Interviews can be very unsettling situations to find yourself in. However, for one interviewer , they ended up in a very unexpected scenario when their old high school bully walked into the room.
The interviewer shared their story on Reddit’s subreddit, r/TrueOffMyChest, and the story sparked quite a lot of debate regarding how the interviewer handled the situation.
They started their story by explaining how they ended up in the situation.
“I work for a fairly large company in the tech industry. I’ve worked there for about 5 years now and I have a fairly high up role in management. Over the last few weeks, I got roped into helping build a new team within the company and was assigned to do multiple interviews,” they started by writing.
They also explained that when they saw the face of a man they called “Brad,” they were transported back to high school.
They recognised the interviewee as the man who made their time in high school a living hell.
“It had been over 15 years since i had last seen him, but I could never forget the face of the man who made my high school years a living hell,” they wrote.
“Brad was your typical bully jock, I was an overweight theater kid in ap math and science, and you can see where this is going. Those were the worst years of my life, and brad was one of the contributing causes to that. So to see him in the candidates here was a shock to me.”
Although Brad did not notice them at first, eventually they recalled one another.
The interviewer detailed that once Brad had recognised them, he tried to play “buddy-buddy” with them and pretend as though they had been friends in high school — the interviewer played along.
Brad apparently did “ok” in the interveiw and said “get [me] the job, right?” as he left.
However, the interviewer did far from that.
“I wrote brad a scathing review. Downplayed everything good about him and exaggerated his flaws. Also wrote in that he tried to coerce me into giving him a good review because he ‘was an acquaintance in high school,'” this person confessed.
They also added, “It’s been 15 years since I graduated high school. I am an entirely different person than I was then. But for some reason, I was dragged back to those days, and I don’t know how to feel.”
Opinions on how the interviewer had acted were divided.
A lot of people shared stories about how they had met their own high school bullies years later, only to be pleasantly surprised when they talked to them as adults. With this in mind, should the interviewer have been more compassionate?
“My school bully saw me at a reunion, 20 years later. He came over, we chatted with a group of people, he waited for the right moment, then asked semi-privately my forgiveness for what he and couple of others had done. He said, he cannot expect me to accept his apology, that he wished he could undo it, but that he really felt sorry for it. I accepted. Felt good,” wrote the top commenter.
However, some thought that it was justice well-served!
“Don’t you love it when life comes around full circle,” wrote one individual. With another person adding, “It’s an opportunity that the universe gave him to add some balance. You gonna be a piece of s***? See how that affects your life.”
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It’s hard to say if what the interviewer did was justified in the end. However, regardless of how you feel, it does go to show that sometimes life can come around and bite you on the ass.
h/t: Reddit
