How do you forget that?

My job is pretty frenetic throughout the day. Nothing particularly challenging, mind you, but there are A LOT of different things to juggle. I like to think I thrive in this type of environment and will even go so far as to say there is a kind of elegance in the controlled chaos of a peak hiring season.

BUT.

But, I have a flaw. (I know! Me! Shocker!) A silly, strange flaw. A flaw that means I forget the darndest things sometimes. I am that person driving down the road with my keys dangling from the doorknob because for some dumb reason I decided to pull out an actual key to unlock my doors (hey, the sensor thing wasn’t working) and then managed to get in the car, turn it on (isn’t that fob thing supposed to sense it isn’t literally inside the car?), and head off down the interstate. Thank goodness it was cold – my key probably iced itself inside the door and was the only reason I didn’t have to spend untold number of hundreds of dollars buying a new key.

OR, I may run around all day like a maniac and completely forget to go to the bathroom. Or drink water. Or eat. Or do any number of routine, self-care things that mean you don’t finish the day like a marathoner crawling toward the finish line, dehydrated, exhausted, and yet with a bladder so full I have a passing stray thought to climb on the scale after a pee to see how much weight I have lost.

Oh, well. I guess no one is perfect.

Let’s move on, shall we? I promise this comes back around at the end of this post.

As one may imagine, a significant fraction of my week is spent going through recent applicants and calling anyone halfway decent enough (on paper) to warrant further discussion. Before picking up the phone, our workflow requires some nominal due diligence for any applicant to sanity check they aren’t already in our files for some reason or other. This one lady had pretty solid experience for a school food service position, but I saw we already had a file on her AND she had been offered the exact same position about a week prior. Puzzling. Further inspection of the file indicated she had completed about half of the hiring paperwork before quitting.

Curiosity piqued, I decided to call and see what was up.

Me: (after introduction) You applied for a school nutrition services position, but it looks like we offered you the position late last week.

Halfway Hiring Paperwork (HHP): What? Really? I don't remember that!

Me: Well, I'm not sure how you didn't remember that because you got halfway through the hiring paperwork before quitting.

HHP: Seriously? (irritating laugh that I always hate) I really don't remember!

Me: (briefly reviews the job description with HHP) I'm not going to go through another full interview since you applied for the exact same job. Are you interested in continuing the hiring process?

HHP: Of course! Can you send me the link again so I can finish that?

Me: Sure. Though if you don't complete the rest of the hiring paperwork before the end of the day, I will assume you are not a serious job seeker and remove you from consideration since this is the second time we're trying to get you through the process.

I admit, there are times when I forget some of the stupidest stuff. We all have those days. But to get halfway through a hiring process before quitting, then forgetting you had been offered that job and reapplying to the same job a week later? That takes a level of memory blackout I wouldn’t have thought possible.