Amusing. I absolutely suffer from the urinal stagefright. I'm also terrible at whiteboard coding. Or playing piano in public. I recall from childhood the time m

Amusing. I absolutely suffer from the urinal stagefright. I'm also terrible at whiteboard coding. Or playing piano in public. I recall from childhood the time my father invited me to play a song I knew by heart in front of one of his friends. I got a couple bars into it, flubbed a few keys and then the song just fell completely out of my memory. I had nothing. Pretty much any time I feel like I'm being evaluated by someone, my brain goes into an overly defensive, self-critical mode where I spend more cycles trying not to screw up than I do actually performing. It's generally a disaster. Strangely, I discovered my cure many years ago when I was able to crank out Mozart's Rondo Alla Turca in front of an entire wedding party. Under just the right level of inebriation, alcohol seems to dampen the self-critical part of my brain just before it starts affecting much else. Unfortunately, it takes quite a bit of alcohol for this effect to kick in. And sadly for me, this hack is a bit harder to pull off in a job interview situation without coming off like a high-functioning alcoholic. It certainly helps with the phone interviews though...