I had an interview last week for a rare, permanent technical writing job in town. The interviewers had prepared questions, standard fare: how did you deal with a difficult situation? what do you do when someone doesn't cooperate in a timely fashion? (Feed them chocolate! Brownies solve almost any problem.)

Towards the middle of the 4.5 hour session, the second interviewer smiled and said, "So tell me what you think of Microsoft Word?" He leaned forward slightly, folded his hands in his lap. Trick question alarms rang.

I politely smiled and replied "I can work in any application you like. I'm very familiar with Word."

He leaned forward, "But what is your opinion of the product?"

I leaned back, still wary. "Word is a reasonable word processor. It is not a desktop publishing application. The most appropriate tool depends upon what the documentation needs and requirements are. If multiple people need to edit a document, then Word is a good choice. If you wish to maintain strict version control, then producing a PDF is a good solution. In that case, it would not matter which tool you were using to create the PDF file."

He nodded, then explained that he had Googled on my name and had found several forum posts, including one where I had declared my love for Word after it lost all graphics in a 50-100 page manual *during* the final printing. He also said that most of my posts were helping other people solve technical problems.

If you were faced with the same situation, how would you have answered? Have you ever been in a situation where an interviewer had researched you online?