Odd Interview

As I was walking into work today I found that I was contemplating the weekend that has just passed, more specifically the interview I experienced on Saturday morning. I feel a small amount of background information is required here, I have recently applied for my first passport and now, in the UK, in order to get your first passport you have to attend an interview to prove that you are who you say you are. A few weeks after sending my initial application I received a letter asking me to call and arrange an interview location, date and time. As I work fulltime I had little choice but to request a Saturday appointment and 8:30am Saturday 29th in Derby was the only realistic option available. In all honesty the time and place didn’t seem particularly bad, it would give me and my partner the chance to make a morning of it and engage in a little retail therapy. So Saturday came round and me and my partner got ourselves up early and headed off to Derby. More or less from the time we arrived it was a somewhat surreal experience. To start with, despite the office being literally just off a main street in Derby town centre, the directions given to me by the passport service took me out of the town centre and round a fairly grimy, derelict part of town. We got to an open area surrounded by boarded up shops and run down houses, feeling a little lost we stopped to get our bearings and check on my partners phone that we were actually heading in the right direction. Almost as soon as we had stopped walking I was approached by a man asking if my beard was real, once he had convinced himself it was in fact real he shook my hand and congratulated me on my obviously miraculous and glorious beard. Oddly this distraction actually helped, while I was busy shaking hands and having my beard admired my partner spotted the building we were looking for. We entered the building expecting to see a reception are, or at least a receptionist, instead we were greeted by a spiral staircase and another door this time with a buzzer, stuck on the staircase was piece of A4 paper with an arrow, directing us upstairs. On the first floor was an identical scene, again with an arrow directing me up a floor. The second floor turned out to be our destination, here there was yet another identical scene, however, this time the paper was on the door and was directing us towards the buzzer. We approached the door and my partner pressed the buzzer, after a couple of minutes the door opening and a slightly creepy looking man in a security guard uniform poked his head around out but said nothing. Slightly taken aback by the situation I haltingly explained why we were there and handed over a letter I had been asked to take with me. The guard asked me if either of us had a mobile phone and refused to let us enter until he had seen that we had turned them off.  Although the outside area gave the appearance of a small building, upon entering the main room it opened out into a large meeting room. At one end there was a bank of chairs set out in ‘U’ formation, obviously the waiting area. At the far end of the room, forming small cubicles, was a series of floor to ceiling dividers in front of a large glass wall with a single door in it. In each these cubicles was a desk which was exactly the same width as the distance between the dividers, essentially separating the room in two. On each desk was a computer and at each computer was a person, these were the people performing the interviews. As I was waiting I could occasionally hear the other interviews taking place and each sounded slightly odd. The interviewers were all of a type, a none descript man or woman, of smart appearance, who could have been any age from 30 to mid 50, all had a kind of fixed smile on their faces and all spoke with a forced joviality. I was called over for my interview and approached the cubicle that I had been assigned, it almost felt like I was entering a trap, the falseness was almost palpable in the air. As the interview progressed I was asked the obvious questions about where I worked, how’d I’d gotten there, did I drive etc. all the time the woman in front of me had a smile fixed to her face and the false joviality in her voice. I think it was this constant forced joviality the disturbed me the most it left me feeling very uneasy as if there was a wrongness about the whole affair. A feeling that stayed with me well after the interview was over, I still don’t know whether I’m being given a passport or not, all I want to do is go on holiday with my partner for a few days....