The Job Interview

The call came around four in the afternoon while I was playing soccer. My mother, who answered it, walked to the field not far from our house and called out to me from the sideline, gesturing that someone was on the phone. The game paused for a moment. All eyes turned toward me. I ran off the field, past my mother, and went straight into the house without taking off my shoes—ignoring Lulu, my eight-year-old sister, who was showing me her drawing and said, “Look, I drew a lion.” I went into the living room, caught my breath, and answered the phone. I remembered the company. I had seen the job listing in the Sunday paper.

“Who was it?” my mother asked after I hung up.

“A job interview, Mom.”

“A job interview?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“Jakarta.”

“When?”

“Wednesday.”

My mother told my father the news as soon as he came home from work. My father, who looked proud, shook my hand and congratulated me. After Maghrib prayer, he took out a pile of shirts and trousers from the closet for me to wear to the interview. The strong smell of camphor stung my nose. Not all the clothes were his—some belonged to my uncle, who worked at a bank. Both my father and my uncle were big men, but my father was stockier.

“Is there anything smaller?” I asked.

My father went to his room and came back with a suit still in a plastic dry-cleaning bag. I opened it. There was a blazer, a white shirt, and dark blue trousers—clearly a gift from my uncle. The shirt was made of soft fabric and fit me perfectly. The trousers were a bit loose, but a belt would fix that. My father also brought two pairs of shoes: one pair of formal black shoes and another pair of casual brown ones. I chose the brown pair.

“Don’t be late,” my father said, giving me interview advice. “Arrive fifteen minutes early. Knock on the door gently. Bow slightly when you enter. Say good morning. Give a firm handshake, but not too strong.”

Then he made me practice everything he said. I did it shyly and had to repeat it several times because it wasn’t quite what he wanted. Lulu laughed at me, saying I looked stupid.

“Now sit up straight like this,” he continued, straightening his posture with his chest slightly puffed out. “Don’t look down. Answer clearly when asked.”

After that, he emphasized the importance of English. Then he demonstrated how to use English in a job interview.

“Good morning, Sir.”

“How are you, Sir?”

“I’m fine, Sir.”

That was all. My father didn’t know much more than that.

But what worried me more was how I would get there. I knew nothing about Jakarta. I had been thinking about it ever since I was given the office address.

“How do we get there?”

“I’ll take you,” my father said.

My father knew the streets and places in Jakarta because he had lived and worked there when he was younger, after moving from Sumedang, his hometown, right after graduating from vocational school. Before getting a permanent job and moving to Bekasi, he had done all kinds of odd jobs—construction worker, cosmetics salesman, waiter in a restaurant. He had slept in mosques and in cheap rented rooms with plywood walls. For someone who had lived in Jakarta for less than a year, he had gained a lot of experience. He used up his leave just to take me.

“We have to leave very early to avoid traffic.”

I couldn’t remember the last time I had gone somewhere with my father. Maybe when I was in my first or second year of junior high school. Back then I used to get excited whenever he took me anywhere, especially to visit my uncles or aunts. I could meet my cousins, be spoiled with snacks, given toys, or pocket money. Now, going somewhere with my own parent felt strange. I was no longer a little kid who needed to be accompanied.

I tried on my interview outfit and looked at myself in the mirror. I looked good. I ironed the clothes, folded the trousers and placed them on my study desk, and hung the shirt on the hook behind the door. I cleaned my shoes with a damp cloth. Before going to bed, I stared at my interview shirt, imagining what the interview would be like the next day. Would I be able to get through it? Thinking about it almost kept me awake.

In the end, I slept deeply—so deeply that I didn’t hear my father knocking on my bedroom door repeatedly the next morning.

“Can’t the interview be postponed?” was the first thought that crossed my mind when I woke up.

I dragged my feet to the bathroom, still half-asleep, sat there for a while, then forced myself to pour water over my head. The cold water woke me up, though my eyes stung from the shampoo. I prayed Subuh and asked that the interview would go smoothly. My mother had already prepared breakfast, but my father said we would eat on the way because we were afraid of being late.

We left at 5:20 a.m. I carried my application documents, a pen, and a notebook in my backpack. I kissed my mother’s hand and said goodbye. When we had only walked about ten meters, Lulu appeared at the gate, calling my name and waving. We took a public minibus. My father gave me five hundred rupiah for the fare, which I handed to the driver when we got off.

The bus terminal was already busy even though the sky was still dark. We walked past rows of buses with conductors shouting to attract passengers. We boarded bus number 17. I sat by the window, and my father adjusted the AC vent so it wouldn’t blow directly on him—I did the same. Vendors selling candy, tofu, and newspapers came and went. My father called a newspaper seller, bought one, and read it for a while. The conductor kept loading passengers until people were standing shoulder to shoulder.

