K And The College Interview - Part Deux

.....continued from here

Mr Floppy started by indulging us in a bit of ice breaking small talk. I considered this to be a good thing and we shot the breeze about wholly irrelevant bits and pieces for a couple of minutes before settling down to the serious business.

When the serious business began the first thing K did was present Mr Floppy with her newest school report. I had been unaware of the very existence of this report until about an hour earlier in the car, when K had casually mentioned it and then read bits to me.

It was glowing. Red hot. I swear.

When I was a kid I would have considered working a bit if I'd known it might get me a report even half as good as hers. The addition of a smart brain would have helped too. There were more predicted As and A pluses than most would consider fair and the narrative was even better. K has been like that since she began school. It would be worrying if she was one of those boffin types, the sort who are total geeky smartarses but no good for anything else.

Fortunately she's not like that. She's got streetwiseness going on too. There are some downsides to her character, the main one being a strange liking for David Blacker, something both her and her sister have that I'm trying to cajole out of them.

As salespeople we're trained to spot "buying signals" both verbally and physically. It's quite obvious but I'll patronise you and explain a bit more. A buying signal is when a potential buyer inadvertently gives a sign that he wants to buy. It can be via their words, like "do you stock it in red?" or through body language like leaning towards you, thereby showing interest. There are a million of them and they include what Mr Floppy did as he read K's report.

His eyes literally got bigger, his whole demeanour changed and I could just see that in his mind the situation had switched from one of him interviewing K to one of him trying to make K come to his college.

The questions began and my vow of silence hung loudly in the room, like one of those silent monks but with tourettes.

"So K, why do you want to come to X College?" was first. I must admit I did think it was weird that he called it "X College" instead of its full name.

I did that smirking thing I do, when I'm trying not to laugh and doing my utmost to look all serious. K though, looked at Mr Floppy very earnestly as if considering her response, then came out with the answer we'd rehearsed and worked out in the car word for word. But she delivered it with such conviction and applomb that it was totally convincing. I wanted to pat her on the back.

We went on and he asked just about everything we'd role played. I must confess to a slight feeling of smugness. Smugness that I'd guessed the questions correctly, but I figured that they were so standard that most people would have guessed the same.

He came to the "why do you want to study law?" question and I crossed several fingers, hoping that K wouldn't forget what we'd prepared. She didn't. Bang, came her answer, full of words about intellectual challenges, analysis and even analyses and the pursuit of knowledge. Not once did she mention arguing.

We had discovered that he was one of the law lecturers and, as he was asking the questions and K was answering, his buying signals increasing all the time. The highest point, which happened only about half way into the interview was when he said

"Look I shouldn't tell you this but you're the exactly the sort of person this college wants to study here and you're going to have a place, but I have to go through the rest of these questions to make sure I've covered everything."

Buying signals don't get much bigger than that. Inwardly I whooped, hollerred and hoped that I wouldn't then say or do anything that might mess it all up. Fortunately I didn't.

After we'd finished the main bit I complimented Mr Floppy on what a great representative he was for his institution. I told him that, despite the fact that this was the college interviewing K, it was also us getting a feel for the place and that he really presented it positively. I can't be one hundred per cent sure but I think he might have got a hard on when he heard this.

Off we went. There were handshakes, K doing all she knows, and I felt immensely proud.

If we were Americans I hazard a guess there would have been high fives and lots of shouts of "Yeah" and "woo", things like that.

We're British though. So we listened to some music and felt quietly proud in our heads. Well, I felt proud, K just took it in her stride, as she does.

You've got to brag about your kids sometimes, haven't you?