Insincerity: The Language of Cover Letters

It all starts in a flurry of excitement. No jobs you say? What rubbish! Look at all these glittering jewels just waiting for me to snap them up. Editing position, fashion buyer, PA to the stars – it’s all here. According to the figures, unemployment is now down from a record high in 2011 to just over 2.5 million and in June this year it was announced that vacancies were at their highest since 2008. Well that sounds pretty promising. Oh wait. The estimated number of job vacancies is 529,000. I’m no mathematician but I can see that is a scary statistic, especially following the realisation that you are distinctly under qualified for at least ninety per cent of these jobs. At this point, you start to pull away from Enthusiasm Junction and head at some speed towards Disappointment Parkway, attempting not to derail completely as rejection e-mails come flying your way with the familiar words, ‘due to the high level of applications, we regret that we will not be able to take you on [read: that we have failed to read your application]. Their ‘regret’ seems somewhat insincere when it’s almost certain they have copy and pasted your name into the first line.

Still, insincerity is the language of cover letters so it’s useful to be given a healthy dose of it now and again. Never in your life will you spend so much time trying to turn the most ordinary of life proceedings into examples of unique and remarkable personal attributes; a process better known as ‘bullshitting’. Your childhood obsession with a wooden abacus wasn’t just a fairly standard toddler’s attraction to brightly coloured moveable objects. No! It demonstrates rare and unparalleled mathematical skill. At junior school, your regular position as third sheep in the nativity play shows that you work well as part of a team. You were always nominated to tidy the sand pit area, which you did admirably, and which confirms an acute attention to detail and a willingness to take responsibility. Take away the bullshit veneer and what you’re really saying is that you’re not completely mathematically inept or an nauseating show-off (like the girl who always played Mary) and you may have mild OCD.

After a few weeks at Application Station when your final destination, Success Central, looks as far as London to Vancouver by foot, it’s common to make a slight detour towards Despair Bridge. You may be here for several days while you’re oiled with reassuring words and inflated compliments. When you’re at your most desperate, friends have a tendency to display an excessive amount of confidence in you and gradually their reassurances just turn into outright lies. “You’ll have a job by the end of next week. They’re like buses, after three weeks of no-shows, five offerings will come along at once.” With figures estimating that, in top companies, up to one hundred and sixty graduates apply for one position, this is statistically unlikely. “They only turned you down because their quota meant they had to employ a male Jewish amputee. And its not your fault you’re not a male Jewish amputee.” Do not be fooled. These are lies. At least I hope they are otherwise, as a white, caucasian twenty three year old with all my limbs and features, my chances of getting employed within any quota are depressingly low.

With the expanding list of ‘skills’ and ‘experience’ needed to procure the most junior of roles, graduates are forced into the position of talking nonsense at an unparalleled rate. The cover letter becomes less of an exercise in expressing your genuine interest and enthusiasm for the job and more of an exercise in out-bullshitting your competitors. Its nonsensical to advertise a graduate job and demand that the applicant have three years experience in that sector. The clue is in the name: graduate job. The only thing we have three years experience in is vomiting, bad cooking and an inability to clean the bathroom (they may all be interrelated). So what they are essentially saying is, yes, we want a someone with a degree but screw you if you’ve spent the last three years at university because you should have spent them training to do this job. And yes, we want someone with a willingness to learn but it would be preferable if you already know it all.

Why not forget the bullshit and employ us desperate graduates for three genuine reasons? One: we’ll work hard because we can’t afford to lose this job. Two: we’ll be enthusiastic because if we know we have to do something nine to five what’s the point in being miserable about it? And three: we’ll be good at our jobs because, after three months at Application Station we’ve learnt how to be organised, determined to succeed, and how to cope in a complete crisis, believe us.

Why You May Regret Culling

Most of us have conducted what is known as a Facebook ‘cull’. I regularly embark on such activity though I hasten to add that ‘cull’ in a social networking sense refers only to the removal of someone from your contacts rather than to genuine selective slaughter (much as you might wish it). Culling makes me feel powerful. At no other point in my life, except in the midst of a culling frenzy does my right forefinger feel as potent as when it hits the ‘unfriend‘ button. However, I have recently begun to regret the culls I implemented over the past years as, rather than a source of great annoyance, I now regard those selected for online slaughter as free comedy. An opportunity to indulge in the most base of british comforts – laughing at other people’s expense – is not to be missed. Had I not been so rash in my culling days, I might now have a larger supply of daily entertainment. Alas, I cannot re-friend these people.

