Sorry.

I lied to you last week.

I said this week was probably going to be boring again.

It was not.

This has somehow turned into one of the most “what the fuck is going on?” weeks I’ve had in a while.

It started completely normally.

I was just working through the checklist from last week, getting Outreach V2 ready, sorting the leads, fixing the site, and generally doing all the boring little things I said I needed to do.

Then Friday happened.

THE WASHINGTON PROGRAMME

A few weeks ago, I applied for a programme advertised by the local government where a group of recent graduates get selected to spend around eight weeks in Washington.

The programme itself is handled by an external organisation based in Madrid. You visit companies, attend sessions, meet people, network, and do all the professional young-person-in-Washington stuff.

It sounded cool, so I applied.

A little while later, I found out I’d made it through to the interview stage.

Lovely.

Friday comes around and I join what I assumed would be a fairly informal 15-minute chat. Three people are staring back at me.

Even lovelier.

They explain that I’ve got four questions, and the first is about my “focus areas of alignment”.

Which sounds understandable while I’m writing this now.

At the time, my brain went:

What the fuck does that mean?

So I asked if they could remind me what I had selected in my application.

Not my finest wording.

They couldn’t tell me exactly what I had written, but started listing different areas. Then they said artificial intelligence.

There’s my boy.

I spoke about AI, tech, and an internal compliance bot I had built at work that week. It checks paid media ads before they go live and flags things like incorrect offers, markets, terms, and other compliance issues that become quite important when you work in the gambling industry.

So, as interview questions go, this felt pretty aligned with me.

I wasn’t sitting there saying:

“AI is the future.”

I literally use it every day to build cool stuff and make my life more efficient.

They also asked what I wanted to get out of Washington, and my answer was networking.

Your boy is pretty shy. Walking into a room full of strangers, introducing myself, and turning that into an actual relationship has never come particularly naturally to me.

It’s something I really want to get better at, especially if I’m serious about building all the things I’m constantly dreaming about.

So Washington seemed like a pretty good place to practice.

The interview carries on. Nothing spectacular, but nothing I thought was disastrous either.

Then, at the end, I ask one final question.

A friend of mine had also applied, but part of the application process had landed in his junk folder, meaning he never completed a second form. I asked whether there was anything he could do.

Initially, they said the deadline had passed.

Fair enough.

Then one of the interviewers jumped in and told me:

“I am a firm believer that it never hurts to actually send the email, explain what happened.”

They gave me an email address, told me he could send his documents, said they would document it, and thanked me for bringing it to their attention.

Sorted.

Everyone smiles, the interview ends, and I leave thinking it had gone alright.

Not amazing.

Not getting invited to the White House tomorrow.

But alright.

Then, about 40 minutes later, I get an automated email.

My meeting transcript is ready.

Bit weird.

My interview lasted about 10 minutes.

Naturally, I open it.

Turns out...

The recording never stopped when I left.

“JAKE? NO.”

I had been sent another half an hour of the panel’s private conversation.

Candidate scores, rankings, who was going, who wasn’t, and basically everything an applicant is very obviously not supposed to see.

Obviously, at this point there was only one reasonable thing to do.

Be incredibly nosy and find out what they said about me.

And to my surprise, the atmosphere changes almost immediately after I leave.

One of the interviewers says:

“Qué buena actitud el chico.”

Basically:

“The guy had a good attitude.”

Lovely.

Then one of the women responds:

“Sí, pero no.”

Basically:

“Yeah... but no.”

The other woman is even less convinced, and from there I get to watch my interview be pulled apart in real time.

They start questioning whether my answers matched what I had written in my original application, which confused me slightly.

My application spoke about business, entrepreneurship, and wanting to develop my leadership skills. In the interview, I spoke about building things with AI, entrepreneurship, technology, networking, and wanting to become better at leading people.

I didn’t exactly apply as a keen future politician looking to examine the inner workings of the US Congress.

The male interviewer does make one fair point though.

Instead of asking:

“What did I put in my application?”

I should have asked them to remind me of the general focus areas.

Which is totally correct. That would have sounded much better, and I completely accept that.

Then, randomly, one of the women starts repeating the way I’d asked the question back in a mocking voice, laughing and imitating me.

Okay.

Slightly different vibe now.

Then they start scoring my four answers.

Jesus Christ.

Even the guy seems surprised and basically asks whether they’re serious, commenting that one day the women say one thing and the next something different.

Which made me feel slightly less insane.

I know I didn’t give the greatest interview of all time. I winged most of it, and I could have prepared much better.

That is on me.

But ones and twos still felt pretty brutal.

Anyway, then they open the final rankings.

There are around 15 places, and somehow, after getting absolutely murdered in the interview scores, I’m sitting 16th.

Honestly?

That’s not even terrible.

One person drops out and your boy could theoretically still be packing his suitcase.

Apparently one interviewer did not enjoy that possibility.

“Jake? No.”

Then again:

“Jake, no, please.”

The numbers are saying I’m sitting just outside the group.

She is basically saying absolutely fucking not.

At this point, I’m watching the recording thinking:

What did I actually do to you?

Then, later, I hear:

“Ciruela sacó la peor entrevista.”

Translation:

“Ciruela had the worst interview.”

Right.

That explains the enthusiasm.

Not a poor interview.

Not bottom five.

The worst interview.

Pretty brutal.

But also strangely impressive considering I’d still ended up 16th for 15 places.

Whatever my initial application score was before that call must have been doing some serious heavy lifting.

