When I returned home from work today I was watching a live interview fromthe TechCrunch Disrupt Conference.  Merissa Mayer and Mark Zuckerberg, CEOs of Yahoo! and Facebook were being interviewed by J. Michael Arrington of TechCrunch.  Arrington is a millionaire entrepreneur if you aren’t familiar with him.   There were two things about the interview that made me think it was a good example of how not to interview someone.

I know I am obsessed with office supplies, but I think this is just a little lame using such an awful clipboard to interview some of the most influential people in the world of technology.  Arrington doesn’t need to impress anyone with a clipboard but to me it gives the impression of not caring or being unprepared.  I feel like that clipboard is ideal for processing prisoners at the county jail rather than for anything with this visibility.

Here is another picture of the offending clipboard during the Mayer interview.  You are probably asking yourself what the second thing was that made this a good example of how not to interview someone?  As you can see from the photos, the interviews were being aired live on CNBC and apparently there was no delay.  Right in the beginning Arrington decided to ask Mayer about the new Yahoo! logo and dropped an F-Bomb on live TV.  I don’t know which is worse, the F-Bomb or the horrible clipboard.  Either way I guess it doesn’t matter because I’m not the one interviewing such successful people.

So there you have it, in my opinion an F-Bomb and an awful clipboard are two lethal ingredients that combine for a ” How not to Interview Someone ” moment.  Obviously I was bored tonight and figured I would share some office supply related fun on an off day for the blog.  It was also a good excuse to re-introduce the F-Bomb for some of you that may not have seen it before.

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