When applying for a retail job online sometimes you have to take a quiz.
As I am applying for a retail job, online, I just took one of these tests. I assumed this was going to be a personality quiz, one of those inane ones where they ask if you think you're good at making friends in a dozen different ways and then slip in "do you think it's all right to steal from your employer?" just in case you'd have forgotten you were in fact applying for a job.
And there was such a quiz, but it was administered after a first quiz which involved basic math skills, some verbal questions, and a strange series of exercises in which they provided a definition and then asked that I choose the first letter of the word for which the offered definition would likely belong.
I ought to mention that I have been drinking.
So, what I suppose was intended as a basic competency test proved more of the field-sobriety variety of examinations.
If I may add, in my defense, I likely wouldn't have done much better on the math had I been clear-minded (though I doubt, if I do get an interview I'd offer this bit of information) and that asking what letter a word corresponding to an offered definition begins with is ridiculous.
Especially given that there are a great deal of words.
If I remember correctly there are supposed to be anywhere from a quarter to three-fourths of a million words in the English language... and let's not get bogged down in the issue of spelling.
So when they offer "an opening in a wall that lets light and air through" and then supply the choices: JHWS, I am forced to wonder whether they mean a hole, a hemorrhage, a window, a wound, a split, a seam, a slit, or an amount of space (and space most definitely begins with the letter s) . I could not think of any words that begin with the letter j... so I did not chose that. Maybe a poorly caulked joint, but that's more of a phrase.
And what if instead of the most fitting (which is more than likely meant to mean the most common response) they are actually quite clever and have a computer that knows when I chose h I was imagining the word hole and that while a window might best describe a specific hole in a wall the word hole is in fact more fitting because a window (a properly constructed window) does not allow air into a room unless it is open and an open window is in fact little more than a fancy (some might say pretentious) hole?
