Congrats. Glad to see everything worked well.
Sadly the only positive that I remember from the interview was the discussion I had with the guy that would be the manager of the new person about kit that I had at home to practice on (e.g. 1841 routers) and he said they use them with BT infinity lines for small branches and I said that was exactly what I setup when I got my BT infinity before progressing onto getting an ASA5505.
Depends on who you are talking to. If this interview was done in Australia, you wouldn't get the job, sadly. I go to job interview every year. Not because I am looking for a job, but because I want to hone my interview skills (one of my deficiencies).
Majority of Australian business want someone who can become productive immediately. The organization here immediately loose interest when you tell them something like "I hadn't had experience of but that I was very interested and that I had done a bit of research to just understand what they are and roughly how they work". This is one of the main reasons why people are able to BS their way into jobs.
Take us for example, we had:
1. A so-called CCIE who designed a rack full of servers to be powered up by PoE from a 3750E;
2. Another "security" expert who takes about 1 day to implement a firewall rule.
3. Another person who didn't know what a DRAM on a router is used for.
We got them because the panel who interviewed them weren't IT- even remotely network-related. They wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a pancake from a cow if either one was shoved up their nose. No one bothered to check-and-verify the CCNP number because it was just another "four letter" acronym.
When it was our team's turn to do an interview, we got a practical test done. When we told the prospective candidates this, 3/4 backed out immediately.