The bus left the terminal as the sky began to brighten. My father paid seven thousand rupiah for both of us, then went back to his newspaper. Meanwhile, I looked out the window, watching cars race past and rows of buildings slide by.

Time seemed to pass quickly. It felt like only yesterday I had registered for high school, made new friends, joined the school soccer team, become the student council president, fallen in love with a classmate, taken the final exams, and received my diploma. I could have gone on to university, but I didn’t want to be selfish. My parents had supported my education for twelve years, and I didn’t want to burden them any longer. So I decided to work. I prepared myself by buying a job guidebook for twenty-two thousand rupiah, where I learned how to write application letters and prepare a CV. I sent job applications every day—through the post office, by delivering them directly to companies (usually leaving them with the security guard or at the front desk), or dropping them off at the manpower office. I spent a lot of money on photocopies, passport photos, envelopes, and folio paper. In September, I enrolled in a vocational training program. For two months, I studied computer networking and servicing. I received a certificate with satisfactory grades, but job openings in that field always required a bachelor’s degree.

The bus slowed down, stopped, moved again, then stopped once more. We were stuck in heavy traffic. My father fell asleep with his head bowed, still holding the newspaper. Fatigue and boredom crept over me. What time was it now? Was I already late? I closed my eyes and dozed off. The traffic was still bad when I woke up, and it only cleared when the bus turned toward Cawang.

“Is it still far?”

“About twenty more minutes,” my father said.

As we crossed a flyover, I saw a statue rising from a curved concrete pillar. My father said it was the Pancoran statue. When we passed a curved stretch of road, he said, “This is the Semanggi Bridge.” Then we entered a street lined with skyscrapers. “This is Sudirman Street.” The bus stopped at a shelter in front of one of the buildings and let off many passengers. I stared up at one of the buildings all the way to the top in awe. I didn’t know whether the company where I had the interview was in one of those skyscrapers, but I dreamed that one day I would work in one of them. I kept looking at the buildings we passed, reading their names—most of them called Tower or Menara. My father pointed out Bundaran HI and Hotel Indonesia as we passed them. After that, we prepared to get off.

“Sarinah,” my father told the conductor.

The conductor tapped on the door glass with a coin and shouted, “Stop, stop!” The bus pulled over and stopped at the shelter.

I was briefly confused when my father said Sarinah—I thought it was a magazine, but it turned out to be a shopping center. We got off right across from it. The sun was already blazing, but my father didn’t move into the shade.

“We should have gotten off over there,” he said, pointing far to the left.

Two auto-rickshaws had already approached us as we stood there. When the third one stopped in front of us, my father waved it over. He told the driver our destination. The driver held up five fingers—five thousand rupiah. My father nodded. The driver opened the door for us without getting off. I got in first, and we sat in the narrow seat.

The auto-rickshaw sped off with a deafening engine noise, making my father’s voice almost impossible to hear.

“What?” I shouted.

“Uncle Maman is going for Umrah,” my father said more loudly. “There’s a gathering next Saturday.”

Maman was my uncle—my father’s younger brother who lived in Pondok Kelapa and worked at a bank. My father was only informing me, not inviting me. He knew I would refuse to attend my uncle’s religious gathering. There was no more conversation after that, even though he could have pointed out the places we passed.

After the second turn from the Bank Indonesia intersection, the auto-rickshaw stopped.

“That’s the building,” the driver said.

I read the company sign. Yes, it was the right one, just as mentioned on the phone. My father paid five thousand rupiah, and we got off.

The building wasn’t a skyscraper like those on Sudirman, but it wasn’t a small shop-house either. I counted four floors. The area was busy with street vendors. In front of the building, on the sidewalk, a chicken noodle cart had many customers. On the empty lot next door stood a simple food stall. Right against the boundary wall, above the drainage ditch, was a small kiosk selling snacks and drinks. Farther away were more tented food stalls. The stall owner—an old, thin man wearing a worn cap and a short-sleeved brown batik shirt—was arranging his goods. My father took two bottles of mineral water from the cooler, paid, and handed one to me. We sat on a long wooden bench and drank.

“What time is it, sir?” my father asked.

The man looked at his watch. “Ten past eight,” he said in a Sundanese accent.

My father set down his bottle and stood up.

“Wait here a moment.”

He went to the chicken porridge vendor and bought two large bowls for our breakfast. I was hungry, but I thought a packaged bread from the stall would have been enough.

“Come on, eat,” he said.

It was a jumbo portion of chicken porridge with crackers, plenty of shredded chicken, and two skewers of offal satay that made me hesitate—surely it wasn’t cheap. After eating, my father returned the bowls. When he came back, I was already standing, ready for the interview. I kissed his hand, and he reminded me to pray.

The gate was no more than ten steps away, but it felt far because I was leaving my father alone. I looked back and saw him smiling, waving, then giving me a thumbs-up. I passed the security guard who was directing cars out and approached another guard at the corner of the building.

