We'll stay late!
A mediumish-size electronics manufacturer contacted me about a position in early 2003. The emails that this company sent were simply atrocious, and I wish I still had them. The nicest thing to say is they were written by a person who was using email (and possibly a computer) for the first time in their life. Paragraphs were jumbled and out of order, edits weren't removed, and the person sending it even managed to spell her name wrong. I'm not talking about starting your letter off with "Suzanne" and signing it "Sue," I mean "Szunanne."
The best part of all of the emails I received was the portion where they wanted to state they were interested in speaking with me, but instead wrote "Would you be interested in speaking with you?"
You bet I would, sometimes it's the best conversation I have all day!
I was very hesitant about returning this, but I did. We traded a few terribly written emails and I finally did a phone screen with them. It wasn't quite what I was looking for, but was interesting enough. At the end of the phone call, they asked if I could come in for an interview. I indicated this was something I could do, we would need to schedule this as it's a 8 hour drive to their location and it would probably be an overnight trip for me.
They were all "That's great, can we do that today at 4:30?"
"No, I'm in other state, it's an 8 hour drive." (by this time it was around 3PM.)
"Would 5PM work then?"
"No...it's an 8 hour drive. We need to set up something..."
"We can stay late, how about 6:30?"
"..."
I don't think they quite understood that distance limits didn't exist over email, and that I wasn't right next door. I broke the conversation off with a statement about having to do an overnight trip to drive down there, unless they had an alternate or other transportation. Video interviews didn't really exist yet, Skype was just a rumored announcement at this point.
I don't remember exactly what happened, but I tried to set up a schedule with them where I'd come down, spend the night, do an interview in the morning, and drive home. Any time I brought up was a "We can do that today, how about a few hours from now?" I could not convince them that I wasn't just right across the street, even though they had my full address and could easily look up the location and see that it was well over 450 miles away. I just kind of said "Thank you, but no thank you."
The hiring manager that I spoke with actually called me back after a few days, and we went through this again. They weren't willing to set up any other schedule than "Just come in today." Nothing I did would convince them that I wasn't local and had to schedule a trip to come see them. I went through a few more rounds of the same thing, and finally just had to tell them I was no longer interested.
I do remember running across the fact they'd been acquired by a larger rival a few years after this. I have no idea if it's related to their ability to hire people, but I hope they found someone that was just willing to come in today.