another rejection =/

alas! the consulting company i had been interviewing with rejected me yesterday.

it boiled down to a single, uncomfortable moment at dinner last tuesday. i had already been feeling a bit dazed by the conversation, as we had been switching rapidly back and forth between german and english and one of the two founders i was dining with had an overwhelmingly high level of energy which i struggled to keep up with. but then he asked me a question, in german, which i initially failed to understand: “can you give an example of a time when you completely botched something?”

it was the first time i’d heard the word which he used for botched, vermasseln. at first i thought he was asking me to talk about a failure or regret, so i started to explain how i felt like i had let my team down when i ultimately decided to leave my last company almost a year ago, especially since i had helped to set up the team. i knew i needed to leave, but i also felt like i had been weak for not sticking it out a little longer. but i could quickly tell from the expression on both founder’s faces that this type of regret was not a fitting example of vermasseln. they were looking for something more dramatic, a big capital “Whoops” which is only reconcilable in retrospect. the founder who’d asked the question gave an example of a time when he screwed up a negotiation with a customer by agreeing to too low of an hourly rate and wound up costing their company millions of Euros in potential revenue. to be honest, i can’t think of a professional experience which i’ve vermasselt. I tried to explain that, because i am pretty careful and risk averse, i don’t tend to find myself in situations with vermassel-y consequences and then suddenly, for some reason which i still can’t grasp, the high-energy founder started to become quite agitated. his voice rose louder and louder as he wondered out loud if i was capable of answering a question at face value, without trying to interpret what was being asked behind it. this question startled me even further, because i do almost always try to understand the intention behind a question before i answer it, and i tend to think that’s a good - perhaps even necessary - part of communicating with people whose language and culture i’m still grasping to learn.

when i asked that same founder for feedback over the phone yesterday, he explained that he’d had an unshakeable feeling the whole time that he couldn’t tell who the “real yuelian” was, if the answers i gave were authentic or if i was rather only saying what i thought he wanted to hear. this time he sounded humble and gracious, a far cry from the borderline manic persona which was on display last tuesday. i instantly knew what he was referring to, and agreed that in that moment, a substantial disconnect had formed between us, although in my opinion it was likely borne from a language or cultural barrier. at least, i don’t believe i was pretending to be anything other than how i felt, although how i felt in that moment was admittedly very disjointed between my internal english and german monologues. it is of course disappointing to be rejected from a job i had expected to get, but then again - i’m not sure there is anything i could have done differently.