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I hate phone based interviews, I am really bad at that, today I proved this is very true.

First of all, I should probably say I am at least partly responsible for my failure: the recruiter phoned me up and said I had to choose between being interviewed on Friday at 1pm or on Monday at 8.30am. Obviously most of you would pick the Friday option, however I had to pick the latter as I just couldn't commit to the former. Only a fool would do that, right? Well, I thought I was being smart because that actually gave me a lot of time to prepare for the interview. I won't reveal the name of the company, I can only say that they are head quartered in London; they specialise in Internet services; they target both individuals and companies. Oh, and something probably equally important: they were recruiting a Senior On-line Developer (a rather unconventional job title I must say) to work on the redevelopment of their web applications. I believe I spoke to the Head of Development and he said he'd already picked a PHP framework: CakePHP. This makes it even more painful to some extent as I really wanted to learn a new framework.
So, what happened? Well, I had trouble falling asleep on Sunday, I woke up several times, I got up way before 7. Needless to say I was in such a state that a zombie would have been more talkative than me. Nevertheless, I decided I would dress up and have the interview in a relatively quiet coffee shop. Now that apparently was my mistake: I didn't notice but apparently the coffee shop was so noisy that the interviewer had trouble understanding what I was saying. While I totally understand I could have (and probably should have) stayed home or at least be in a quieter place I am still not convinced a potentially good candidate should be discarded regardless of his work experience and skill set which, at least according to the recruiter, really were a good match. The problem is, I didn't really have a chance to talk through my CV and I wasn't even asked why I thought I would be a good match for the development team. I found it very unfair because: a) despite I was given two options for the interview I had to pick the only one I could commit to; b) 8.30am on a Monday is really a bad time to have a phone based interview; c) if the interviewer could not understand what I was saying then he should probably have asked me to either reschedule or to meet me in person; I understand the whole purpose of having phone based interviews is to 'skim' potentially not-so-good CVs, now I feel sorry for all those people who don't manage to go through to the next stage.
Anyway, I have learnt my lesson. Hopefully next time I'll have better luck.