Being told I had the worst interview was embarrassing.

What came next was where the whole thing started becoming genuinely weird.

REMEMBER MY FRIEND?

Remember the question they had encouraged me to ask about?

Send the email.

Explain what happened.

Here’s the address.

We’ll document it.

Thank you for raising it.

Apparently that friendliness expired the second I disconnected.

A few minutes later I hear:

“No, this kid is going to leave. And he wanted to take his friend. No, please.”

Suddenly I’m being framed like I’m trying to bag a free trip to Washington and drag my mate along for the party.

Which, to be fair, would have been class.

But he had literally already applied to the same programme.

He missed part of the process because the form landed in junk, and I simply asked whether he could explain what had happened.

That was it.

If they thought it was a stupid question, they could have just said no.

I’d have respected that.

What I found weird was being encouraged to do it to my face, then mocked for the exact same thing once I’d left.

At this point, the whole thing was mostly embarrassing and slightly annoying.

Then we reached minute 36.

WAIT, WHAT ARE WE LOWERING?

By this point I know my interview scores, I know I apparently gave the worst interview, and I know I’m sitting around 16th.

Then I hear:

“Es que ni bajando le altera sus scores porque él estaba alto. O sea, la gente lo tenía alto.”

Roughly:

“Even lowering it doesn’t alter his scores because he was already high. People had rated him highly.”

Immediately afterwards:

“Jake.”

“Jake, yes.”

Sorry?

Even lowering what?

My interview scores were already done.

So this appeared to be referring to an earlier score attached to my application, one where, according to their own conversation, people had rated me highly.

That was where it stopped being funny.

Someone thinking I interviewed badly is fine. Someone not liking my personality is fine.

But if previously awarded scores can potentially be lowered after an interviewer has already decided they don’t want someone progressing, that is a completely different issue.

Especially when that person is sitting 16th for 15 places.

Now, I don’t know exactly what happened.

There could be a legitimate moderation process I don’t understand, and I’m not going to pretend I know something I don’t.

But I know what I heard.

A discussion about lowering scores because the existing ones were high, immediately followed by my name.

So yeah.

I’d quite like someone to explain that.

AND THEN THERE WAS EVERYONE ELSE

I know I’ve made this story mostly about me.

Obviously.

It was my interview, my scores, and my accidental front-row seat to people absolutely cooking me once I left.

But by sending me the full transcript and video, they had also given me information I should never have had access to.

I could see other applicants’ names, scores, file averages, interview averages, rankings, progression decisions, and withdrawals.

Actual personal assessment information belonging to people I had never met.

At that point, this was no longer just a funny story about Jake accidentally hearing what his interviewers really thought of him.

It was now a potentially serious data protection and confidentiality issue too.

So my Friday afternoon went from hoping I might get to spend eight weeks in Washington to writing one of the most carefully constructed emails I’ve probably ever written, formally complaining to the local government about the external organisation running the process and how the whole situation had been handled.

No emotional rant.

No asking them to reconsider my application.

No trying to convince them I deserved to go.

Just the facts.

Here are the timestamps.

Here are the quotes.

Here is the recording.

Here is the information about other candidates that was accidentally disclosed to me.

Please explain what happened.

ANYWAY, I WENT TO A JAZZ CONCERT

I’m not going to pretend it didn’t annoy me.

It did.

It was embarrassing to leave an interview thinking you did alright and then accidentally receive 30 minutes of people explaining that you apparently gave the worst interview of the lot.

Not ideal.

But strangely, it didn’t ruin my mood.

That same night, I went to a local poetry and jazz concert, which might be the most pretentious sentence I’ve written on this website.

It was definitely something different... but I had a really good night.

My friends were completely on my side, and if anything, the whole thing reminded me how many people I have around me who genuinely back me.

Life continued.

Apparently even the worst interview of my life couldn’t ruin jazz night at El Kasbah.

THE ACTUAL SURPRISE OF THE WEEK

Before Washington completely hijacked this article, this was supposed to be the big reveal:

*cue the drumrolls*

Life of Jake has photos now!

I take loads of photos of travel, friends, random places, and things I think look cool.

Then most of them get edited, sit on an SD card or camera roll, and disappear forever.

So I built a system around it.

Now I can edit a photo in Lightroom, drop it into Google Drive, and the rest happens automatically. It gets processed, formatted, uploaded, and appears on Life of Jake within roughly five minutes.

This weekend, I was walking up town at night with a friend, took a photo I liked, edited it, dropped it into the system, and a few minutes later it was live.

That is extremely cool to me.

Hopefully, over the next few years, /photos becomes a massive visual archive of all the random people, places, and moments that made up my life.

This was meant to be the exciting bit.

Sorry, photos.

Washington absolutely shafted you.

ALWAYS BE COMPLEX

So yeah.

Bit of a week.

I know I could have done better in that interview. I should have prepared properly, and next time I get a call of that calibre, I will.

That’s the useful part I’m taking from it.

It’s important to take criticism when it can genuinely make you better.

But becoming better should mean expanding who you are, not shrinking yourself to fit someone else’s limited view of who you should be.

So remember:

Not everyone is going to understand you.

Not everyone is going to like you.

That’s perfectly fine.

Keep expanding your own view of the world instead of reducing yourself to fit inside theirs.

Keep the weird bits. Keep the ambition. Keep building your own rooms, and make them big enough that other people have to expand their thinking to step inside.

Being different is good.

Being difficult to put in a box is good.

Always be complex.