? It wasn't too hot, was it?"

The man looked down at his shirt with the expression of someone who has a meeting in twenty minutes. "I'll live," he said, a little shortly. Then, perhaps noticing how horrified she looked, he softened. "Honestly, it was my fault as much as yours. I wasn't looking." Valeria was already pulling napkins from the dispenser. "Please, let me pay to have it cleaned. Would you mind giving me an email address? I'd feel terrible otherwise." "That's very kind of you, but really, there's no need," he said. "Good luck with whatever you're dressed up for." And he was gone.

She arrived at the office at ten to nine, slightly out of breath, and was shown into a meeting room overlooking the canal. At five past nine the door opened, and in came a woman from HR, a younger man with a laptop and, last of all, wearing a navy jumper that was clearly not what he had left home in, the man from the cafe.

There was a pause that seemed to last about a year. Valeria considered, briefly, pretending not to recognize him. She considered, even more briefly, leaving. Then she remembered something her first manager in Monterrey had told her: when something goes wrong, mention it first, before anyone else has to. She stood up and held out her hand. "I think we've already met," she said. "I'm Valeria. I'm afraid I owe you a shirt."

The man looked at her for a second, and then laughed, properly, in a way that made the woman from HR visibly relax. "Daniel Hartley," he said. "Head of Analytics. And as I said, you don't owe me anything. Although I'd be lying if I said this jumper was my first choice for today." The younger man coughed in a way that might have been a laugh. "Shall we make a start?" said the woman from HR, who was clearly enjoying herself.

Oddly, the interview went better than any Valeria had ever had. Perhaps it was because the worst had already happened. She walked them through a model she had built in her current job to predict hospital waiting times, explained where it had gone wrong and what she had changed, and answered their questions without the stiff, rehearsed phrases she had practiced on the train. When Daniel asked how she dealt with stakeholders who disagreed with her data, she smiled. "Politely," she said. "And I always offer to pay for the dry cleaning."

At the end, he walked her to the lift. "I'll be honest with you," he said. "We've seen a lot of people who are very good with numbers. What we don't see so often is someone who can handle an awkward situation without making it more awkward. You've done that twice this morning." "Would you mind if I asked how many candidates you're seeing?" said Valeria. "I'm afraid I can't tell you that. But if I were you, I'd keep my phone switched on this afternoon."

The call came at four. She got the job. On her first day, three weeks later, she found a paper cup of coffee waiting on her new desk, with a note in neat handwriting: "Welcome to the team. This one has a lid." Underneath, in a different hand, someone had added: "Please keep it well away from Daniel."