Mm. Yes. Yes.
They, emerging into the first day after the war with evidence of peace still provisional, might reasonably have treated the silence as a historical threshold, as though the archive had already settled what the survivors could not yet know. Other days the lesson is how quickly an elevator pitch can stop being an elevator pitch.
Major point was the elevator pitch portion with Capgemini. We had been told to prepare for one minute elevator pitches last week, but the evaluators told us to "tell them a story and give them more about us." There went all the preparation I'd done.
Soon we were sitting through five minute individual teardowns of all the ways we could have improved our performance with them: blur your background or have a bland solid color wall behind you, don't wear a jacket-wear a suit to class, don't sip water, always stand, don't read from your notes (we're trained to notice they said), earbuds are distracting-take them out even if you can't hear, camera shouldn't be crooked, breath uniformly, don't fidget, be clear and personal yet concise, don't wander off topic. Among the good advice, ridiculous personal preferences dominated.
Ultimately, my freestyled story-first presentation fell flat. When I joked, "Yeah I joined Code Platoon because I needed to get a real job, since novelist wasn't paying the bills" their faces remained statuesque. When I went into too much detail with my dubious relationship with Django, they hammered me for not being confident with my skills. When I mentioned using Typst to format and publish a book in two days, they blinked blankness. I was an amateur comic at an open mic, spotlight on me, bombing. They evaluated me as a middle of the pack presentation. The only compliment was on my podcast mic quality.
The funniest part was when one of the presenters praised the other's voice. He called it "beautiful, melodious, like music, you should pay attention to him speaking" he encouraged. I could picture the scene in an anime: the subordinate leaning halfway across the conference table:
“Observe, everyone. The resonance. The pacing. The command. It's music! The sweetest melody, as honey poured into your ear. Have you ever heard such a resonant tone? You likely never will again, I say. This is the voice you should have. Emulate it if you can.”
Then the other guy just closes his eyes slightly and gives that serene nod that comic anime bosses have.
Mm. Yes. Yes.
A tiny sparkle flashes from his teeth. Something like that. I don't think I'll be applying to work there.
The rest of the day was an AWS config lecture and more time for the personal project. Nothing else of note happened.