I feel a complusive Need to blog about this, release some angst and hopefully feel a bit better. The interview was BADbadbad, so the following post is going to be a Blow by Blow (pun intended) account of it.
Argh, it started off ominously, I couldn't really understand what she was saying because of her accent, so when she asked me if I was the last of Mr White's little lambs (ie the last Geoger of the day), I heard "Have you tried any of Mr W's little lambs," which I of course thought was an appreciative tribute to Mr W's culinary skills, so I almost told her all about the chocolate fudge brownies he baked us last week. Fortunately I stopped myself in time and deciphered her question properly enough.
Then she asked me the inevitable Friendly Social Question ("Where would you most like to visit?"), to which I chamged my choice destination THREE times. 1. Africa (then I realised it wasn't a country) 2. Kenya (then I realised I forgot the name of the tribe I wanted to visit) 3. Peru (because it has 28 out of the 32 available climates!)
Following that, she asked me about solving the aging population problem, which was okay, I suppose, but then she asked me why I would want to solve it. So I gave her the standard quip about how sensitive jobs in the political arena and the military should be taken up by Singaporeans. AND THEN -ahem- she accused me of being xenophobic. (!!!BADBAD) So there was this small silence where I frantically tried to save myself, while she went on about "how sewn up our society was", how "PAP (she pronounced it pap) has killed off the opposition," and the" ideal solution would be to kill off everyone aged above 65." In comes horrible joke about recurring costs of burial and funerals.
It goes further downhill-
We went on to talk about The Article (this arcane piece on "Fossils of Quadrupeds"). (AAAAArghhhh)
I didn't really know where to start, so I just gave a summary, and stupidly started talking about Paleoclimatology--> global warming and how skeptics question it, to which she said "Global warming? My foot" (I'm not kidding, those were her exact words), to which I laughed weakly in response and said "So I see you're a Skeptic".
Then she started on this truism "the absence of evidence is the evidence of absence", and she asked me whether the author agreed with the statement. ARghhh. badbad. She had to ask me the question 3x before I gave her the specifics.
I was absolutely freaked out by now, so her constant pausing to cough made me all the more nervous (were my answers so shockingly absurd as to induce a coughing fit?!?!). Then she asked me about a giant mammal found in Madagascar (homoflorenscian or something) and I didn't anything about it!!!!! ("So the debate is, are these creatures a new species of quadrupeds, or were they merely suffering from island dwarfism 20000 years ago?" omgddddd)
I think by this time she was kinda fed up, so she said, "Alright, now, do you have any questions for me?" Diediediedie. Intelligent Question Thinking Time suddenly sprang up, and I wasn't prepared to leap into fluvial geomorphology, so I asked her about some lame thing regarding conducting a census of the ocean, and whether she believed in the existence of exotic, undiscovered species on earth. Then she told me about some giant squid they found off the coasts of Africa or sth.
Her parting words: "Go find out more about those homoflorenscians."
And no I do not feel any better.
