Following a screening with a recruiter, I was given a coding exercise to take home and asked to complete prior to my phone interview. I was told the phone interview would be an opportunity to go over technical questions and review my coding exercise.

The coding exercise was extremely tedious and was estimated at taking 4-6 hours, but it took me closer to 24.

Once I got on the phone interview, my interviewer didn't ask me anything about my coding exercise but asked me to open the link to CoderPad that I'd been sent. My recruiter had not told me this was a phone screen, nor had she sent me any link. Therefore, I wasn't even at a computer. Thinking I'd made a mistake, I turned on my laptop and opened my email. Sure enough, I had not been sent any kind of CoderPad link from my recruiter, so my interviewer had to send it to me, much to his annoyance.

Furthermore, I began coding in Java because my interviewer said it didn't matter what language I used. However, when I got stuck and asked for a hint, he said, "I don't know Java, I can't help." So, I had to start over in Python.

When he asked if I had any final questions, my interviewer hung up on me while I was in the middle of asking my first question.

Write an algorithm that calculates the sum of a word, where a=1, b=2, and so on.