Still up fairly early this morning despite being up until 3am last night, mainly to finish off the security clearance form and get a little bit more info on how the NZDF works.

Left in plenty of time, and got to the interview 10 mins before I was supposed to be there – cool!

Not so cool, the panel decided to have a comfort break and coffee stop after their previous interview. So I ended up waiting for 20 mins, not too bad though and at least the security guard showed me where the water was!

The panel was two male “geeks” and a female HR specialist. I think somebody mentioned that the two “geeks” had flown down from Auckland that morning. (Note. I’m allowed to call a geek a geek, trade professional and all that, takes one to know one etc)

I’m fairly sure the two geeks hadn’t done their Interviewing Techniques course (if there is an NZ equivalent)! After a fairly short “Hi how are you”, the interview launched into a question set that would have seen the combined efforts of Dave Proctor and Dave Aspden (Microsoft consultants often visiting St Athan) scratching their chins! It made the HR questions from the female panel member quite refreshing!

I should have spent some time brushing up on my IT skills too – there were FSMO, Exchange processes, Exchange server “How many networks should you have for Exchange clustering and kindly explain the difference between active/active and active/passive clustering?” to “Explain exactly what happens to an e-mail through after it leaves the users desktop – ie. transaction logs, writing to the database, where does it go from there through which strand of the network cable etc……..”, general Microsoft “Can you quote the difference” and network questions. Struggled in a couple of places as my memory seems to have faded a bit over the last two months – that’s what you get for not working on IT I suppose……….or, it could just be the NZ sun, much more than I’m used to in the UK! On the bright side, I nailed the HR questions!

The interview was due to last from 2.30pm – 4pm. I ended up outside looking for Louise (she’d been shopping and drinking coffee to wait for me) about 5.15pm!! No wonder I was thirsty and a little hoarse -hoarse not horse, its not like I grew an extra set of legs and a long neck and nose under the pressure of the interview….. or indeed a tail, obviously!

When I got back I had a few swift rum n cokes, it was quite a gruelling interview. Louise told me afterwards that I fell asleep about 9.30pm….