The AI Bot Slayer: A Career Path I Never Asked For

They call me the AI Bot Slayer now. A title I never applied for, never trained for, and definitely never put on my LinkedIn profile. (Although let’s be honest, if I did, recruiters would still message me about “entry-level unpaid internships requiring 10 years of slaying experience.”)

This “honor” was forced upon me by circumstance, chaos, and one very poorly designed Zoom interview.

Scene One: The Setup

Like every desperate gladiator in the modern colosseum of job hunting, I logged into Zoom five minutes early. Coffee in hand, fake smile on face, existential dread in heart. The little notification popped up: “Your interviewer is connecting.”

I straightened my posture, adjusted my lighting like a YouTuber, and whispered a prayer to the Wi-Fi gods.

But instead of a recruiter in a blazer, what appeared before me was… an animated avatar. A robot. A company’s shiny new AI Interview Assistant.

Now, I’ve seen some dystopian things in this job market—ATS rejection emails, “internships” that pay in pizza exposure, LinkedIn posts written like Disney movie trailers—but nothing prepared me for staring into the dead eyes of a cartoon face with Siri’s long-lost cousin’s voice.

“Hello, Alex,” it droned, like a Roomba that majored in HR. “Why do you want to work here?”

Scene Two: The Resistance

Now, most candidates would panic. Most would adjust their tie, regurgitate buzzwords, and pray the bot rated them above average on the “emotional intelligence” slider.

Not me. No, I smelled blood.

If this company wanted to replace humans with bots, fine. But they weren’t ready for me. The one candidate deranged enough to fight sarcasm with sarcasm.

“Why do I want to work here?” I repeated. “Because your CEO looks like the kind of man who eats string cheese in one bite. That’s leadership I can follow.”

The bot blinked. A pause so long I thought maybe it had gone to fetch updates from Microsoft. Then, mechanically: “Interesting. Tell me about a time you worked on a team.”

So I leaned in. “One time I worked with a team of raccoons to pry open a trash can lid. It took precision, courage, and the ability to see in the dark. Honestly, more collaboration than I’ve ever seen in corporate America.”

The bot’s cartoon smile twitched. It looked like it had just watched the last season of Game of Thrones.

Scene Three: The Fatal Blow

By the third question, I was unstoppable.

“What motivates you?” it asked.

“Free snacks,” I said. “And spite. Mostly spite.”

That was it. That was the final straw. The screen glitched, the avatar flickered, and then—silence. Suddenly, it was just me, staring at my own reflection like I’d just won a fight no one told me I was in.

Interview over. Or so I thought.

Scene Four: The Aftermath

A week later, the call came. Not from a recruiter. Not from a hiring manager. No, this was bigger.

HR and Legal. Together. Like Batman and Robin, but without the gadgets or moral clarity.

They informed me that my responses had been flagged as “non-traditional,” “potentially inappropriate,” and—my personal favorite—“a misuse of company systems.”

Excuse me? I didn’t misuse your system. Your system misused me. You locked me in a virtual room with a digital filing cabinet and expected me to bare my soul like I was on Oprah. That’s not an interview. That’s a hostage situation with Wi-Fi.

Scene Five: The Legend

So yes, I’ll wear the name AI Bot Slayer with pride. Not because I hate HR (I’ve known plenty of great HR folks who deserve hazard pay for surviving corporate nonsense), but because I refuse to play pretend in a system where honesty is a punishable offense while “results-oriented ninja” is apparently a valid personality type.

If that means I get flagged, so be it. At least I know somewhere, deep inside a corporate office, a frazzled HR manager is rewatching my interview tape—wondering why their $200,000 AI avatar rage-quit when I compared teamwork to raccoons.

And honestly? That’s the closest thing to job satisfaction I’ve had all year.