I had been playing Shaco since he came out and he's been a pretty disliked character for almost his entire history. Over time he got buggier and buggier and buggier so I put a bunch of footage together demonstrating everything that didn't work on him. This is S1 territory and at the time he was regarded as awful. He mostly was. His boxes were visible through the fog of war, his boxes wouldn't always fear, they didn't provide vision to some bushes, stealthed characters could see and reveal them, it was bad. I posted the video on the official forums and on SA and was told by Brackhar that he'd move it along. I was pretty happy with that.
A few weeks later I get contacted by one of Riot's engineers through my YouTube account and compliments me on the bug compilation and I half-jokingly ask if maybe I could get a Shaco skin out of it and he goes and unlocks every Shaco skin on my account (which is where I got my Nutcracko) and gives me a 10 game IP boost. Awesome customer relations stuff. I was pretty tickled at that.
Then a few weeks after that I get friended out of nowhere by one of Riot's QA people, Kismet, and he asks me if I had ever thought about applying for a job at Riot. I hadn't and he says that he thinks I should. We talk for a bit and I decide to go ahead and give it a try. This is a bottom of the rung QA position but I know people that turned those kind of basic jobs in the gaming industry into a career so I tell him I'll put together a resume. I send one out and that leads into a phone interview with Kismet. Then I have a phone interview with Veigar, the head of the department. I take some dumb online intelligence test and then I have another phone interview after that. They want to fly me out. They also will set me up for one day in a hotel room if I want but I don't really want to impose so I go with a same-day flight back home.
I fly out there and the first thing I do is I meet Morello and spend maybe 45 minutes talking with him about the game. I think he's a dick on the League forums and I hate his buzzwords but in the flesh he was very personable and fun to talk with. I'm told I'll talk with Veigar next. One of the other QA people comes in. Veigar is in a meeting and can't make it. This person doesn't know why I'm there. The interview starts to go poorly. He asks me questions like this -
"Alright, so I'm on the third floor and I send you a text asking for you to run me up a pencil to my office. Someone else sends you a text asking you for a pen and they are on the first floor. Where do you go?" He says "why did you apply to Riot? With a resume like this you could have applied...at any gaming company." He doesn't believe anything he just said. I don't have much experience in this situation and I don't know how to salvage it. From the moment I got there I have been trying to look and act as calm and professional as I possibly can. I try my best to answer the questions I'm asked but I freeze up when he asks me if I have an experience working on a team and I cannot think of anything. I completely forget my entire time in the Army. He tells me that next I'll talk with Kismet.
Then the woman who was my intermediary during all this, the human resources person, comes in and tells me that the interview process is over and puts my on a cab back to the airport. My flight isn't for 13 hours. I buy a copy of Full Dark No Stars by King to try and stay awake and it is god awful.
No one had any idea who I was or why I was there, I was flown 2000 miles to be asked the same kind of questions that I was asked when I applied for a job at Walmart, and after talking with two people for less than an hour and a half they were flying me back. I am later told that I wasn't enthusiastic enough about being there. The job paid less 11 dollars an hour. Eleven dollars an hour in Santa Monica.
