Mensa is afraid of him

As an interviewer you expect to speak with weird candidates from time to time. Sometimes they don’t have the best social skills or can’t do FizzBuzz without getting a hint. I don’t think anything could’ve prepared me for this particular guy. I hopped onto the call about two minutes early, but he was already there eating a tube of cookie dough. He didn’t notice me at first, so he yelled at his loud daughter downstairs to stop filming her TikTok and STFU. I ignored all that and said good morning. He told me I was 8 minutes late and continued to chow down. I was momentarily taken aback by his blunt response, but decided to just apologize, suggest that there might have been some miscommunication about the start time, and ask if he wanted to begin. He finished his last bite, discarded the wrapper, and agreed. I started by reciting my typical introduction, including how long I’ve been here and what I work on, and asked him to tell me about himself. He immediately gave me this whole spiel about how computers are his passion, how he’s been programming since he was 12 (he’s in his 50s now), and that his resumé doesn’t reflect his “true genius.” He claimed that he met Bill Gates at a computer convention in the 80s and gave him code for device drivers in DOS, but didn’t get paid a single cent. He proceeded to tell me about contributing to several systems research papers as an undergraduate but never getting any credit. His previous jobs mainly involved DevOps and QA, but he insisted that he had created a sentient AI when he worked at a small bank and had to shut it down and erase the code because of the dangers (I’m like 90% sure he got that from HBO’s Silicon Valley). He also claimed he was once a Mensa member, but was “excommunicated” due to political reasons. This monologue of his took almost 10 minutes. We finally got to the coding question, so I decided to give him a variant of a LeetCode medium. He was having a hard time coming up with an optimal solution so I suggested he use a priority queue. He thought I meant a regular queue, so he asked me “well, then how would the elements be sorted?” After some back and forth, I realized that he didn’t know that priority queues were a thing. By the time I finished giving him the SparkNotes summary of priority queues, it had already been 30 minutes into the interview and he was already getting frustrated that it was taking him this long to even begin coding. He then said, “you expect me to implement this bullshit before I solve the actual problem??” I explained to him that this data structure is already a part of the Java Collection Framework and kindly asked him to not use profanity during this interview. He exploded and went on a second rant, saying how Google has become unoriginal because Bard followed ChatGPT, how LeetCode questions are an insult to a seasoned professional, and how “there’s a damn good reason Mensa is afraid of [him].” At this point, I decided to cut the interview short, and asked him if he had any questions for me, to which he replied, “how does it feel to be this empty-headed?” I ended the call without answering. This all happened a few months ago. I never saw him again, until yesterday. Apparently, he sometimes mixed weed in his cookie dough and his preteen daughter unknowingly made a batch of cookies with one of the laced tubes and distributed it amongst her friends. Some of them got sick, which eventually led to his arrest, which got covered by the evening news. I wonder if there was any weed mixed within the cookie dough he was eating before our conversation.