Dear future employer (because there really is no doubt you will hire me after I have made you aware of the following),
I can proudly announce that I am applying for a position in your company. I do realize that you have not announced any openings, but I have no worries that you will rethink this once I enlighten you on the unique and extremely useful competence I possess.
It is a fact that most jobs consist of doing one thing, and one thing alone: What most jobs is all about (unless you are a male lingerie photographer or a female chocolate tester) is doing endless amounts of things you do not want to do. Now, if there is anything six years at the university have trained me for, it is doing things I do not want to do.
I do not find it particularly rewarding going through endless amounts of pointless sources for my pointless master thesis. The few glimpses of unpointlessness are too rare and too short to give much if any satisfaction. I also do not find it rewarding to spend time writing nonsense in an attempt to make sense out of all the pointlessness. I do, occasionally, find it slightly rewarding to post random status updates to Facebook, but I realize this only in a very limited way can be said to be linked to my studies.
And yet I force myself to stray off Facebook every now and then.
I have spent hours after hours on leafing through documents by people whose names I cannot keep apart (mostly Johnson or Johnston). These people were sending each other letters and telegrams and airgrams and memos (they must have had poor email access in the 1950s) about more or less significant topics, topics that occasionally are related to the topic of my thesis. I have spent even more time trying to make sense of these documents, and to write about them. I have even spent time trying to make the text I write seem relevant and plausible and professional. Definitely not something I like to do (I am more of a parentheses and italics kind of gal, after all).
Therefore you should, without hesitation, hire me immediately. Preferably for a well-paid job. Let us be honest – I will not glow with enthusiasm for the work I perform in your company. But I will do it nonetheless. Because this is the most important lesson I have learned from my expensive education: Life is all about doing things you do not feel like doing. So if you do not feel like hiring me after this inspirational note, that actually implies all the more that you should.
Best regards,
Your future (reluctant) employee
5 comments:
but I do! I do want to hire you. We'll have to do it under the table in the trading sort of way though. I'll hire you to help out around the place doing stuff I don't want to and you can hire me to do the same because doing it for someone else and being paid is entirely different. We might be on to something now!
OK - report to work tomorrow morning. I have a lot of dust bunnies to corral.
Following some obscure economic law I've half forgotten (and don't feel like digging out my textbook for), it isn't the amount of money that determines the wealth of a nation, but the amount of transactions made with that money, hence the importance for the economy in employees spending the money they receive in pay from their employer, who in turn received it from his customers. Therefore, if you two keep paying each other for the tasks you performed with the money you received from the other in the first place, you will be engaged in massively boosting the national economy ;)
Yay! No more worries about how I'll educate myself into unemployment, then! :)
There was some very clever writing going on here! Being a Southern Californian and having lived under the moody skies of Britain for 10 years now--I have to say, I miss those American breakfasts with a drooling-kind-of-passion. Nowhere in the world has such indulgent breakfasts as those in the States. Give me cheese blintzes covered in raspberries beside home-fried potatoes with grilled onions. Or how about a stack of fluffy pancakes--even made with pumpkin butter in autumn or blueberries in the summertime. And the choice of syrups is mouth-watering: cherry, strawberry, maple, etc. A big American breakfast sets me up for the whole day--I don't have to worry about a meal until late-dinner. Thanks for your take on things--and oh, by the way, I loved the April Fools' stuff. Cool. The 'yellow bent'--I love it! Keep on writing. From, the girl who sings and plays guitar. ;)
The girl who sings and plays the guitar - thank you so much! It really warms my heart when people stop by and have a good time reading my blog :)
I have only visited Britain once, and while it was a GREAT trip, I can definitely relate to your breakfast grievance. Ironically, though, I think my objection to the UK breakfast is the opposite of yours - I'd like it to be smaller and simpler. An American breakfast - while I loved them when I was there - would probably suit me better come lunchtime. Like now... Mmmm - pancakes!
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