Funniest thing you've heard in an interview

[adventure_rn]

So, this thread may belong in the 'Nursing Interview' section, but I'm hoping that it will get more traffic from experienced nurses here (as opposed to terrified new grads looking for help).

What's the funniest, weirdest, or wildest thing you've heard during a nursing interview, either from an interviewer or an interviewee?

Here's mine: At the end of the interview, the interviewer always asks, "Do you have any questions for me?" I usually ask, "What is your unit's greatest strength, and is there anything that you're trying to improve on?" It's basically the strengths and weaknesses question; the way that managers respond to the weaknesses element is very telling. As a weakness, one manager looked at me and said point-blank, "Well, we have a lot of drama on this unit." I must have looked dumbfounded because she clarified by adding, "You know, like, cattiness." When I asked if they were doing anything about it, her response was simply, "No."

...Thank you for your honesty, and I'd like to respectfully remove myself from the applicant pool.

[Coldsvt]

i got asked " how many times is acceptable to call out from work in a single year"

I replied with " well that depends...if its a monday or friday I am gonna be skeptical, if it is a thursday before a 3 day weekend im gonna say youre full of it...so umm twice in one year im gonna be less than pleased...infact there only to be late or miss work is if you are dead or in the act of dying in my honest opinion"

The interviewer then asked me (with a grin) how many days of work i had missed in my 12 year Navy career...i replied with " ONE, and i was on a board and collared because the paramedic took away my decision making privledges, yet i still managed to call my boss 1 hour before i was supposed to be at work, and i still went to work after my x-rays came back negative!"

i got offered the job the next day lol

[CCRN_CSC_0710]

I got asked my biggest weakness. I said chocolate. Then laughed and followed up with a legitimate answer after the interviewer picked up on it.

Got the job.

[Therhapsody89]

AIDET is an acronym for acknowledge, introduce, duration, explanation, and thanks. You are supposed to use this system with every patient, every time.

[TeeKay12]

I was on the interview committee for a new manager. We didn't ask any silly questions, but our interim manager, who was interviewing for the position did. She wanted to know if any of us wanted to see photos of her new baby, told us about her breastfeeding of the new one and potty training the older one, and then at the end, wanted to know if we thought we'd give her the job, since she'd done such a great job thus far (she had been a charge for a year, had been a tech, then an RN on the floor, and had been our interim for all of 3 weeks before her maternity leave - she didn't get the job).

[EMSnurse411]

I applied for nursing informatics job and one of the interviewers in the group of three asked me one question and he said later that he made his decision to hire me based purely on how I answered that one question.

The question was " Do you believe there's life on other planets?"

My answer was "Well, logically and scientifically statistically if only 1% of 1% of the visible galaxies have one planet in the Goldilocks zone andonly 1% of 1% of those is capable meaning has atmosphere and other needed elements to sustain life and 1% of 1% of those has elements of life such as plants or even a single cell organisms, since I assume your question his asking about intelligent sentient life and not just elemental life. 1% of 1% of those planets would still be millions if not billions of planets and it would be extremely egotistical to assume that if there are millions or billions of planets that would technically be capable of sustaining intelligent sentient life that we are the only planet that it actually happened on."

He told me afterwards that the reason I ask this was to see how I handled being asked and absurd question that I was not prepared for since the job required teaching and there would be probably a number of incidents where you got ask you question that we were not prepared for. He told me afterwards that the reason I ask this was to see how I handled being asked and absurd question that I was not prepared for since the job required teaching and there would be probably a number of incidents where you got ask you question that we were not prepared for.

[gdottie]

OMG...I got the what kind of tree are you one. I said do you mean like a web document object model tree? I'd be the application interface I guess. Half of them were laughing, especially a guy on the end who was especially amused...but the woman who asked was just looking dumbfounded. She asked another question and I heard the guy on the end say 'geek'. They moved on. After the interview as someone was walking me out, I said, did they mean trees like in the forest? She said your answer was perfect, but not what most people say.

[Dyvinite, RN]

When asked why the unit was hiring, the interviewer said that recently the entire night shift quit all at once.

[Quo Vadis]

When I got interviewed for a position as nurse specialist on a Huntington's Disease floor, I got asked which ride in an amusement park I identify with the most. I got hired with "the haunted house" as my answer and later the interviewer told me that the unit could be very wild, crazy and scary at the same time. Now I wonder what he would have done had I said something entirely different. Though it probably didn't matter anyway.