Yesterday I interviewed at Emory for the master's program in anesthesiology. Admittedly, I haven't been to many interviews in my life, but the ones I have been to were all pretty similar. Yesterday's was a decidedly different experience. It was definitely the most interesting and, in the end, fun interview I've had. First the format was different. We had three group interviews with three different pairs of interviewers. The first was mostly standard "learn more about you" questions such as the last book I read, the most unusual thing that had happened to me, and how I would react in a given scenario (first to arrive at an accident scene). Then they asked about how Ansel Adams and Robert Frost are related. They also asked about Martha Graham, Eugene O'Neill, and Samuel Clemens. The second interview was just like a normal interview.

The third phase was what made this interview unique in my experience. From the time we walked in, the interviewers acted very intimidating, one more than the other. It was almost like a "Good Cop, Bad Cop" routine, but the good cop never did anything to help us out. It was more "Playfully Mischievous Cop, Pure Evil Cop". They asked us questions that didn't seem to have any relevance, trivia questions (of the sort encountered at the Panasonic Walt Disney World Academic Challenge rather than at a Quiz Bowl tournament for those familiar with such competitions). "What is the Fibonacci sequence?" "If I stand at the nose of a spaceship traveling at the speed of light and turn on a flashlight, what happens?" "Define treason, heathen, and cretin." If you answered correctly, they would have a more difficult follow up question, and it seemed like the goal was to get you to say "I don't know" or make something up. If you made something up, they would pick up on it immediately and ask you more about it in a way that allows you to go farther down that road eventually making yourself look like an idiot. There was no encouragement and no shortage of snide comments. My favorite from my group was "So the little that you know about it is actually zero. Well I guess that's a little." I heard from a woman in the group before mine that he had asked her a psychology question that she didn't know and he responded pretty viciously. "You're a psychology major and you don't know that?! Where do you go to school that they didn't teach you that?" I got the impression that the point of this interview was to see how well we could think and respond under stress. Everybody I talked to beforehand said that it was horrible, but I enjoyed it. My favorite question was as we were leaving. The hardcase asked everybody what his, the interviewer's, name was. He had only introduced himself as "Not Sam." The other interviewer, Sam, had referred to him by name a couple of times while we were in the room though, and he wanted to see who had picked up on it.

Like I said, this was the most interesting and fun interview I have been to. Has anybody else encountered something like this or have I just had the bad luck to meet with unimaginative people?

I'm afraid I'm developing a rather particular sort of anxiety toward a set of elevators at the hospital. More than anything I think it would have to be classified as a social anxienty. At the center of our main tower there is a bank of three staff elevators, technically speaking. For the past several months, the far left elevator has been out of service, so functionally we're just talking about a pair of elevators. As is bound to happen, one of the elevators is faster than the other. I wouldn't expect them to be exactly the same, but I also wouldn't expect a speed difference this extreme. From what I can perceive while riding in the elevators, they travel up and down at roughly the same speed, but the slow elevator takes much longer to open or close its doors and wastes more time at each stop. Therefore, the more stops it makes on its way, the slower it is, relative to the fast elevator. This is what always makes me nervous while waiting to get on the elevator.

Say both doors open at the same time, both cars fill up, the doors close, and you ride all the way to the top floor. You want to already be walking away when you hear the "ping" of the other elevator just arriving so you will feel validated in your ability to choose the right elevator, just like Ray picking a checkout line at Chik-Fil-A or Paul Giamatti at the grocery store in American Splender, which I just finished watching. So, obviously given the choice I always take the fast elevator and silently sneer at all the people too oblivious to notice a difference between the two.

It seems to me, though, that when I push the button and have to wait, the slow elevator arrives first a disproportionate percentage of the time. What usually happens is that I am alone in the elevator lobby when I push the button, then while I wait several people walk up and wait for the elevator with me. Eventually the slow elevator "arrives", presumably because the fast elevator has been busy ferrying people up and down between floors and is probably near the top floor while the slow elevator has been sitting on my floor all along obstinately refusing to open its doors to me. Here's where the social anxiety comes in. Everybody else files into the elevator car, with someone usually holding the door open so I can get in (this being completely unnecessary because these doors have never closed before someone could get on). But I'm thinking "I've been waiting long enough that the fast elevator should just about be here." So I walk close to the shaft to try to hear the pinging of the elevator as it passes the floors above me on its way down. Then I say,"That's okay, you go ahead," which is fine when the car is almost full but, with two or three people, feels like the most inane form of snobbery conceivable.

Then there was the awkward situation, likely exaggerated in my mind, that I always fear I will repeat. I joined the crowd in the slow elevator and was standing just inside the doors. We all stood there waiting for the doors to close for the longest time, while the nurse manning the buttons had pressed the "DOOR CLOSE" button at least ten times. Just as the doors started to close, I heard the other elevator arrive and instinctively stepped out to change cars, causing the doors to reopen for I don't know how long. A lot of the time I'll just take the stairs, all to avoid saying "I'm waiting for the good elevator."

I have very exciting news worthy of my first ever blog entry and possibly indicative of what one may find in this space in the future. Tonight we discovered that you can play Six Degrees Of Kevin Bacon using my wife. I realize this information comes about ten years too late because noone plays Six Degrees Of Kevin Bacon anymore, but we were still greatly amused by it for a full fifteen minutes. So here's how it goes. What few people know about Kelly is that in 1982, at the tender age of a year and a half, she appeared briefly in the Kenny Rogers movie Six Pack. I am sure you remember it, but in case you are fuzzy on the details, a young Anthony Michael Hall also costarred with Kelly and Kenny in this film. Of course Hall is best known for playing the nerd in the Brat Pack movies of the eighties, most notably The Breakfast Club. From there Emelio Esteves (TBC) leads to Keifer Sutherland (Young Guns 2), who was in Flatliners with Kevin Bacon. Okay, fifteen minutes may be stretching it. I got a bigger kick out of scrolling through Anthony Michael Hall's videography and learning that he was in Six Degrees of Separation.