Chater 5

About 2-3 years ago, Mr. Naman submitted to his father's wishes of getting a normal job and began the interview cycle. One of the typical interview questions asked to him was : Where do you see yourself 5 years from now? This question just baffled Mr. Naman as he didnt knew the answer. For the first 7 interviews he tried the "I frankly dont know" answer to which he got a raised eyebrow, lips down, "silent huh" reaction and quickly followed by - "well thank you for your time. We will let you know of our decision soon" and mostly in the next day, sometimes that evening only he got a reject.
Mr. Naman could never have understood the rationale behind this question. It was not that he did not knew the trivial answer but he did not wanted to lie for some job that he never wanted in the first place. So followed Mr. Naman's experiments with the interviewer. Some of his attempts were:

Interviewer: Where do you see yourself 5 years from now?
Mr. Naman: I dont know, why dont you tell me where do you see yourself 5 years from now?

And now followed the case analysis:
Case 1 - Interviewer: (Blank face), stammers something
Mr. Naman: See! Do you get it now? Do you agree that it was a dumb question?

Case 2 - Interviewer: The trivial BS!
Mr. Naman: Good for you. I do not have such concise clairvoyance.

but if Mr. Naman is not impressed, he goes like
Case 3-
Mr. Naman: So you think that you know everything about your life. Huh? You have got it all planned out. Huh? Have you considered the contingency situations? What if your wife discovers your affair with the pretty secretary sitting outside? Or what if your mother sends her awful homemade laddoos to your boss? Have you thought about that? You think that because you wear a tie, because you polish your shoes, everybody should do that.
Interviewer: What is this?
Mr. Naman: I am not finished yet.

And then to show the irony of the situation, he walks out.


When he had heard all the different answers to the above cases, he decided to increase the level of fun. In his next interview, he answered this question as

Mr. Naman: I want to be the person sitting above you in the hierarchy of the organization. Is it possible.

The above answered once backfired when Mr. Naman interviewed for a really small company and the interviewer said that he was the CEO of this company. This was unexpected by Mr. Naman and so he replied by - " So what, even Steve Jobs was fired."