In 12+years of working full time, I somehow have managed, until this day, to get away with never doing a single presentation for an interview. I’ve always hated presentations, and I have a particular distaste for mock presentations where everything is fake, but everyone involved has to pretend it is all real. I’ve always thought that because I didn’t enjoy presentations that I wasn’t actually good at it. My friends and colleagues, though, who have all seen me present, have said that watching me, they would never have guessed I hated it, and that it appears that it comes naturally to me. I guess fake it until you make it? My former colleague and now friend made a good point to me, though: “There’s a difference between hating something and actually not being good at it. You may hate the process of putting the deck together or the delivery of it, but no one else has any idea at all because your delivery is good.”

So I gave a presentation for about 45 minutes today to a panel of six participants. And as I suspected, a couple people decided to throw in some curve balls to throw me off guard to see how calm and collected I could be under pressure. What I always remind myself in these tense situations is to a) breathe, b) think about the question before I speak, and c) as a result of b, do NOT use stupid filler words like “um,” or “uhh,” and instead, pause and use silence as my time to think, as that will actually make me come across as more thoughtful and deliberate.

It seemed to work. The recruiter emailed me a few hours later and said that all signs were quite positive post presentation.

I really appreciate honesty upfront. I appreciate it even more as I’ve gotten older and less patient. There’s many ways to deliver honesty. You don’t always have to be an asshole about it, contrary to popular belief. But in order to appreciate honesty, the receiver also needs to have somewhat of a thick skin and be able to take it. It’s a balance on both the giver and the receiver’s side. In an exchange between a recruiter and a job seeker, what I really love is honesty upfront: if there are certain benefits I am looking for or a salary range that I am eyeballing, I tell the recruiter in the first call, and I really appreciate it when they tell me that they can or cannot meet those expectations. It respects my time. It also respects their and their hiring team’s time. So you can imagine when I’ve been upfront about all these things since day 1, and two weeks later, when an offer is on the table, and somehow, the salary offered is about $40K off of what I originally laid out. What exactly happened here that got lost in communication?

The recruiter explained that the company tries hard to stay aligned with market rates, constantly does market research, and this is what they came up with for this job title. I told her in response… well, that may be the case, but that doesn’t align with the years of experience with that title, because someone with five years of experience doing this type of work is going to demand something a lot lower than someone with 10 years of experience. They need to align their compensation bands as such.

I was so frustrated. It’s the first job offer I’ve had on the table since I started loosely looking for a new job at the beginning of this year, and this is what the result of the last two weeks of interviewing has been — really? It felt like a total waste of time. I realize I should be grateful to have any offer given so many people have lost their jobs since the pandemic began, and many companies have hiring freezes, but this was just poor expectations set on the recruiter’s side since the very beginning. I would have much rather appreciated that she just tell me as soon as she found out that the comp wasn’t going to align so that I didn’t have to waste any more time or effort with them.

This afternoon, I spent some time filming my next video for my channel, which is for Kerala chicken stew. I always feel a little funny filming Indian cooking videos since I am not Indian, nor did I grow up in India or eat Indian foods when I was young. Therefore, someone watching my in one of these videos could easily ask, “Why should I trust this Chinese/Vietnamese woman on Indian food?” The concept of cultural appropriation has been much discussed in recent years, especially in the food world, and I really do not want anyone accusing me of trying to appropriate their food. I suppose my cooking it and advocating for it can be made more “legitimate” by the fact that Chris is Indian, and by default, so are his parents and family, so that’s my connection to it. It’s important to be sensitive to the roots of food and to acknowledge that no, I did not in any way “create” this recipe, and I just took a version of it and decided to make it because I thought it was delicious. And there shouldn’t be anything wrong with sharing delicious foods and recipes, right?

While outdoor seating has become far more prolific in New York City than it ever has been before, it does not always work out exactly the way you would imagine. While some restaurants in certain neighborhoods have been able to take over their sidewalks and even parking spots front of their restaurants with outdoor tables and chairs for dining, not every business has been able to enjoy this luxury and offer this option to its customers. Many are still relying on takeout and delivery only. Some, attempting to do what they can with limited space, have maybe one or two 2-top tables just outside their front door. They’re doing everything they can with what they have.

We did our weekly Saturday day trip to another neighborhood today, and this time, we visited Carroll Gardens and Red Hook. And the spot we ended up choosing to get food from, Lucali, had no seating at all outside; it was takeout only. It’s actually a place that has been on my list for a long time given it’s supposedly the best Brooklyn pizza in all of New York City, and it normally commands waits of 3-4 hours, as they take no reservations normally, and they are also cash only. So in some way, COVID-19 has allowed us to try this famed pizza with zero wait! Once we picked up the pizza, the next challenge was… where to eat this darn thing?

