Back to List

Alien Job Interview - 3

Author: Youngjin Kang

Date: 2022

Alien Job Interview - 3 (Figure 1)

Alien Job Interview

Chapter 3: Social Skill Lessons

(PERSONAL NOTE)

My first half of the interview with Airl was an utter failure, according to the IT executives. Fortunately, a very clever fellow named John Newble, who was a Nerdpsychology specialist from a nearby university's Department of Therapeutic Astrobiology, had a solution to the problem.

He explained that the reason why I could not assert my dominance over the alien was that he lacked basic social skills to realize how utterly insignificant he is compared to the ego of our top directors.

Therefore, he suggested that we had only two options. Either I had to learn the alien's coding skills in order to assert my dominance over him in the field of tech, or the alien had to learn our social skills to make him understand that it is all about politics and rules rather than being smart with those big ass calculators. Factually, only the second option was possible because I didn't want to learn coding just to hire a code monkey.

Thus we began to conduct our own social skill lessons for Airl. We asked our community manager to bring us as many children's books as possible for the purpose of teaching him that a full English sentence is supposed to end with a period instead of a semicolon.

After reading out loud a series of fables and biblical stories to the alien, I began to teach him how to engage in small talk, chit-chat about things that are not technical, exchange business cards with smile, shake hands without awkwardness, and last but not least, show vivid reactions with lots of hand gestures whenever somebody says something emotional.

Airl was not happy to adopt these rules of social interaction, but later on he somehow managed to pretend at least that he was a human being with a functioning soul.