Today and tomorrow, the Mariners' are holding a job fair at Safeco Field and I applied! Bad news is I didn't get it, but the good news is I'm going to dish all the juicy details about how it happens and what to expect!

They hire for something like 10 different job titles. All but one job is in the $9 per hour market, with the box office having a $9-$11 range. They don't come out and say it, but expect part time with a maximum of something like 35 hours a week when the Mariners are in town. Expect 4 or 5 hour shifts starting at 4 or 5 p.m. for games starting at 7:10 p.m.

The interviews start at the top of the hour, but they have around 100-125 chairs set up in the lobby with the managers of the diamond club and suite levels giving a run down of what to expect and what's expected of us.

Benefits include:

• $2 Parking at the parking garage under the old amazon building, unless you have 3 or more employees in your car, which then parking would be free.
• Bus pass.
• Orca cards for ferry riders besides Whidbey Island for some reason.
• 4 free tickets to somewhere in the 300 level seating every month.
• During your shift you get one 15 minute paid break, or the option to extend that into a 30 minute unpaid lunch.
• A voucher for half off one item at a concession stand each shift you work.
• Promotion/giveaway items at a much later date (They buy an extra 1,000 per giveaway).

Pretty quickly after the hour, the interviewing managers came down and called off names about 8-10 in a row, to be interviewed in a suite upstairs in front of a panel.

Each person in each group is applying for the same position. My group had a panel of 4 people (The manager and two supervisors of the box office, and then some lady who they didn't say what she did), and they interviewed 9 of us.

After the panel briefly introduced themselves, they asked us to spend about 5 minutes getting to know our neighbor enough to quickly introduce them to the panel and the rest of the room. With an odd number of people, I was stuck in the group of 3.

Nobody in my group made it beyond the next bit. They pulled us and one other guy into the neighboring suite and said something to the effect of "It's nothing personal, we just can't hire everyone. We hope to see you at the games though. Better luck next year."

The guy who I didn't "interview" stormed out hardcore, but didn't remember how to get out of the lobby. He was furiously pacing around downstairs until the rest of us took our time thanking them for the opportunity. He was being a pretty big baby, and kept saying stuff like "How dare they!".

But back to the "interview". Now keep in mind they haven't seen any of our resumes at this point, and besides our names and phone numbers, know nothing about us.

The introductions themselves are less than important, but I will summarize them; 2 of them worked for a sport box office before (Century Link and Miller Park); 2 of them were just looking for work because their wives told them to; The last guy was an avid sports fan with background at the YMCA.

They only asked two questions beyond that. Something along the lines of, "Why are you applying to the box office as opposed to other positions?" and, "What is your experience with computers?"

My response to the first one was a little bit of a trap stating I was assuming it had the most shifts. The supervisor took my bait and responded to my statement with a big no it doesn't, and I don't think we were friends after that.

Answers to the second question were filled with general computer lingo like internet or keyboard. The second to last interviewee said she used ticket master's interface at Century Link, which the supervisor revealed is what they use as well.

One of the guys I interviewed is a student at Western Washington University, and was hoping to start out just working weekends until spring quarter was over. Yeah they, didn't like that.

The other two guys who didn't get the job, just said something dumb about liking baseball and being big Mariners fans. Though, there were two guys who made it and said this is the job they kinda got thrown into when they called about how much they loved baseball and the Mariners, so who really knows what answer they were looking for.