Some statuses often remind me of the story of Narcissus, a man so in love with his own reflection that he was unable to draw himself away from it. I imagine that people who constantly publish updates on such banal topics as what they are eating, reading or buying, sit staring at their computer screens, just as Narcissus stared into the water, waiting for the validating ‘likes’ and comments to pour in. As a recent video on the connection between loneliness and digital interaction succinctly puts it, the feeling that ‘I share therefore I am’ appears to permeate many people’s psychologies. No event is complete without online evidence of its having taken place. I think the reworking of Descartes’ famous proposition could be altered even further; ‘I share therefore I am a moron’ seems closer to the truth.

 Narcissus updates his status

Facebook news feeds are littered with vacuous expressions of quotidian activity and I thought I’d share some. But let me defend myself before I’m accused of evident hypocrisy. I share, not because I’m a moron, but because I need to practice my writing and I have a cruel sense of humour. The following unedited excerpts are taken from my own news feed. I realise that I may well get a taste of my own culling medicine once this is published which is a shame as I’d hate to lose these useful repositories of inspiration.

I’m so happy with myself at the moment. Everything I do is one step closer to my goal to be a better person.

I’m pretty sure grammargirl.com would have something to say about this. I’m finding it difficult to put what I have to say into words as I seem to have thrown up in my mouth a little bit.

I hate mondays

How unusual. Truly informative.

Lush day today with ami and Kate 

Well that’s interesting…for no one. Not even for ‘ami’ or ‘Kate’ who presumably don’t need to be reminded of how their day went, considering it must have occurred a mere two to three hours ago. Unless of course either of the two has severe memory loss, in which case the status could be described as particularly thoughtful.

Feeling very needy and emotional #wreck

You don’t say? Though they say a problem shared is a problem halved, a problem shared on twitter is most likely just a problem read and ignored.

Perhaps it would be useful to know that when the Facebook status bar asks you ‘what’s on your mind?’ it may simply be a civility in the same way we often ask people how they are with no interest in the answer. If what’s on your mind is self-pitying, unfunny or of interest to less than fifty per cent of your followers it might be best to treat the question as a courtesy rather than a genuine request for information.

What’s in a username?

Oh God. There are huge numbers of people on the internet and they’ve stolen all the usernames. I want to create a blog and the first obstacle to overcome is to choose a name. Thinking of what I plan to be my first post I type ‘IThinkThereforeShush’ into the designated box. But WordPress tells me that capitals are not allowed. Really? I’m not used to my computer telling me I can’t do things. In the physical realm, I have only a finite array of fonts (my own scrawl) and colours (some ten year old glow pens) to choose from but in the cyber realm you’re usually allowed to pick any font, any colour, any size that you like. It’s not easy to distinguish the words in ‘ithinkthereforeshush’ and I don’t want my eyes to spasm every time I have to read it. Nevermind, it’s a shit name anyway. Different tactic. I type ‘blogoff’ into box and box answers ‘sorry, that username already exists’. Fair enough, it’s a pretty obvious pun. Next I try ‘freepublishing’. Taken. How about ‘writeeditpublish’. Taken. I like this so I’m fairly irritated by the computer’s third rejection. However I’m intrigued at these cyber dismissals and keen to test the waters further so I randomly type ‘iamaduck’. TAKEN. ‘flobberworm’. TAKEN. ‘computersaysno’. Computer does say no. Still absorbed I try ‘doesthisexist’ and indeed the familiar words appear before me, ‘sorry, that username already exists’. Annoyed, I type ‘fuckoff’. Taken.

I look around the room for inspiration and type ‘ornamentalcow’. Success!  But wait…I don’t really want a blog called ‘ornamentalcow’. Is this my punishment for joining the blogging world too late? Will I be stuck with ‘ornamentalcow’? I read recently that the rich and famous are creating twitter accounts on behalf of their babies so that their domain names are secured. It seems ridiculous, but now I wonder if their parents are just particularly internet savvy and are saving their children from the fate of ‘ornamentalcow’ as an online persona. What could be worse, my dear?

Having now written it four times, I’ve developed quite a liking for ‘ornamentalcow’ but I think it gives off the wrong impression so I’m rejecting it. This is difficult. But why? It’s a username for God’s sake, not a tattoo. However, as I have often thought with tattoos, if you can’t pick one you probably shouldn’t have one. On this note I attempt ‘hewhoshallnotbenamed’. Taken, obviously. Harry Potter references are probably a no go area.

No wonder it’s so difficult to choose a username; in 2011 it was estimated that there were over 181 million blogs while the current reality is likely to be around 250 million. WordPress itself claims to play host to over 71 million blogs. But I’m looking forward to delving into the blogosphere so I need to decide on a name. I want something that will be difficult to regret; something to the point and lacking sentimentality or personal associations. What essentially is this? It’s a publishing platform. So let’s go back to basics; Write Edit Print.