We walked around aimlessly for a while, struggling to find a bench or somewhere to sit that was semi shaded during this hot summer day. In the end, we finally settled on a stoop… right at a random public school nearby. We sat there and ate an entire pie, just the two of us. And it was likely one of the best pizzas I’d ever eaten in my life. The crust and base were so light and airy but crisp. The cheese was light, chewy, and had just the right amount of saltiness. And the tomato sauce had a little tang and wasn’t too sweet. The fresh basil thrown on whole on the top was like icing on a cake. It was the most expensive Margherita pizza we’d ever eaten at $28 for the pie, but it was truly worth every last cent.

Ahhhh. I’m so grateful to live in New York and be able to enjoy this, even during a global pandemic. And since we have lived in New York for quite some time, New Yorkers tend to be resourceful, so we certainly made the most of the situation and enjoyed it the way we could… on a stairway at school just before the downpour began.

I spent 45 agonizing minutes on the phone today with a hiring manager who, based on his LinkedIn, had barely had any management responsibilities in his short career. He’s approximately 1-2 years older than me, yet he was trying to grill me on why I thought I was suited for this management role, particularly given that I had spent the last 3+ years in an individual contributor/player-coach role after leaving a management role. Did this guy realize the hypocrisy coming out of his mouth, or was it really just me?

When he asked about the company I am leaving, I told him the changing strategy moving forward, and he could not contain himself on his disgust and disagreement with leadership’s decision. He probably spent about 10-15 minutes asking me questions about the rationale behind this… even though I obviously was not the one making any decisions. I had no idea where the hell this interview was going, but I knew just five minutes into this that this is not someone I’d want to report to, work with, or even be associated with.

I truly believe that everyone who is ever in any position to interview anyone else must be taught and given a guide on how to do this because I have had way too many interviews where the interviewer forgets that an interview is a two-way street: the company is evaluating the candidate, but the candidate is also evaluating the company… and the people who are interviewing her. I’m guilty here, too: I know for a fact that I haven’t always been a great interviewer, either. But why are we not investing time and money into building these skills?

The above example is just one instance of terrible interviewing that genuinely does not need to happen. It can be better than this. We can do better than this as a human race, right?

These days, it seems like having anywhere from 3-6 rounds of interviews is no longer enough to get a job. Now, you have to do things like submit writing samples, sample email responses for customer emails, case studies, presentations, and mock meetings. Because once upon a time, having three to six rounds of interviews was not grueling enough. Getting grilled by anywhere from 6-12 people? That’s a piece of cake — let’s really put this person through a ringer and see how much she REALLY wants this job by grilling her in the form of a mock customer meeting!

I was sitting on the couch today, putting together a mock business review presentation and adding graphs I’d created to slides as I contemplated this. I understand why companies do this; they want to make sure you at least are presentable and have some semblance of competence before getting a job offer and enjoying company perks. But I would argue that a lot of what should be measured during interviews themselves is passion, curiosity, and empathy. Tasks like data analysis, presentations, how to actually present and run a meeting — these are things that can be taught and learned. You can’t really teach passion, curiosity, or empathy, though. You just have to have it.

Chris has been attempting to put YmF branding on everything. We have shirts and now we even have masks with my logo on them. In addition to this mask, I also have a mask that a colleague gifted to me, but outside of that, I really don’t have any others that I would regularly want to use. We temporarily used airplane eye-masks for sleeping as “masks,” but they were hard to breathe in, so we eventually stopped. But now, knowing that masks will be our new normal, I figured I would get some new interesting ones to have some variety and also to accept that this is our new normal moving forward… until probably forever.

I ordered some masks that are locally designed and made here in New York City, and some of the proceeds go to the nonprofit Color of Change. One of the masks has different Asian sauce bottles on it, and the second is pink with dragon fruit on them. It had to be food related for me, right?

One of the biggest things that companies have had to change during a time of COVID-19 is in-person meetings. When I say that they have needed to change it, what I mean is that in-person meetings are now finito – they no longer exist, and ALL meetings are now virtual. Since it’s not considered safe to be in an office, this also means that if you are interviewing for a new job, no more in-person marathon meetings where you have to meet one person after a next for 3-5 hours. This also means that for once in your entire life, it’s acceptable to come to an interview wearing a T-shirt and shorts — yes, really. I’ve been doing this for the last two months. It’s been a little weird, but also quite liberating at the same time. Who wants to wear stuffy clothes anyway?

What is strange, though, is that while companies have shifted in this sense out of necessity during a global pandemic, they still insist on having “virtual onsite” meetings for interviews, meaning… you no longer have to come in for your interview, but you DO have to meet one person one after the next in a single time block. What ever happened to… I don’t know, being creative and breaking up these 1:1 meetings throughout a few days so that we could potentially prevent Zoom fatigue and eye tiredness? I literally spent 3.5 hours on Zooms back to back meeting with about six different people. I had one 15-minute break. The Zoom fatigue — that is real. I was also trying to time this so that my laptop battery didn’t run out since my plug was not nearby.

