Why teaching interviews are a kick in the teeth

Ok. No interview is exactly a barrel of laughs, whether or not you get the job. They are nerve-wracking, soon-forgotten interludes from your daily life, which leave you a bit peeved if you don't get the job but aren't that memorable. What happens? You get asked to come to interview, you haul out your best suit, iron it, suck in your gut and smile. You might get it, you might not.
Teaching interviews? Oh, such a different world.
First of all, they never seem to give you more than a couple of days' notice by phone. No time to prepare. Second, unlike in any other job, your work (i.e. six classes of 32 kids) can't simply be left on your desk while you're out. So you prepare cover lessons. You make worksheets. You trawl your imagination for work that will need no questions answered (because the cover teacher probably won't speak German) then you spend hours inventing exercises, writing worksheets and wordsearches that you know only the three keen kids in your class will bother to do more than the first five minutes of, and you get them all photocopied and organise the paperwork. That's on top of teaching your full timetable and marking books etc etc in the two days (if you're lucky) before your interview. You will get NO thanks for setting such great cover work. It took 8 hours of your life and no-one will know or care, least of all the kids who get to do it.
You then go home and agonise about the lesson they've asked you to teach for the interview. Oh yeah, you have to teach on interview. Observed by up to five people, including head of department, deputy head, headteacher... It has to dazzle. So you stay up till midnight or beyond making up the snazziest 20 minute lesson you ever saw in your life, with powerpoints and flashcards and stickers for prizes and name tags and vocab sheets and games etc etc etc...
Then you get no sleep anyway cos you're so nervous about teaching strange kids, when you have no idea what they have already learned and whether you are aiming the lesson too high or too low.
Then you get up at a stupidly early time, put on your ironed suit, suck in your gut and go to the interview. You smile. You teach the strange kids. You try to get them to participate with this odd person they've never seen before doing something totally different to what they normally do in class. You heave a HUGE sigh of relief when the teaching is over. It was an ok lesson. They learned something. You're not a total failure as a teacher.
then you get about 20 minutes to answer whatever questions the head and the head of department (and whoever else - from deputy heads to governors) thought were a good idea, which you can never predict, then you go home and wait by the phone. Oh yeah, THEY TELL YOU THAT DAY. This sounds fab to people who have never tried it. Oh great, no waiting around for a letter, yeah? Great! No, what it means is you sit by the phone staring at it feeling more and more sick until it rings and then scream at your mother for tying up your phone line.
When the phone eventually rings, a hour (or two or three) after they said they would call, and then tell you that you were great, enthusiastic, confident, come across very well and taught a great lesson, but they aren't giving you the job because someone else 'just had the edge', you burst into tears and hit the wine or chocolate or hide under the duvet and cry.
Why? Because you just poured about 24 solid hours of work into that interview, you're sleep deprived and not only did you not get the job, but you know that you still have to plan all of tomorrow's lessons, and mark that huge pile of books in the corner.
Then you have to go find the jobs page in the newspaper and start the whole process again.
[Rant over. Sorry no knitting progress to report - too busy drinking wine and eating chocolate and having a good cry. But here is a picture of my garden looking lovely, and I am now going to go and sit in it and try to enjoy the sunshine and tell myself I am NOT crap and I WILL get a job for next year and I WON'T be destitute and kicked out of my house because I can't pay the mortgage. See? Teaching interviews suck.]