quelle coincidence

So I’m at le forum (internship/job fair) standing in line waiting for the next recruiting person to free up and hating being a girl and having to wear heels when I couldn’t help but notice one of the recruitment guys being really mean to a Chinese student.

Basically he said: “If you want to speak English go find an internship in an English speaking country.”

If this was a episode of Seinfeld he would’ve looked abruptly away and said “Next!”.

Unfortunately the next person up was me.

Having seen what just transpired I was careful to only speak French. Until he started asking hard questions. Like after I told him I would like to work with databases he said “What do you do with a database?” Having to choose between speaking in English and have a coherent answer or saying in French “Base de donnees sont tres bon.” I choose the former.

He picked apart my answer and basically dismissed it as wrong. I defended myself. He moved on to the next hard question like “Why are you studying in France?” “Why not another European country?” “Yes, but why France?”

Basically he was being, in my opinion, an asshole. At least other recruiters have the decency to pretend to be nice before throwing your resume in the trash bin.

After grilling me he asked me if I had any questions. I could’ve gotten out of there by saying “No” and “Au revoir” and ending my interaction with the miserable man but for some reason I pressed on and asked him what his project was and what kind of internship opportunities there were.

He told me was working with Intelligence Business (“Do you know what intelligent business is?” “Uh huh… WRONG!”). As he scrutinized and berated me, I couldn’t help but notice he spoke English with the British intonation and asked him if he learned his English in England. He told me no but he interacts a lot with people in London but that he has family in Texas. For some reason he told me he was from Vietnam.

Me too! I exclaimed (a little too excitedly) and switched to Vietnamese hoping he’d like me better. He told me he came to France in the 1970s and before that he lived in…. wait for it.

Japan.

We bonded. I got his business card. What are the odds?