Writing Privacy

Ten years ago this week, I got my first main job at a UK university, the London School of Economics. The date is so memorable because I made a colossal fuck-up and somehow got away with it.

It was a lunchtime interview – around 1pm. Looking back, that now seems quite odd timing, but it should have been good news. I’d had three interviews in London in the second half of 2014, and none of them had been particularly easy for someone who lived in Leicester.

One, at the Political Studies Association, was at 4pm on a scorching hot Friday in July. I’d spent most of the week in a Leicester attic trying to record finance videos and stumbling over lines. On the Friday morning, I had tried to record a video on business banking. My head was swimming. The travelling was sticky and awful.

The interview was such a struggle, I even apologised for wasting their time when they called just 15 mins later. They generously offered to pay for my train travel, which I declined. I had a nice evening in London with a friend, and left thinking better of the PSA than many other organisations I’d had dealings with in 2014.

Another interview was quite early in the morning at Kew, which isn’t the easiest spot in London to reach, especially if you’re travelling from the north. For this one – apparently – I failed a proofreading test. Even my PhD supervisor, who occasionally turned critique of my work into an art form, cast his doubts about that.

And so it went on. My confidence was in the gutter. I’d made about a hundred applications and got five interviews. I seemed to have had particularly poor showings in London. But the last of those had been a few months ago. The summer and autumn had been and gone.

And LSE was worth getting excited about. It’s a magnificent institution – so much so, I almost didn’t submit the application. If Bishop Grosseteste and the University of Bradford don’t want you, what’s the chance of LSE giving you a shot? But this was a broad role, and it seemed like a chance to pitch a case for versatility over teaching or editorial roles.

So, 1pm on a Thursday it was. Not too early, not too late. I get into Holborn for about 12:30. It’s damp, but reasonable, for early December.

And I get walking.

It’s only when I reach St Paul’s do I think to myself, “Shit, I think I might have gone the wrong way here”. Mate…

I have walked over a mile in the wrong direction.

In a panic, I do what most people in that situation might do, which is to hop in a cab. But it’s lunchtime and Fleet Street is rammed. It might have been quicker to walk, but clearly, I don’t know my way well enough. It seems the best choice at the time.

It ticks past 1pm, as we’re inching back towards the Strand and I’m wondering how I managed to blow this opportunity before I even got in the building. I remember thinking, “you’ll be lucky if they even agree to see you now”.

We get there at quarter-past, and I head up to the top floor of Connaught House, as per instructions. Nobody is there.

But someone must hear me scrambling around and sticks a head out of the main office door. “Are you Keith, by any chance?”

She waves away my apologies as they come tumbling out. The panel were glad of a chance to have a bite to eat! They would see me at 1:30pm.

Relief is an underrated feeling. It’s not something you seek; it’s more like the odd win you get at long odds against bad news. But it was great to have a reprieve.

And because of the mess I’d made, it felt like a free hit. Pressure off. And I quite enjoyed it in the end. You never really know at the time whether they’re looking for anything specific in the answers, or something about character, or just a good communicator. On another day, I might have given better answers in a tenser and more wooden fashion and not made the same impression.

Where it became fun was a test afterwards, where I inadvertently got to suss out the competition. The previous candidate has saved over the master spreadsheet rather than saving their own copy, so some of their answers are still showing.

The test includes some basic proofing, some logic, and calculating the weighted averages of student grades. This is GCSE maths I haven’t done in half a lifetime. I’m convinced one of the answers erroneously left for me is wrong. And this candidate hasn’t even attempted the weighted average.

From distant memory, I have an idea how to do this. Once I calculate roughly what to expect as the answer, I undergo trial and error a short while until it clicks. Super. Now ‘fill down’, and the job’s a good one. Having ‘failed’ a test on a previous occasion, there’s an impish enjoyment that I might not be bottom of the pile on this one.

I even begin to wonder if this is a setup – if part of the test might be owning up to finding somebody else’s answers. Honesty goes a long way at a university. So afterwards, on a hunch, I did that too.

It’s nearly quarter to four by the time I reach the British Library. I’d hoped for a lot longer to make decent use of the trip. At least half an hour was lost by my own carelessness.

But as I reach Euston Road, I get the call. The job is mine.

Adrenalin kicks in. Punching the air. Call the parents immediately. I can’t focus a wink at the library. I don’t think I make it further than the café. There are butterflies. I start in the New Year. I have four weeks – in Christmas month – to arrange a move to London.

That began by visiting a friend in Walthamstow for the evening. We’d half-pledged that we’d find a place to live together if I was ever successful in getting a job in the capital. And I hadn’t shown much sign of making good on that – until December 2014.

A friend of a friend generously offers me a room in Woolwich for the first few weeks of the New Year. It’s a wonderful arrangement, and I enjoyed time there so much, I later came back to live permanently.

And the job was amazing. I loved LSE. I loved the department. The people were engaging and interesting, the work was wide and varied, and the job was almost completely elastic to my own ambitions.

It’s a different sort of pressure, and part of me does miss how simpler working life seemed back then. But it proved to be the first step in a brilliant journey. And it all started with an interview day that threatened to be another disaster.

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