Makayla's Canterbury Tales: A too-honest travel journal
Day Sixteen: AWKWARD!
I swear I am a good journalist. Even good journalists make mistakes, right? Well, this mistake made me laugh my way home after an interview.
This interview has pretty much been scheduled since I arrived in Canterbury. After accidentally getting the day wrong (see day nine), I thought I had this interview in the bag.
Mistake!
This interview was so awkward. This has nothing on my source, she was an angel. My ability to communicate with another human being just short circuited and I am sure I made this interviewee’s day a little strange after that.
The conversation flowed as well as interviews usually do but it just felt like I could not phrase any of my questions in the witty way they sounded in my head. This part is super important later on.
So when I was interviewing my source, she mentioned that she worked at a pub for a bit when she was at university. I thought this was super cool, so I told her about a story I am working on about pub culture in the United Kingdom.
About 30 minutes go by and we both finish our coffees and wrap up the interview. We walk outside together which is new for me because somehow my interviews always end up with either me or the source sticking around the interview spot a little bit longer.
Because this is new territory for me, I panicked.
Trying to be witty and remembering my source worked at a pub in the area, I asked her where the good pubs were around the city. She pointed to one across the street from where we met, then she turned and walked away in the opposite direction.
Strange, I thought.
Then it hit me.
This woman must have thought that I thought the interview was so awkward that I had to go to the nearest pub and drown my sorrows. Readers, I swear to you that was not my intention. I was trying to make small talk and it just so happened to revolve around a location that most notably serves alcohol.
When I figured this out, I immediately texted about three people in my family to laugh at the horrible misunderstanding. Walking the entire way back to my university accommodations, I burst out giggling at least three or four times – enough to bother the person sitting a few seats away from me.
Not every interview will go perfectly, aspiring journalists, but that is totally fine. As long as you consider it a lesson to be learned and you only slightly degraded your appearance to your source, you will recover.
With that being said, this will totally be a memory that keeps me up at night four years down the line.