Phone interviews are different when you are at home most of the day.

In the Episcopal Church, our process of discerning a call to ministry in a congregation has several steps.  You put all of your info online, answering a bunch of questions.  Then contact is made, either presbyter to congregation, presbyter to diocese, congregation to presbyter, or some other way.  The congregation may invite the presbyter to answer some more written questions, or supply examples of her preaching.  Then, if she makes the cut, she will get a phone interview.  Then after that is the face-to-face.

In our process, the phone interview is the middle weeding-out moment in which the people on the search committee get the opportunity to get to know the presbyter a little better, and get a sense of her personality.

For me, the phone interview is a difficult part of the process, since I do better in print and in person than I do over the phone.  Some of that is being mitigated by the increase of the use of Skype—a welcome addition to the process.  But it is still distant.

So here’s the real reason phone interviews are difficult.  Interviews make me nervous.  When I have one coming, my guts get all tied up.  You get one shot, and about an hour or two to get the group everything it needs to know about you.  Or at least that’s how it feels.

The anxiety of preparing for a phone interview in the past was minimized by the surrounding options.  They are often scheduled in the evening, after everybody gets out of work, so I would always get time during the day to prepare.  I would also have an office to go to, daycare to watch my daughter, and the opportunity to focus on other things.  Sometimes I could get most of my research and prep done first thing in the morning, work late, and then have some dinner and sit down and relax.

Now that I have done several phone interviews since the end of March, there is one consistent theme: I am a lousy parent on phone interview day.  Terrible.  I get irritable, refuse to play, obsess over the potential responses to potential questions, comb the demographic data for the church’s neighborhood, push my kid to take a walk so that I can think while we walk.  But really, the whole day is spent with me as one big ball of frustration.

Perhaps it is the irony of the situation, but I actually like the phone interview itself.  I get to talk about how my theology informs my practice and how I handle certain situations.  It is a pretty comfortable place for me, when I get past my nerves.  And you can ask my wife—I’m wired after it’s over: I stay up late thinking and unwinding.

Then, as I lay down to sleep, the guilt resurfaces and I know that I have to make it up to my daughter in the morning.  I will get up, make some bacon, let her help make pancakes, and she and I will probably play outside.  Soon, everything is normal…until I check my email again.