Another Interview

Last Thursday I had my interview for the National Health Service Corps Scholarship, so Wednesday I decided was when I was going to get my hair cut and beard trimmed. So after class I cruised down to the barber shop called $4.00 Haircut, took a number and a seat, and waited for my number to be called. Finally it was called and I sat down to my fate.

The lady asked me what I wanted and I told her I was not sure, just some kind of trim that would look good for an interview, because I had one the next day. So we decided on a little off here and there and she started in on my hair. Then, her interest piqued, she could not help but ask what job I was interviewing for. I told it was for a scholarship for school and she of course asked me what I was going to school for, to which I replied physician assistant school. She asked me if I was a nurse in a manner that assumed that I already was one, and I told her I was not.

Let me break to give the setting. Basically, I’m in a small town barbershop, right out of Mayberry off the Andy Griffith show. Same deal. It was packed; almost all the customer-waiting seats were taken waiting for their turn in the haircut dissembly line. And, of course, the barber chairs are facing the customer-waiting seats so there is no place else to look but at the customers who are looking at you and it makes for a bit of an awkward setting, simply based on the seating arrangement. It was pretty dead quiet in the shop besides the buzzing of the clippers and an occasional exchange of pleasantries between customers. And so that is the scene.

After I told her that I was not a nurse, she stopped cutting my hair, turned the clippers off, stood just in front and to left of me and said rather loudly, “You mean to tell me that you are not a nurse and they’re just going to let you become a physician assistant? I am never letting another physician assistant ever touch me again! How are you supposed to know anything about the body? You were an operating room technician? They just let anybody off the street become one of those. Hmmp.” So now every set of eyes and ears were turned and tuned on me and the lady who just completed the belittling rant of my past and future occupations. Now that is awkward.

With a sense of regal loyalty and dedication to the occupation to which I have chosen to affix myself, I set out to defend it in a manner that may leave it and me with some dignity. I took a second to make sure that what happened really happened and I had not just dozed off during class in a lecture about buffering systems, and when I realized that I was unfortunately not dozing I told my assailant that I was sorry to hear that. I assured her that from my experience, operating room technicians were not allowed to work in the operating room straight off the street and that PA school was a graduate program with a rather intense curriculum, very similar to that of medical school. In fact, only one semester short, as semesters go. I also gave her some background history on the making of the PA and its model from World War II Fast Track Physicians. She seemed to hear what I was saying and went back to cutting my hair.

It was quiet for a while and then the next thing I know she’s telling me her mother was manic-depressive and her father had depression and was an alcoholic and that she thinks she too has manic-depression. She started unfolding her medical history to me right there in the barber chair with all these people around and telling me her medications she was on and how they were affecting her and asking me for advice and if I had taken this or that course. I had to keep reminding her that I only started the program a week and a half earlier and did not have the classes she was assuming I had taken. It was something else. She went from berating me to being a patient in a matter of a few awkward moments. I was stunned to say the least.

Well, she set in on trimming my beard and I basically at that point I just wanted out of the chair and on my bike rolling quickly away from there. So she trimmed on my beard, asked me if I liked it, I said yes, and that was it. Actually the trim was bad but I could take care of that at home, I just wanted to leave. And so I left.

When I got home I got the clippers out, put on the guard and started trimming my beard, only to find out that I had put on the wrong guard and was basically all but shaving. So, long story short, I ended up shaving off my beard. It wasn’t so bad because I was threatening to do it anyway, but the way it happened was rather unfortunate.

The next day at school people did not even recognize me, I mean had no clue who I was, to the point that the girl that sat next to me was going to introduce herself to me because she did not know who I was. People thought I was a new student or something. It was pretty funny. People would just stare at me trying to figure out who I was, or once they knew who I was, if they liked what they saw or if they wished I could put the beard back on to cover up my radio face.

Not only did I have the whole clean face to deal with I had a wonderful moment that was classic. During the quiz I went up to ask Leroy a question and came back to my seat at the very front of the classroom and when I sat down I snapped the chair in half and ended up on the floor. Nice. Great move. The funny thing is that it happened when a lot people still did not know who I was so the look on their faces was pretty funny.

At lunch I went home to change into my suit so I could leave early from class and head directly over to my interview, and when I showed up in that it really threw people off. One girl asked if I was in the witness protection program.

The interview was in a hotel room, in an actual hotel room, with two people sitting behind a table reading me questions from a government standardized test booklet and writing down my answers. The questions were about my past and future and consisted of enormously broad, undefined questions that I was expected to answer in about two sentences. It felt more like some kind of psychological evaluation than an interview for a scholarship, who knows, maybe it was. I was so tired and sleepy that I had a hard time concentrating but managed to make it through. I have no idea how I did, none whatsoever. I find out some time in mid-July to August if I got awarded it or not. We shall see.

So that was my couple days leading up to and involving my interview, and the loss of my beard. What an experience.