Long distance job interview

After a few days in lovely Luang Prabang it was time to move on. Peach and I took a bus 4 hours north-west to Nom Kheow. We left Tess behind. Things had never really recovered from Peach & Tess’s falling out back in Thailand and from this point we pretty much went out separate ways except for a couple of brief path-crossings.

Nom Kheow is a very small village up in the mountains of northern Laos. It’s set in a valley with a river running through it and is surrounded by mountainous peaks. There’s just a small handful of places to stay – mostly bungalows along the river. The view from our bungalow in the mornings was incredible – a massive mountain with mist around it and the river in the foreground. There were hardly any other tourists around and there wasn’t much to do but kick back and relax. I had no problem with that.

Here’s a shot from the porch of our bungalow.

One thing that was causing me a problem though was a nagging headache that didn’t seem to be going away. By the time I got to Nom Kheow I’d had a headache non-stop for about a day and a half. I had been dosing up on pain killers but they didn’t seem to be having any effect. Peach blamed the Laos whiskey that I’d taken to having shots of at regular points throughout the day in Luang Prabang. I didn’t know what it was. It was a good thing there wasn’t much to do in Nom Kheow because with my throbbing head I didn’t feel like doing much.

The next day the headache was still there. I decided to stop taking pain killers and tough it out. At 4pm that day Peach had a job interview for a position in London. She’d sent her CV off on a whim a few days earlier for an entirely different role and the company had asked her to interview for a much better role that would have been a great step for her career. Having not had to think about work for so long Peach was very nervous. To try and help this we’d spent much of the previous evening going over the job description, anticipating potential questions and formulating appropriate answers.

There were only 2 internet connections in town but unfortunately these were dialup connections so doing the interview via Skype wasn’t an option. We sussed out that there were only 2 phone lines in the town capable of making international phone calls. Early in the morning the power went out. This meant the phone lines were down too. As the day ticked on the power didn’t come back on and the locals we asked had no idea when it would come on either. We had to come up with a contingency.

We thought of buying a mobile phone from the one guy in town that had a few old models for sale. We also thought of catching a bus back to Luang Prabang. Eventually we arranged to borrow a mobile phone from a girl that worked at a restaurant we’d eaten at a couple of times. It was a prepaid phone and we had no idea how much international call rates would be so we played it safe and loaded it up with $US25 worth of credit. After a successful test call to Australia to make sure it could make overseas calls we were set to go. All this time we were also trying to figure out how Peach would actually get to London to start the job, assuming she got it, since they’d indicated they wanted someone asap and we were in a remote location 4 hours from the nearest main town. I’ve managed to sum up this contingency in a few lines but let me assure you it took a good couple of hours or more and all the time my head was still aching.

By the time it came for Peach to make the phone call to the company in London I was in agony so I crawled back to the bungalow to lay down whilst she went to a bungalow attached to the restaurant to go over her notes one last time before making the call. I noticed as the clock hit 4pm that the power came back on – not that it was any use to us now!

I was surprised when Peach came back to the bungalow 20 minutes later. It turns out that despite all out planning we’d converted the time in London incorrectly – we didn’t thing to consider that the UK had adjusted to summer time. Bugger! It turns out the person who was to be interviewing Peach was in another interview. The receptionist told her to call back in an hour and try her luck then.

Finally the interview did take place but Peach didn’t think it went to well and she didn’t end up getting the role. On the positive side though she now had a revamped CV and lots of interview preparation material that could be used next time. Also we had a great adventure figuring out how to make the phone call in the first place. When we gave the phone back to the local girl it still had the best part of $US20 on it – this was a small fortune in Laos. The smile on her face was priceless. So despite I gave the experience a big tick.