One of the jobs I had applied for during my crazy spree of applications during the Eid Holiday was for an English language writer for a local publishing company. It was one of those long shot things, I don't really have any professional writing experience, but it's something I enjoy doing and have always thought about doing, so I figured, why not apply? When I didn't hear anything back, I more or less forgot that I had ever applied. Then, on Sunday, they called out of the blue to have an interview on Thursday.
So Thursday afternoon, I left work a little early, which was no big deal since I wasn't doing anything anyway. I got a taxi to take me to the office which was in the downtown area of Riyadh. I left an hour early for the interview in case the taxi driver didn't know where it was and we got lost trying to find it. Turns out, whenever you leave early in case the worst should happen, the worst never happens. The driver knew exactly where to go and we had almost no traffic. I found myself in front of the office building 45 minutes early.
I tried to kill some time by checking out the shops on the ground floor of the office building, but since one was a wool cloth wholeseller and the other sold thobes (men's robes) there was only so much window shopping I could do. Finally, I figured that 15 minutes early was a reasonable amount of earliness, so I went upstairs the the publishing company's office.
There were two doors, and I wasn't sure which one I should enter. Turns out both doors were locked. I looked around and saw what looked like the old-school drive through window speakers. I pushed the button and could hear a buzzing inside the office. I figured that meant that someone would come soon to open the door. I waited. It's a funny thing about waiting. I told myself I would wait 5 minutes. But standing in a hallway in a deserted looking office building is a surprisingly long 5 minutes. I think I only lasted 3 before I decided to ring it again. Finally, someone came to the door and let me in.
I sat in the small waiting area and picked up one of the magazines they published. The issue was all about traveling in the southern part of Saudi. I was amazed. It was beautiful. All I had ever seen of Saudi was concete jungle. I had no idea the desert could be so beautiful. The magazine made it seem like there was actually the possibility of real tourism here. I was impressed. I figured I should probably read some of the stories as well and not just look at the pictures. I was about a page into an article on historic Jeddah when May came out to let me know they were finishing up a birthday party for a colleague and they would be ready soon.
May came and brought me to the conference room and she asked me about my iqama right away and I started in on the whole story. I was just about finished when the head of the company cam in and I had to start the whole thing again. I was only about half way through this time when the third interviewer, Nick, head of the English department came in and I had to start again for the third time. By now I had whittled the story down to the bare bones. The company that brought me did something illegal with my paperwork, and because of this I was in a sort of limbo. I couldn't be transfered or given a final exit or anything really for reasons that no one fully understands, aside from its a sort of Catch 22 situation.
Formalities asid, we got into the interview portion, which was pretty standard. Then, after the head of the company left, I was left with Nick and May. They seemed to get along really well together and had a nice raport. Nick seemed sort of lost and confesed he hadn't really ever been in charge of hiring before and so didn't really no what to do next and wasn't sure what questions to ask. He ended up asking me what kind of questions I would ask if I were the interviewer, which turned out to be a kind of brilliant question. If I'm ever in a postition to interview someone I will ask them this question because I think it revealed to them a lot about what the job was and what kind of work enviorment was important to me.
The last task was to take home some of their publications, read them, and then over the weekend to write two sample pieces. I was pretty excited to do it and got started right away. I read through the Saudi Voyager magazine, which was sort of two magazines in one; the front half was an industry specific magazine announcing awards in the tourism industry, and the second was geared toward expats who would want to travel in the kingdom. The first assignment was to take a 3 page press release about a new initiative to get young Saudi's more interested in thier heritage by taking them to various local historical sites on school trips and rewrite it down to 100 words. Since a good portion of the press release was repetitive praise of the Prince in charge of the project, it was pretty easy to cut it down. What was hard was trying to find any of the facts that would normally seem like the most important part of the article. There was no mention of the age group of the students, when the program would start, where they would take them, or hhow much it would cost and who was paying. So basically, there was a name for the project and that was about all. If these were the kinds of press releases we usually got, I could see how producing good journalism here would be very difficult.
The second piece was a travel journalism sort of story, and I chose to write about the salt flats since that was fresh in my mind. It was a little cheesy but I think it was still okay. I threw in some pictures I took to help make a good impression.
Nick told me they had a few other candidates to interview, and since I couldln't really be transfered anyway and had already started with the medical and dental school technically, I figured it was unlikely anything would come of it. But it was still a really fun experience. And hey, I got a free magazine out of it, so that's something.
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