DRDO (Disaster Reaches out and Destroys Opportunity)

I am usually lucky, but I have the worst of bad luck if it ever happens to me. I sat for a job interview with DRDO (Defence Research and Development Organization), the Indian defence technology unit, which is supposed to be a research based job, and which will take only the best, though it pays the same as any ordinary software company. I was eligible so I sat for it, and it happened to be the worst thing in terms of an interview that ever happened to me.

I had a splitting headache in the morning as soon as I woke up. Yet I couldn't cancel out on the interview, because that would be the worst thing to do in the face of the Don, the head of our Training and Placement Department. I called him and asked him if I could cancel, but he snappily asked me to get dressed, take whatever medicine I wanted and get to the interview room asap. He offered to send his car if I wanted. So with my head spinning, not having bathed, and my portfolio in pieces, I landed up for the interview.

I was not prepared for a core based interview. I hadn't sat for one before, and I had no clue of the sort of questions they liked to ask. As a result I made a fool of myself there. I couldn't answer simple basic questions that I'm supposed to know as an electrical engineer, and now I wonder whether I should be given the degree of an engineer at all. The panelists actually commented, that I was giving answers that were too generic, and I seemed more interested in electronics based subjects rather than electrical.

My Head of Department was on the panel too. That was a shock, because then it felt like a viva session, and I am bad at viva sessions. To top it all I was staring at him for the first few minutes, and I was wondering whether it was really him, or just a guy that looked like him. It was only after he spoke that I was sure, because I recognized the voice. It was embarrassing, because I gave all those horrible, generic answers and made a fool of myself right in front of my HOD. The icing on the cake came when one panelist asked me to name the subjects we were studying this semester. I flubbed even on that question, pathetic as it was. I named four of five subjects. The one I forgot was the subject that my HOD teaches.

How does one recover from a shock of this kind? I have never had such a disaster before. I have been assiduously avoiding my HOD since then, though I couldn't escape him in the classroom the next lecture after this, when he commented that he hadn't expected this from me. The story of forgetting his subject though, seems to be a hit amongst all my batchmates.