Treasuring the waiting

In the past when I've done job interviews, I've generally had a good time, and so have the interviewers.  Then they feel awful when they can't hire me.  They call me on the phone and just sound wretched about how they liked me best, but they have to hire this horrible person with ten years more experience.  That will probably happen this time, too, which makes me sad.

My favorite story about that was this time I interviewed for an internship at a big company, got that exact phone call, and later, when I was at the annual conference for my professional organization, they saw me from across the room and very non-subtly tried to stay on the far side of the room from me during the entire reception.  It was kind of flattering and mostly hilarious.  Eventually, I actually bumped into one of them (totally by accident), and she just looked mortally embarrassed, like she wanted to grovel and beg my forgiveness for not hiring me.  "We all really wanted to work with you," she said mournfully.  "We were so sorry they wouldn't let us have you."

That made two of us.  Soft skills being more valuable than hard skills my ear.  It all worked out later during the conference when I finally managed to secure a kind of crappy internship at a small company where micromanagement was not a problem, and I got to make a website from scratch all by myself.  It was located near where my older sister lived, so I was also able to live with and make awkward attempts to connect with my sort-of-estranged older sister the summer before she got married.

I wonder if the people I interviewed with will be that disappointed if they don't hire me this time.  I almost brought one of them to tears just during the interview.  (Accidentally, I swear; I was just wrapped up in this one story I was telling that had a kind of sweet ending, and I got a tad emotional, and is it a good sign if they say, "That was a really nice story" and "I had no idea what we were going to talk about for an hour, but the time just  went past and was over" at a big corporate job interview?)  I'll certainly cry if I don't get the job, but we'll burn that bridge if we come to it.

I thought I'd already learned the lesson about how sometimes your best isn't good enough, but I still don't want to learn it again.  I'm kind of treasuring the waiting right now because not knowing NO is better than knowing it.

Ever been in that situation: where the waiting is painful but still seems better than finding out for sure that you've failed?