LONDON, UK – A man on his way to a job interview learned an important lesson in why it’s important to be polite to strangers. You just never know when that stranger might be someone more important to you than you might have imagined.
Matt Buckland, a job recruiter tweeted a story that has been shared over 14,000 times. His tale of cosmic karma begins on the London tube, where a man who rudely pushed himself past and told him to “go f**ck himself” ended up in his office arriving for an interview… with Buckland himself.
“I was on my way into work on the Tube on Monday morning during rush hour. I stood to one side to let a lady get by, and ended up blocking a man momentarily. He shoved passed me, almost knocking me over, and shouted” Buckland told BBC Trending.
Despite a bad start, the day carried on as normal for Buckland, who is the head of talent and recruiting for Forward Partners, which funds early startup businesses. He had an interview scheduled for 5:30pm. At 5:15pm the interviewee turned up. Lo and behold – it was the man who’d been so charming earlier.
Buckland stepped away briefly to tell his Twitter followers about it and went back into the interview room. At this point the interviewee still hadn’t made the connection. “It was totally awkward,” says Buckland. “So I approached it by asking him if he’d had a good commute that morning. We laughed it off and in a very British way I somehow ended up apologising”.
By the time the interview had finished, the tweet had gone viral and people began sharing similar stories of their own online. It became a topic of discussion on Reddit, LinkedIn and Tumblr. A Facebook post of Buckland’s tweet accompanied by the caption “Quick reminder: Nice continues to finish first” has been liked over 400,000 times.
Of course, the applicant didn’t get the job.
