Can I call a do over?

[elfs]

The T61, dismantled

Where do we start with today?

Let's start with going to meet a recruiter who wanted me to interview for a job at Cisco. Our meeting was at a cafe. As I stood up, I bumped the table and spilled an entire cup of hot coffee into the laptop. The hot, sugary liquid immediately gummed up the keyboard badly, and I lost my mouse and my arrow keys.

I was unable to do any demos for the interview that morning.

The interview ran over by half an hour. There was a ticket waiting for me on my windshield when I got back to my car.

Then I get home to discover that another company I had screened with earlier in the week had turned me down. "We chose a candidate with a better cultural fit," which I've learned to read as, "You're too old." This is the flip side to the "You'll just get bored here," which is HR code for "You're too experienced."

At least before I poured the coffee into the laptop, I had a nice half hour wait at the cafe and did 858 words. Not my best speed, but better than nothing. It helped that the cafe' didn't have WiFi.