Can companies please look to be a little MORE nimble and evolve as time is evolving, please?

I woke up this morning to a text message from Chris’s brother. I don’t remember what it was about, as it probably was inconsequential, but the text conversation randomly took a turn for worse when he brought up that he was still upset from our family chat last Friday. For a second, I had no idea what he was referring to, as the conversation seemed quite innocuous and didn’t really cover any serious ground. But then I remembered the conversation bits I overheard before I joined, when Chris was loudly berating his brother for traveling via plane this past weekend for a long-weekend vacation and actively planning holidays during a period of a global pandemic.

I’m not sure what he was seeking from me when he shared that with me, but my first thought was: why do people focus so much on their own hurt feelings being the main issue as opposed to the actual content of what was actually said to them? If someone says something to criticize you that you find hurtful, isn’t it normal to stop and wonder why they would say that about you and whether any of it could potentially be true? Or is that just me, someone who grew up constantly getting criticized, who would think that way? It’s human nature to be defensive, but to focus on their own feelings as opposed to the content of the conversation seems childish, dismissive, and sadly, just plain selfish. Should anyone at this point in time be traveling for leisure while hundreds of thousands of people are literally contracting COVID-19 and dying from it every single day, especially when they are not even sure if they could be carriers themselves? This is even worsened by the fact that in many cases where COVID-19 cases have dropped, resurgences have been seen… 100 percent due to outsiders who have come from out of state or out of the country just for vacation — so in other words, for their own selfish benefit. I pointed all this out to him, and he simply responded, “Rehashing the conversation doesn’t help.”

Perhaps it doesn’t help to someone who cannot see outside their own bubble, who likely knows no one who has contracted COVID-19 or died from COVID-19, who merely sees COVID-19 as an inconvenience to his leisurely life instead of as a deadly pandemic that is causing global mass deaths, recessions, joblessness, and unrest. He’s still healthy, is gainfully employed. No big deal to him, right? The worst thing that has happened, as he complained about early on after only a week of lockdown in Australia, was not being able to socialize with his friends and being lonely.

Boo. Hoo.

I know people who have contracted COVID-19. I know a former classmate from college who has now died from COVID-19, and she had just entered her 30s. Our doorman’s brother was hospitalized for COVID-19 in his twenties for over three months, at the worst point on a feeding tube. I have a friend whose father died from suicide because he couldn’t get the medical help he needed from his opioid addictions he suffered due to a language barrier in Georgia… and the reason he was denied medical treatment was due to the local hospitals all being overwhelmed from COVID-19 cases and being forced to triage.

So, yes — maybe rehashing the conversation, the facts, the diagnoses, the deaths, will not help him understand why he’s being selfish, and instead he will continue to focus on his own hurt and pain at being accused of being “selfish” instead of thinking about the potential harm he could be causing to others. How would he feel if he knew he was responsible for someone contracting COVID-19 and dying? Would that even matter to him, especially if he didn’t even know the person? It’s unclear based on his defensiveness, his decision to shut down and not respond and speak for his actions. And honestly, I don’t really care if he’s hurt because his hurt is insignificant and meaningless next to all the people in the world today who have suffered or died from COVID-19 or been impacted by COVID-19 in a tangible way — like all the medical professionals who cannot even treat these patients and cannot even be with their own families at night; the essential workers, not to mention all the people who have lost their jobs due to this global pandemic.

This is not about choosing to live one’s life in their own way anymore, as he’s constantly arguing with his brother about. “I disagree with lots of things Chris does, and I know he disagrees with me, but we live our own lives, and not everything is black and white.” Actually, in this case, it really is black and white because this could potentially be life or death. This is about — do you give a shit about other people, or do you not?

After the grueling hike up the mountain on Friday morning, we visited a winery for wine tasting and lunch. Because we’re not allowed to be indoors due to COVID-19, the winery has set up lots of outdoor tables for wine tastings as well as lunch (provided by seemingly another local restaurant with wood-fired ovens just steps away). The seating overlooks vineyards as well as the water. While we did our wine tasting outdoors, ate the local pizza and enjoyed a cheese plate, I thought a lot about all the travel that we had to give up this year: Hawaii, Cabo San Lucas, Ecuador, Kerala, Sri Lanka…. and I thought, well, none of those places are going anywhere. They all have their own COVID-19 restrictions. Everyone is trying to manage with this virus in every way they can. So if that means we need to explore more locally and enjoy what’s in our backyard like beautiful places like this, then that’s not a problem. These are the new local pleasures we will have to pursue until the world opens up to us.