I almost made it to Google !!

I just missed it !! I almost made it to working with Google annd believe me, it was by a whisker ! It was really interesting, everything happening in just one day.

I had never applied for a job in Google but somehow the Google executives managed to find out that I am one among the best available and hence decided to invite me for an interview ! This was a honor for me, to be "invited" by one of the best companies for an opportunity to work in their company. I just wondered if this is what people refer to as "Opportunity knocks on your door!". I gleefully accepting the invitation and the technical interview was a telephonic one which was scheduled on the same day! Mmmm ... no time to prepare but then I am supposed to be the best !

The clock struck 10 and simultaneously the phone rang. In the initial few seconds of our conversation, I could imagine a techie sitting on the other side of the phone banging on two or three key boards with cables flowing all across him and his table ! Once we were both comfortable with the conversation, he asked about my profile and then we were into the technical round. Surprisingly, he said that he had just one technical question for me and I just hoped that that question had nothing to do with the fundamentals of discrete mathematics applied to holistic speech reconginition in a noisy environment ! But the question just stumped me ! His question was "Can you explain how placeware works from a user point of view ?". I just wondered if he knew whether this was an interview and whether he had confused this call with the call to the Placeware support team !!! But this was the question for me and I knew I was making it to google. With total confidence, I described the working of placeware from login to how you can conduct meetings and log out once you are through with the meeting. The techie was totally impressed ! He then logged out of the call after asking me to wait for the call from HR.

It was one of the most anxious moments of my life. I got to know from the techie that there were 3 people who were invited for the interview and only 2 would be selected. Finally the phone rang and it was a conference call involving another candidate and the HR manager. The HR manager informed us that they had selected one candidate and now it was a toss up between me and the third candidate. Both of us had answered the technical question really well (yeah !!) and now he had to choose one. He paused for around 30 seconds and then informed that I am the unlucky one !! The world had just collapsed under my feet and it was as though I was being sucked into an abyss !! What did I do wrong ? Why the third candidate and not me ? This is not fair ... all kinds of questions were criss-crossing my mind ! The HR manager then clarified that I had lost because of the answer I gave for the question relating to my current job profile. Instead of mentioning my job profile, I had got excited and had mentioned about the challenges that I had solved - the nuts and bolts of the product architecture that I was working on !

Excitement had become the bane of the Indian cricket team in the world cup finals and now it had come back to haunt me !!! There was no purpose left in my life. I just banged the table in front of me, but surprisingly the table was soft as bed ! The bottle of water that was placed on the table toppled over and I could feel the water spill all over the room and on me ! Things just were not going right. Suddenly the world around me had gone dark and I was sitting on my bed feeling sad at missing out on the opportunity of not getting into Google ! I could still feel the water that had spilled over on me ! There was sure a missing link ... something had happened ! It was then that I realized .. it was one of those dreams that makes reality look boring. I had just missed working for Google in my dreams ! In another 5 hours I had to go back to the same old job !