“Good morning, sir,” I said. “I’m here for a job interview.”

“Go straight to the receptionist.”

“Thank you.”

I entered the quiet lobby. The receptionist, a slim woman with short hair, smiled at me while she was on the phone.

“How can I help you?” she asked after hanging up.

“I’m here for a job interview.”

She took a sheet of paper and placed it on the desk.

“Fill in your name, address, arrival time, phone number, position applied for, and signature.”

She pointed to the columns I needed to fill in and set her pen on the paper.

I looked for my name and found it in the fourteenth position—the only row still empty. Was I late? I filled in all the fields, checked the wall clock before writing the arrival time—08:35. Then I handed over my ID card in exchange for a “Visitor” name tag.

“The interview room is on the third floor,” she said.

I pinned the name tag to my shirt pocket as I walked. There was no elevator, even though I really wanted to ride one. I had never been in an elevator before. On the third floor, I went to the restroom to urinate, wash my face, and fix my hair. The receptionist hadn’t told me which room, but I held back from asking any staff I passed. I walked down the quiet corridor, glancing into offices where people were busy at computers or on the phone, hearing the whir of dot-matrix printers, people in small meetings, passing a closed wooden door on the right, until I found a door at the end with a paper sign: Test and Interview Room.

I went to the window and looked outside, seeing my father chatting with the stall owner. Then I stood for a moment in front of the interview room door. I could faintly hear voices inside. I knocked twice and opened the door. The room fell silent for a moment; all eyes turned toward me. I sat in the frontmost chair—the only empty one. The wall clock showed 08:50.

I busied myself drawing skyscrapers in my notebook. At exactly nine o’clock, two staff members entered. One was a woman in her early forties wearing a gray blazer and skirt. The other was a young man with glasses, wearing a white shirt, a red tie, and gray trousers, carrying a blue tote bag, which he placed on the table. The woman introduced herself as the HRD manager, and the man beside her as her staff. She gave a brief explanation of the company profile and career path. Then the male HR staff member continued, informing us that the written test and interview would be held on the same day. There would be a ten-minute break after the test. Coffee, tea, and snacks were provided on a table outside the room. Only those who passed the test would proceed to the interview.

There were four written tests, each given thirty minutes. I whispered “Bismillah” before starting. During the break, I got to know the other applicants and went to the window to check on my father—sometimes he was reading the newspaper, sometimes chatting with the stall owner. I could handle the General Knowledge, Basic Math, and English sections, but I struggled quite a bit with the psychological test. The tests ended at 12:20 p.m.

They didn’t provide lunch. I prayed Zuhr at the small prayer room behind the building, then went to the stall to meet my father. But he wasn’t there. The owner said he had gone to the mosque. I returned inside and saw the written test results posted on the door. I was one of the eighteen candidates who passed. While waiting for the interview, I chatted with the woman sitting to my right. Her name was Fransiska. She had applied for an accounting staff position. This was her second interview. The previous week she had attended one at an expedition company. She worked to pay for her studies and had moved her classes to the evening. When she asked where I went to university, I told her I had just graduated from high school.

“Impressive,” she said.

The male HR staff member entered and made an announcement. We were divided into groups according to the positions we had applied for. There were four groups, which meant four open positions. Fransiska and four others went to the accounting department on the second floor. The rest stayed on the third floor for marketing positions, while I and two other candidates went to the IT department on the fourth floor.

Even though the other candidates were graduates of well-known universities, I didn’t see them as rivals. We had become quite friendly since the second break. They had just graduated that year, and this was their first job interview. A female IT staff member wearing a green sweater welcomed us and asked us to wait. We sat in staff chairs across from busy employees. The staff looked relaxed and didn’t seem to care much about appearances. The desks had no partitions, and many were empty. Monitors, CPUs, and printers were stacked at the back.

My name was called. I was glad to be first so I could go home earlier. The woman in the green sweater took me to a room. Two people were already waiting inside.

I didn’t follow all of my father’s advice that night. I didn’t knock on the door because the woman in the green sweater opened and closed it for me. I didn’t say “Good afternoon” because the two men immediately shook my hand and introduced themselves as the IT Manager and Supervisor.

The IT Manager, who looked relatively young but had some gray hair, wore a slightly wrinkled short-sleeved shirt. The IT Supervisor wasn’t any neater—his glasses were crooked, and he had a bit of mustache and beard.

“Please sit down,” the supervisor said.

I sat up straight as my father had advised.

“Relax. This isn’t a military selection.”

The IT Manager, holding my file, leaned forward and said, “You really only graduated from high school?”

I didn’t feel offended. In fact, I was quite confident applying for this position.

“Yes.”

“The company does require a bachelor’s degree, but I don’t. I’ve read your CV. It’s interesting. Now it’s time to prove it.”

