...of an interview technique

At the interview formally granted to all new employees by one of the bank's General Managers at Head Office, Christie's minimal qualifications were laid bare, his appearance scrutinised, and his nervousness remarked on. Then he was asked why he wished to join the bank. Christie was lost, could not think of his answer. One was shortly supplied for him: most young men joined the bank for the security, for the very liberal pension which amounted to two-thirds of whatever salary the employee was receiving at retiring age. And this retiring age itself was as an act of generosity sixty, and not sixty-five!
Not only was Christie simple, he was young, too, a few weeks past his seventeenth birthday at the time of the interview.
Christie was silent even at the information that he had only forty-three and not forty-eight years to wait before he was free. The whole impetus of the interview was towards providing a standard set of correct answers: or of losing points for wrong answers. Did Christie have to play? The General Manager made him very much aware of his power. What Christie thought, however (and how privileged we are to be able to know it) was that he would consider himself to be a failure if he had to depend on a bank pension at sixty; and that it would show a remarkable lack of spirit even to be thinking, at the age of seventeen, of pensions and retirement. The truth, that he was interested in placing himself next to some money, seemed not to be required in this context. The offices of a General Manager of one of the few national banks is not the place to exeleutherostomise.
From this you might think that Christie was mad for money as some are mad for sex: but that is not so. Christie, like almost all of us, had to think of earning a living first; the economics dictate to an extent sometimes not fully realised the real (as distinct from the imaginary) possibilities open to one to move in other directions. But be assured that sex was one of the things for which Christie wanted money; sex was always, particularly at this age, one of the things he thought about most, had very often in mind.
Christie was accepted into the service of the bank despite his inadequacy at providing the correct answers; his failure to give any answers at all did not count against him as much as a succession of wrong answers. And, for reasons Christie was just about to experience for himself, the bank had difficulty in holding on to recruits of his age and therefore deliberately took on far more than it knew would stay the long course to early retirement and two-thirds of an honest penny.

[Christie Malry's Own Double Entry, Johnson, B. S.]