Eastward Bound II

My hopes did not end up in vain when those people from Eastwood called me up last week, telling me I should drop by sometime. So, I did. The problem is how I’d tell my boss about it. Or how not to. Just like the previous alibi, I said I was sick. And yeah, I was actually a bit sick but not to the point where I couldn’t go to work. The thing is that I’m supposed to attend to the critical crap that I’ve been working on. So, even if I told my boss I was sick, I was still made to go to work.

But I still made it to the Eastwood session. I was late by about 10 minutes, thanks to the taxi driver who toured me around White Plains going against the traffic all the time. And then he had the guts not to give me any change. I wasn’t even offering a tip. I was so glad to learn that the guy who would interrogate me is still on a meeting. Ten minutes, I waited in the really cold corner where I also took an exam the last time.

After a while, somebody made me transfer to a more comfortable area. Solitary confinement. I wondered if that was part of the screening process. Cameras may be in place to monitor how we react to situations where we had to wait. Finally, the guy arrived. The session went well, I guess, since I was occasionally smiling. He began the conversation in Tagalog but I found myself blabbering in English the whole time.

There were a bunch of personal and hypothetical questions. Many of them were related to my current job. I actually blurted out about the grave situation I was in at the plant. Whew, got the message across: please get me out of there without actually begging for it. There were two technical questions which I could still vividly remember, though:

Question 1: How do you code the function for getting the string length?

I was at a lost but I tried, nevertheless. Dunno if it was impressive cause I actually was able to code the function but not in strict C syntax.

Question 2: Supposed ‘1’ is assigned for “Hello”, ‘2’ for “world”, and ‘3’ for “!”, could you print the strings whenever an integer from 1 thru 3 is pressed? Do it without using conditional statements.

It was actually a breeze, until he mentioned that I wasn’t supposed to use if’s, cases, and so forth. I gave up. Well, I haven’t really used C outside of my programming class in college three years ago. Anyway, he told me nobody ever gets that one. Time to jump for joy.