Before the interview, he briefly explained the duties of an IT Support. If accepted, I would mostly handle hardware, networks, printers, software installation, and deal with complaints from senior staff who weren’t used to computers—including managers and directors. Especially the picky finance manager, he said, laughing. I overheard him telling the supervisor about the chaos in the finance department just because a LAN cable had come loose. They both laughed.

They asked more technical questions than about my background. I answered fluently about LAN, routers, cables, printers, BIOS, and so on. Then we moved to another room with several computers and printers. The tasks were quite simple. They asked me to connect the keyboard, CPU, monitor, mouse, and network cables. After that, they tested me on printer installation, connecting a laptop to a projector, setting up a LAN network, configuring email in Outlook, and some Excel tasks. I could do all of them—tables, charts, and simple formulas. However, I struggled with some other Excel formulas, and there was one question I couldn’t answer at all. At that moment, I just stared at the screen and stayed silent. Had I forgotten? No. I had simply never learned it. So at that point, I had already accepted that I might fail.

“It’s okay. That can be learned from books,” the IT Manager said. “Can you install a printer ribbon?”

“Yes, I can.”

Installing printer ribbons wasn’t taught at the training center, but I had done it several times in the school administration office.

“Can you install cable clamps?”

“Yes.”

They trusted me and didn’t actually test the ribbon or clamps. The supervisor said that if I passed, they would notify me within a week at the latest. Of course, I hoped to be accepted. Even if not, I no longer saw job interviews as something to be overly anxious about, as I once had.

“Did you come here alone?” the IT Manager asked.

“My father brought me.”

“The one at Mang Ipul’s stall?”

It must have been the stall owner in front of the building.

“Yes.”

Then we shook hands.

On my way out, I approached the other two candidates, shook their hands, wished them luck, said I was going home first, then hurried down the stairs, ran out of the building, and went to my father.

“How did it go?”

“They’ll let me know next week.”

“Whether you get it or not is for later. The important thing is that you had the courage to try.”

That was all he said. He didn’t even ask what questions they had asked, how I had answered, or anything else. Maybe he understood that I had just gone through one of the most important days of my life and needed to unwind. My father chatted briefly with Mang Ipul, the stall owner, and asked about buses to Bekasi. Mang Ipul mentioned bus number 52, but said it rarely passed. Other options were to go from Kampung Melayu terminal or take the train from Pasar Senen station.

“Let’s go home by train,” my father said.

For a very late lunch, we ate chicken noodles. My father paid ten thousand rupiah for two portions. On the bus to the station, I calculated how much money my father had spent since we left home, including the fare he had just paid. The fairly large amount left me stunned. Thinking about that, and about the Excel question I couldn’t answer, I barely heard my father telling me the names of the places we passed. When I came to, we were in a busy area lined with book stalls.

“This is called Kwitang,” my father said.

Pasar Senen station wasn’t far. My father bought two cardboard tickets for four hundred rupiah each and gave one to me. We went through an underground tunnel to reach the platform. Food kiosks lined the area between the crowded waiting benches. We sat against a low wall near a pillar. My father opened his newspaper and read. I don’t know whether he was rereading it or if there was something he hadn’t finished. I glanced at the sports section but didn’t read it. I was looking at the forty-four-year-old man behind the paper. I recalled our journey since leaving home that morning until now. I recalculated the money he had spent to take me here and silently promised myself that after receiving my first salary, I would treat both my parents and my little sister to meatballs, chicken noodles, or fried chicken. I smiled when I realized I didn’t even have a wallet yet to keep my money.

Trains came and went until ours was finally announced. People lined up along the platform. Our train came from the left, from Kota station, ten minutes late. We got on, and people rushed to find seats. My father called me and patted the empty space beside him.

The atmosphere inside the train felt more like a market, with vendors, beggars, and buskers moving from one carriage to another. The conductor punched the tickets with a tool like a stapler. A strong wind blew in through the windows that wouldn’t fully close, making me sleepy. But I didn’t want to sleep. I looked outside, watching the main road and long lines of vehicles as we passed them, reading the names of the stations we stopped at. Junior high school students who boarded at Jatinegara station stood by the doors. They cheered and teased students from another school on the roadside. A little girl swept the floor with a short-handled broom. When she finished sweeping under my feet, she held out her hand. I raised mine slightly, and she moved on. After Buaran station, everyone was startled by the scream of a plump woman sitting directly across from me.

“Thief!”

Even though it happened very quickly, I saw a man in a black jacket snatch her necklace. No one could chase him. The thief jumped off as the train picked up speed. My father wasn’t bothered by the scream or the commotion. Nor by the off-key buskers or the shouting vendors passing through. With the folded newspaper resting on his round belly, my father slept soundly. His face looked tired, calm, and peaceful. ✦