Jam PressIt’s always good to be prepared for a job interview, particularly if it’s your first, which – by law – will be embarrassing no matter what you do.
The last thing you want is to be scrambling around for a clean shirt 30 minutes beforehand, or realise way too late that, yes, you should have given your hair a trim.
But you’d have had to undergo a ridiculously stressful first-ever job interview to surpass that of 25-year-old Gooko.
Jam PressBack in 2013, Gooko was left greatly amused when he realised his mates had shaved off one of his eyebrows during a particularly boozy night out.
However, the laughter soon stopped when he remembered he had an interview for a position at Burger King a few days later. Not nearly enough time for his shorn eyebrow to grow back.
Panicked enough to take any daft advice, Gooko opted to listen to one of his schoolmates, who suggested scribbling the eyebrow back on using a black marker pen.
Believing this to be his best shot, Gooko told his schoolmate to go ahead. However – to the surprise of absolutely no one – he didn’t exactly ace the interview.
Jam PressSomewhat hilariously, Gooko proceeded to spend the next few weeks attempting to grow his eyebrows back by brushing his eyebrow hairs with toothpaste. Bizarrely, this actually worked pretty well.
Looking back on The Inbetweeners-esque moment, Gooko recalled:
I had been drinking with my friends from Friday through to Sunday, and by Sunday night we had ran out of stupid things to do so we each shaved off one eyebrow. When I sobered up it was still funny, and then it didn’t stop being funny until I realised that I had to attend that interview during the week.
To be honest, at the time I was really young and really dumb, and I genuinely didn’t understand why I didn’t get the job, so yeah I was confused. I ended up removing the sharpie eyebrow and just rocked the singular brow – that was less embarrassing somehow.
But my eyebrows are pretty prominent and it took ages to grow back. I googled ways to stimulate hair growth and ended up brushing the hair follicles with a toothbrush every night.
Jam PressSeven years on, and a more mature Gooko is still getting a few chuckles from his painfully embarrassing ordeal.
Tweeting pics of his younger self sporting a butchered eyebrow, Gooko wrote:
The very first interview I went on was in Burger King after a long weekend of taking Eccies which ended in me shaving aff my eyebrow.
A bird in my class tried to fill it in with a sharpie so the interviewer wouldn’t notice but a didn’t get it.
Many Twitter users were left in stitches at the very obviously drawn-on brow, with one howling, ‘This is so chaos omg’.
Another added, ‘feel like you only would have got it if you shaved and filled in the other one as well’.
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Jules studied English Literature with Creative Writing at Lancaster University before earning her masters in International Relations at Leiden University in The Netherlands (Hoi!). She then trained as a journalist through News Associates in Manchester. Jules has previously worked as a mental health blogger, copywriter and freelancer for various publications.