"So, Allan, when you gonna tell us how you got your job?"

Shortly after I began my job with Data Fusion, I flew out to Maryland to meet the team in the Cockeysville office. Data Fusion maintains three formal offices: one in Maryland, another in New Mexico, and another in California. There are also a few other folks scattered throughout the country who work out of home offices or satellite offices. There are folks like that in Texas, Colorodo, and Ohio. Probably elsewhere, too.

But that's the thing about a company like this: you can have twenty-five employees, and several of them have never met several of the others, even after many years.

And yet, after being at DF for only a little while, I was flown out to Maryland to meet the gang there. Turns out, many of them had read my website, and noticed a teaser I'd put up about how "soon I'll tell you the story of how I landed my new job." From time to time, they prod me to put up the story.

So, here it is: I got my job at Data Fusion because I am a former Lunatic.

Well, okay, that's not how I got the job, but that is how I got the chance to get the job.

Toward the end of 2003, the founder of the Cornell Lunatic humor magazine got in touch with a few of us former editors because he wanted to assemble an alumni network. As the network started to come together, he thought it would make sense to put together a newsletter to send out to all of the alumni to help us become better connected and also to encourage financial support of the magazine.

The fellow who volunteered to assemble the newsletter asked if any of us had anything we'd like to contribute, and I got into a long discussion with him (and did a lot of research) on one of the former editors who had died a couple of years ago. I suggested that we put the article about his death in the "Where are they now?" section of the newsletter, with a photo of his headstone.

Yes, I know, that's sick. But if you knew the guy, you might think he'd have wanted it that way. RICHH had a very twisted sense of humor.

The fellow assembling the newsletter and I got to talking about employment situations, and he thought that maybe there would be a fit for me at his company. And that's how I got the audition. By being a former Lunatic.

But I got the job by passing the audition.

For pretty much every other job I've held, I've had a series of interviews with future co-workers and bosses and the like. In this case, after talking with my future employer on the phone -- and having never met in person, ever -- he decided to set up a test condition. He sent me a laptop, some installation disks for software I'd never used before, and e-mailed files to me. My task was to set up the software on the laptop (there were three versions of the software in question), and then "upgrade" the files from version 3 of the software to version 5. After doing that, my task was to see if there was any way to speed up the way the files worked.

There is something fascinating to me about this method of selecting a candidate for a job. It relies not upon how well you can bullshit your way through an interview, but rather upon how well you can actually do the job under test conditions. Working at Data Fusion often involves going into someone else's system, figuring out how they got it set up, and then solving the problem.

Funny thing about this audition, though. The e-mail files that he sent me became corrupted along the way. And the laptop stopped working after only about eight hours. It just went ka-put.

Now, keep in mind that at one time in my sordid past, I had also interviewed for (and was hired by, and later even conducted interviews for) a certain software company that is notorious for their interview process. Books have not only been written about this company's interview process, but they have actually reached the NY Times Bestseller list.

One of the things that is stressed in the interview process at this company (whose initials are MS) is the "get the job done at all costs" kind of thinking.

Example interview question: you're working on a [whatever] on your laptop while in an airplane en route to [wherever], and you absolutely must must must have [whatever] completed by the time you arrive. The batteries to your laptop have just run down completely, and you're only halfway done. What do you do?

The way this works in the interview is this: with every answer you, the interviewee, give, the interviewer gives some reason why that doesn't solve the problem. (example: "I pull out my power outlet and plug it into the port that is now standard on all airplanes." Response: "You discover that you left your cable in your office.") The interviewer wants you to see how creative and determined you are to get the job done.

Remember: I not only interviewed with that company, I worked there.

So here I am, auditioning for a new company, and I've been given a test environment to test my skills, but the test materials are failing on me. Oh, and also: I want the job. What do I do?

With the MS example firmly planted in my brain, I set about resolving everything I can by going beyond the bounds of the test. I have a PC laptop of my own, so I load the software onto that. In the meantime, I figure out that the laptop they sent me was under warranty, so I call the office administrator and get information on sending it back to the manufacturer to have it repaired under warranty.

After figuratively banging my head against the wall for several hours and unable to get the software to open the files I'd been sent, I open them up in a text editor and realize that they are corrupted. I reconstruct them as best I can, and then finally manage to have the software load them correctly.

After upgrading the files, I read through the online documentation on the software, perform a lot of trial and error, and finally get the job done. I turn it in on time, while the computer that I'd been sent is still being repaired by the manufacturer.

My future employer and I talk about what I did and how I went about completing the task. I told him how I cleverly figured out that the files had been corrupted, etc., etc. And finally asked the question that had been plaguing me throughout the process: were the problems with the files and the computer known? Were they, in fact, part of the test?

"No," my future employer said. "I have neither the time nor the inclination to make the test any harder than need be. But you'd be surprised how often that kind of thing crops up just in the day to day job."

Or words to that effect. And he was right, of course. I've been surprised at how often that kind of thing crops up in the day to day job. It happens all the time.

So there you have it. Because I was an editor of a college humor publication fifteen years ago, I ended up with a job performing database work for some of the biggest law firms in the country.

The end.