The interview was a virtual introduction. Nothing complicated. He dressed, opened his laptop and logged in a few minutes early to check the connection.
The interviewer joined and said nothing. He greeted him; no reply. The interviewer stood up, walked around his office, came back, and eventually looked at the screen long enough to say two words: hold on. Then he started typing. Then he signed out.
A moment later an email arrived from the company’s AI assistant, informing him that he had missed the interview.
He had been sitting there the entire time, camera on, waiting. Nobody had asked him a question, explained the silence, or ended the call. The system had logged the meeting as a no-show — presumably because the human on the other side never joined it in the way the software expected.
He wrote that it was the strangest interview of his life. The machine, at least, had an explanation. It was just the wrong one.