What is/are your biggest strength/s? or the good the bad and the ugly

Quick, when was the last time you heard that question (and was it perhaps accompanied by the inevitable "what is/are your biggest weakness/es)?

Some unknown force (midlife crisis, too much gang warfare, junior-high-school hi-jinx, aeon flux?) is telling me it's time to try movin' on up in library land. Thus, in addition to my usual library lit reading, i've been perusing The Librarian's Career Guidebook edited by Priscilla K. Shontz. This is actually quite a useful book that i wish i had picked up much earlier--perhaps back in library school--it offers advise and guidance for all stages of library careers from choosing the library profession (and all the different areas within the profession) to the "experienced", managerial, and administrative aspects of the job. There is also a companion website.

Anyway i prep for an interview like i prep for other things (and then i always seem to get there and all sorts of things seem to come flying out of my mouth unbidden.) All the time i'm thinking "is this really what i want, and at least now i'll get it over with" but then i get there and it's only a screening interview~IF i get past the first i have to do it all over again~such is life i suppose...

why do we stress so over things that always seem to follow scripts anyway?

I did have one interview once that didn't follow the script at all~i think it may have started out that way (interestingly enough it was the one interview i "lied" in too. Quotation marks are added because it ended up being only self deception--i was interviewing for a bookstore in a college town that only hired full-town employees and the manager asked for a year's commitment. I was in library school and was looking for a summer job. The lie i thought i was telling him was that in the fall i was only going back to school part-time when i actually intended to go back full-time and find other, part-time work. Financial and other concerns forced me to go back to school part-time and i ended up working for the bookstore eight years~beyond graduation from library school, after i got a library job, even after moving to another state~now that's what you get for lying in a job interview (or at least that's what i get).

Anyway, back to my point~the only thing i remember about the (hour-long) interview (other than my not-lie) is hearing about how my manager used to be a philosophy professor (before he was a bookstore manager) and how he met his wife (he was her professor, she was his student~hmm...) He did at least 90% of the talking. At the time i thought, "this is a rather odd interview, this is an interesting (or maybe interesting/pecular guy). The oddest thing about all of that was, that, after working there for quite some time, i learned that talkative, he was NOT, and that none of my coworkers had interviews like mine.