Main Character of the Week: Woman who had the most ‘standoffish’ job interview ever

Main Character of the Week is a weekly column that tells you the most prominent “main character” online (good or bad). It runs on Fridays in the Daily Dot’s web_crawlr newsletter. If you want to get this column a day before we publish it, subscribe to web_crawlr, where you’ll get the daily scoop of internet culture delivered straight to your inbox.

The internet is a stage, and someone unwillingly stumbles onto it weekly. This makes them the “main character” online. Sometimes their story is bonkers, like a movie attendee who said a worker pressured them to leave ‘Inside Out 2’ before it was over; usually it’s a gaffe. In any case, that main character energy flows through the news cycle and turbo-charges debate for several business days.

Here’s the Trending team’s main character of the week: 

It’s the woman who returned to the workforce after years away and had the weirdest job interview for an office gig. As we reported this week:

“I’ve never been treated like that before,” Lauren, the woman who went viral for subjecting herself to a wild interview to the tune of more than a million views on her TikTok, said. “Do you have to ask for consent now to shake somebody’s hand? What the hell?”

As she tells it, her interaction was cold, unorthodox, and oddly passive-aggressive. Her business casual outfit was criticized for revealing her shoulders. The interviewer was “standoffish” and inhospitable. The vibes were off which matters because the interviewer should be a hospitable ambassador for the organization she’s joining.

Instead, she refused to shake her hand. Silver lining: She got the job and turned it down.

The video was deeply relatable with commenters sharing their gross first impressions at job interviews. The lesson is to always trust your gut.

I remember interviewing for a door-to-door sales job with a guy who had an electric bass at work and sold me on his live-hard, play-hard vision for his team. I am a workaholic but I couldn’t buy into his false enthusiasm for opportunist upselling, even as a broke and desperate man in his 20s.

I remember getting a job fundraising for a political candidate as a 19-year-old and the guy who interviewed me didn’t understand the community he was sent to target. And he seemed smugly running for his next job, not actually bought into community organizing.

I was not a good fit and was passive-aggressively cut three weeks later.

When I got to the Daily Dot in 2014, I interviewed with three editors who were smarter, faster, stronger journalists than I was. I couldn’t wait to learn from them and develop my skills. 

Every opportunity to go above and beyond was me doing so because it seemed fun. Ten years later I’m the only gainfully employed journalist left in the group chat.

Fit is everything. 

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