Category Archives: Job hunting

Jun 14 2012
25 Comments
Humorous, Job hunting, Two minute read

“I Will Believe in My Glittery Screen.”

Compy goes with me everywhere.

Today I was using the ‘ol computer, typing away at my reinvented hamster wheel and rollerskating through the nets like tomorrow hadn’t been invented yet and I had the life span of an Old Testament patriarch.

I felt magic coursing through my veins as the web opened its doors and welcomed me with the minty breath of an over-eager date. Opportunities pushed me over and grabbed me by the shirt collar, saying, “I’m for you!” Yes, today was different.

It was not like yesterday, when the internet’s waters were grey like grandfather’s liver and my eyes grew weary as they sifted through the words like picking over dance prospects at a honkey tonk after only one drink. Nothing was exciting.

But today, zoom! Bang! Whip! Smash! Crunch! It felt like things were happening.

And then I noticed that my computer screen looked different. It was shining, no, glittering as I sped across the web’s pages. I didn’t think anything of it except for how much of an improvement it was on the dust blanket that eternally covered my monitor in Cairo. And I thought the glitter looked really pretty. It reminded me of when I liked glittery things and the solution to any artistic or decorative dilemma was to rain glitter on that mother effer.

I thought of a conversation I had with my neighbor, a member of a “charismatic” strand of Protestant Christianity, when she told me about a revival at their church. Apparently at the height of the service, some members’ faces and hands started shining with what later turned out to be 24 carat gold.

Maybe I was experiencing something similar, except for it was my computer that was blessed by the Lord and had become a sign to the believers in this household that the Lord does exist and that my computer was an instrument of holy work and had been sanctified for its efforts, that it would now live forever, slowly becoming more and more covered in these glitter specks until it turned into a Mac Wafer, a kind of computer that doesn’t yet exist.

Then I saw a speck towards the right-most edge of the screen that was slightly larger. It looked like a water droplet or something of that nature, but that was impossible, because water evaporates and I hadn’t had any on my computer that day. Oil, however, does not evaporate, and I had been using my computer dangerously close to pots and pans filled with various things sautéing.

My computer screen was not dazzling with flecks of spiritual 24 carat gold. It was cooking oil, either olive or canola, that had splattered onto the screen. My miracle was nothing more than the result of haphazard placement of electronics.

I could choose to be disappointed to think that I merely have a dirty, oily screen that’s no better than the glasses of a fry cook. Instead, I will believe in my glittery screen, will appreciate it for the fact it looks pretty, and will believe that this was still a miracle in its own way, both the fact that I still have a working computer, and the fact the screen looks better now than it ever has.

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Jun 13 2012
11 Comments
Humorous, Job hunting, Two minute read

We’re Modern Now. We Don’t Have to Sweat.

It’s functional. Don’t worry about it.

Saturday afternoon, 1:30 pm. College graduate exits bedroom and runs into father, also a college graduate, for first time of the day. Pleasantries are exchanged. Father, pleased to see the college graduate, lists the yard work he has done that day. He has trimmed the hedges, cleaned out the pool, fixed something, moved something else, and used a loud machine for about two hours. He didn’t mention the last one, but the college graduate knows because she was sitting inside and had to listen to the racket for about two hours.

He’s tired and asks the college graduate if she was planning on making lunch for everyone, a laughable prospect. She chuckles and thinks of this question later when she sees the family has cracked wheat in the pantry. Why didn’t he just make this? She wonders.

In the meantime, college graduate has also been busy. She applied for 3.5 jobs and wrote 2.5 blog posts and made herself an English muffin with peanut butter and jelly on it for lunch. Her mind is tired but she’s hasn’t left the house, hasn’t made any money, and is wearing an old pair of sweatpants and a shirt from two days ago.

She was reflecting on her outfit earlier that day and how she felt surprisingly accomplished despite the fact sweatpants are viewed as the garb of the defeated. At least, she had accomplished until she met father, who had exited the house, made money by virtue of the fact he is a salaried employee of a real company, and burned over 20x as many calories as the college graduate.

She wonders how to explain to father that despite the sweatpants and the fact she was emerging from the bedroom, she had also done work that day, work that was laying the ground for her future and paving the way for his entry into a comfortable nursing home. In the digital age, she thought, we don’t have to sweat while we work. We don’t have to do anything besides stare at a computer screen and think really hard and sometimes type/write stuff down. This is the technological era. We don’t need to go outside anymore.

But instead of saying any of this, she lets the conversation fall into silence and quickly hides the tab with the YouTube music video of “Call Me, Maybe,” the music video that the college graduate had danced to only seconds earlier, maybe, when trying to recall some moves from her hip-hop class last spring.

Maybe father will read blog post later on and want to dance to the music video as well, she thinks, and then we will both burn calories.

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Jun 05 2012
25 Comments
Best blog posts, Humorous, Job hunting, Two minute read

The Cover Letter that Gets the Job

I’m coming for you.

Listen up, mother narker

I know what you’re thinking. You’re at work, wearing your power skirts and wrist-control cuff links, and you think that this is just another cover letter, just another piece of pre-trash that you need to skim before taking your 15th M&M break of the day. Turns out the power to control human destinies doesn’t energize like it used to.

Your precious bundles of neurons are throbbing with boredom from the mediocrity of the stack that lies before you. Where is a peer? Where is the employee so detail oriented she counts her Lucky Charms and times herself on the john?

Where is that special someone with the suit-wearing abilities of a psychopath and marketing skills of nervous high-school nerds trying to convince Big Bob he doesn’t want to beat them up?  All you want is someone with a degree from every Ivy league university and 59 years of experience that has brought the total costs of running a company down to zero while increasing efficiency by 867 percent. Is that too much to ask?

Well let me tell you something, you open-gobbed hand-shaker. I don’t have any of that crap, and I’m not about to sit here and dump out my purse for you and tell you why my tic-tacs are the best ones for this company and how I really am the go-getter you’re looking for because I punched someone when they tried to cut me in line.

I’ve been out there. I’ve met with the graduates of this generation and I was parented by the last generation and I have some friends who belong to the place in between. You think they have something I don’t? You’re wrong, dead wrong. Your last-season shoes and chipped coffee mug tell the whole, sad story. You’ve spent your life trying to find the best and the brightest in the front displays of department stores, hand picking the newest merchandise that still smells slightly of formaldehyde. Then they come in and what do you get? Beneath their shiny surfaces, they’re turds like the rest of us.

This is the best it gets, sweetie. Leave Nordstroms and you’ll see me there on the street. I’ll be playing a pan pipe and have an overly-exited following of neighborhood dogs. Watch me closer. I’ll take those dogs across the street and trade them to the CEO of a start-up tech company called Whiznit for thirty bucks. I’ll take that thirty bucks and come back to Nordstroms and offer to take you out to a cheap lunch and tell you why I’m the best person for this job. Because let’s face it, you can get a shiny Gucci bag from any street corner in the world, but they only make me in Oklahoma, baked in the close confines of an over-crowded womb and served in a harsh world that doesn’t give out any favors. Hire me.

Sincerely,

Snotting Black

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