It was June 1995. I’d lost my job in early February, on the very day I’d returned from six weeks of unpaid maternity leave. We had two babies, six months old and seventeen months old. We had hospital bills left over from the birth of our son, and the insurance company was still working on the $21,000+ bill that our daughter had racked up in the hospital when she was nine days old and had RSV and pneumonia. We had day care expenses, formula and diapers to buy, and had to figure out how to feed ourselves. I was job-hunting full time and getting very discouraged. Despite the promise there had been a few short years before, there just weren’t many jobs for an entry-level computer programmer, straight out of college.

In the meantime, I had an impacted wisdom tooth that had to come out. It was almost completely horizontal, with only one little tip of one corner poking through the gum. The rest of it was pushing against my molar, causing tension and pain all around my lower jaw. I opted to have the oral surgery done under a local anesthetic, so that I could drive myself home and my husband wouldn’t have to take the day off from work. With two little ones in day care, we needed to hoard our vacation time for the inevitable ear infections and strep throats and all the other maladies that kids pick up in their first few years.

The extraction went pretty well. I didn’t feel anything, but the sounds that the surgeon made in my mouth as he chiseled that tooth out of my jaw were decidedly discomfiting. Unfortunately, a few days later, it turned out that I had dry socket, which the surgeon had expected in a gum incision as long as mine had to be. I went back in to his office, and he inserted a little piece of medicated gauze. It took less than a day to discover that whenever the socket hurt, I just had to give my lower jaw a little twitch to release the medication from the gauze, and then it felt better.

I got a call back from one company and scheduled the job interview. It was a great technology company, listed in the Fortune 50 at the time, and the job sounded great. I went in for the interview, and sat in the office with two senior engineers. They asked about my professional programming experience. I had done one project on the side for a friend of mine who was a mechanical engineer, so I told them about that. It was not a very large or impressive project, so this didn’t take long.

When my two interviewers sussed out that I didn’t have anything more to tell them about work experience in programming, they started telling jokes. Great, I thought. They’re telling jokes in my job interview. Well, we’ll just add this one to the list of Jobs I’m Not Going to Get! In the meantime, I was also trying to focus on my lower jaw, continually reminding myself not to twitch it to release the medication into my socket. I knew that the jokes were bad enough - though I did laugh at them, of course - but if these men saw me twitching my jaw on top of it, they’d never give me an offer.

I was wrong. Two days later, the recruiter called to say that she was putting together a formal offer letter for me. I was thrilled. Rather than wait for the mail, I went up to the office to pick up the letter. I signed it at the front desk and set a start date of Tuesday, July 5. I had a job. Woo hoo!

I had a similar experience in early 2003. I’d been laid off from my job after six months in May 2002, when the budget for the government project dried up, and had been trying to find work ever since. I kept getting this close and then having the door slammed in my face. An employer would be at the point of writing an offer letter, but then the budget for the position would be cut. Or the interviewers had recommended me as the best candidate for a position, but then an internal candidate would request a transfer, and the company policy was to always give internal candidates preference over external ones. It was very frustrating.One morning in March, I had seen my children off to school, done my morning aerobic video, taken a shower, and then lain down for a nap. The phone shrilled next to me - a phone interview for a job I’d submitted my resume for several weeks before. I didn’t remember anything from the online job listing, so I tried to sound like I was (a) awake and (b) not completely clueless. I feared I was failing at both. The call ended, and I did not have a warm fuzzy.

Almost a week later, a different person from the company called to schedule a second phone interview. We set a date and time and hung up. I wrote the date on my calendar on April 1. On March 31, I was at a meeting at my church when my husband called my cell phone. “Where are you? You’re missing a phone interview for a job!” I protested my innocence, telling him to flip the calendar to the next page to see the interview the following day. The manager did call back the next day at the same time, and he apologized profusely. But I knew this was bad, very bad. I would never get this job.

I was wrong. A few days later, the recruiter called to say he was fedexing me an offer letter. Even more amusingly, after receiving and returning the offer letter, a third manager called to schedule a phone interview. I shrugged and was polite and good-natured.  I started the job on April 21, and I’m still with the same company today, though two of the three people who interviewed me are gone now.