Fifty-five failed attempts at a cover letter, Or, At least that’s how many I complain about having written.

Sadly, I am the applicant who defaults to To Whom It May Concern, which my friendly spell check automatically capitalizes for me each time. Sigh. When will I remember, finally, to capitalize each and every word?

Sometimes I begin with a statement such as “I am strongly interested in” or “I believe I am” or “I meet all of the desired qualities of,” etc. I expect the reader, and potentially hirer, to give me due credit on the degree of my conviction. Can you not tell how sure I am that out of the entire applicant pool, I am the most interested? I die with interest! If you do not hire me for this job, surely I will be aimless in my despair for another career endeavor, this particular job being uniquely suited to get my foot in some door somewhere. It is only some kind of a seller’s remorse that reminds me, long after the email with attachments is sent and is no longer retractable, that no, my convictions were not as proven as they seemed when I said so in my cover letter. The dilemma thus arises: how much of the letter ought to be dedicated to fleshing out my so-persuadable convictions and how much to my actual qualifications? This continues to be a dilemma because sometimes the non-profit-type jobs advertise a position for the “most interested candidate” or someone who is “passionate” but above all possesses a unique but paradoxically professionally presentable sense of humor. I could spend an entire cover letter asking the question: how funny would I have to be for you to be totally indifferent to any of my qualifications? On one occasion in my mind, the response was non-existent. (I am frequently discouraged by the fulfilled what-if’s of my alternate self in the alternate universe. It is nonetheless comforting that at least someone, coexistent or not, is slogging through the same nonsense that is this jobless universe). I am interested! Hire me! I will write you a detailed analysis of a problem your company or organization faces, rife with literary references, quotations of your own board members, and insights into current projects in which your group has a vested and privileged interest. Is my appreciation of your specialty not convincing enough? Would emoticons help? Extra punctuation, perhaps?? (Note: Begin using rhetorical devices complemented by gratuitously superfluous punctuation marks).

I toy with the idea of an assault instead of a persuasion. I arrive at the point time and again that sometimes, there was simply no way to persuade them that I am the best candidate – short of lying (hmm…) – and maybe I should just beg my parents for money while I work for free in some interesting yet vitally marketable (and somehow available to but a recent grad) skill-building position. That’ll show ‘em; I’ve got moxie. But nay, I digress. Sometimes persuasion is useless (why did I even go to college in the first place if my silver tongue is a lead one in the grown-up world?) and all I can summon up in the way of new methods is flexing some kind of authority; a criticism, perhaps.

Dear Sir,

I shall make short with the trivialities of these 20^th century rites; your company, A, which – although esteemed highly among investment bankers and politicians – is a corrupt, falsely moral enterprise. If you should choose to change course in your effects upon our already capitalism-shackled world, I will be waiting – standing there, to advise you on how best to navigate ethical straits for that is what I am most qualified to do: tell you how to stop fucking up. You are unimpressed, I can see. Your inflated sense of façade amuses me; for although you dress your non-profit up as a “friend to country Q,” you are clearly abbreviating the routes of moneyed interests in their pursuit to lock arms in a globalist march over the people for whom hand sanitizer, high-fructose corn syrup, and Twitter are irrelevant. All it would take is a few brief interviews with the people whose testimony you are complicit in suppressing; thence… [extortion, blackmail, reckless accusations, et al.]

Unsincerely,
the resentfully unemployed

It is after such artfully crafted emulsions of my bitterness that I usually confirm my ambitions of becoming an investigative journalist.

Recently I found a job opportunity on one of my favorite barren haunts, Idealist.org. The sheer volume of applicants stalking this site swell any idealistic hopes of employment into dust, or at best, a “thank you [but]” response-email – the [but] being a lack thereof and in its stead a new paragraph: “We have found an ideal candidate and we encourage you to keep up with [organization G] for we are sure to be as relevant to your life even after you’ve found a job elsewhere!” All they’re missing is an emoticon to seal the tomb on such a politely and assuming rejection. I was listening to NPR a few weeks ago; broadcast on whatever program it may have been was a speech by the current CEO of Twitter. He was explaining that, if you can believe it folks, he doesn’t believe in using the word “but” in the professional setting. “But really, you never use the word ‘but’?” “No” he says (incidentally he probably uses the word “No” to make up for the lack of negatively assuming conjunctions). What does he do? He uses the word “and”. “So what do you do when you offer someone a promotion and de facto deny someone else that same promotion?” “Great question, Bob.” (Using the interlocutor’s name is a great way to delay the denouement of his answer, thus granting it not only civility but an inflated sense of posterity). “Well, I’d say: ‘We really thought your work contributed well to the overall project – “ the audience waits for the conjunction, half-expecting a “but” even though we know it won’t come “and I see real potential in upcoming development projects, so keep working hard and I’m sure you’ll have more opportunities for advancement.” It’s like taking in a deep breath and somehow being denied the promised exhale. What a cop out. Supposedly this is an “effective business strategy,” an incestuous combination of words whose particular and rarefied usage I won’t begin to address now. Well shit, I’ll take the “but” and go back to my desk – if I even had a desk sulk at. “At which to sulk,” said no English professor in the 21^st century, ever.

Yet again, I digress. So I saw a job advertisement for litigator’s assistant. What’s this, I read? They desire applicants with experience R and qualifications T, Y, and W?! Hot Dog!! (Better watch that superfluous punctuation, kid). What do I do? I take a ripe opportunity, or so it seems prospectively, and I throw paint at it instead of trying to take a bite. I begin, not with my rhetorically substantiated convictions, but with a gimmick. Yes, dear reader, I used a pithy, barely creative gimmick to “grab the reader’s attention” as some pamphlet on writing from the AP English test prep kit informed me. I’ll not spare you the details; this is what I wrote:

“To Whom It May Concern,

I eat breakfast every day. I’m not just talking about milk and cereal; I mean a real breakfast: I make three eggs sunny side up, dust them with paprika, salt and pepper; I’ll cut a few slices of avocado, a few slices of blood orange as well, and make myself one cup of medium roast coffee (a gift from my neighbors) from the French press, black. There’s always toast (whole wheat and flax seed), but the jam varies.

This is how I live my life.”

Please, reader, laugh at me; for I cannot bear the shame of your silent judgement. Not only was this untrue; (I eat oatmeal with bananas and honey for breakfast; eggs on Sundays or sporadically) it was so ineffective and so unmoving an anecdote that, Jesus Christ, even a 7-year old wouldn't have read the rest of my cover letter. It was perhaps the most hubristic cover letter I’ve written since emerging from my gauche naiveté (still plaguing my prose). I reproduce my folly for you to illustrate how low I have fallen from the precipice of “I feel like I’m about to get hired.” Perhaps I have found comfort in accepting that maybe one day, I could just live on a farm (and yet still live in the city) while I whittle my way into what would become a prize-winning oeuvre of nonfiction, sure to please the shade of Upton Sinclair. Yes, it’s true; I have passed from the unemployment phase of Desperation into a mixture of Indifference and self-satire. I am at once an apathetic salesman who comes home bacon-less, resigned, and also the psycho-therapist his spouse hires by the house to console him out of his selected vocation of failure. Except me, I’ve got no spouse, no money to pay anyone by the hour (“guys, let’s just take the bus instead of a taxi”), no beat to tread unless you count craigslist. At least I’m not one of those poor fellows who got suckered into soliciting donations for ThinkProgress or GreenPeace or the Southern Poverty Law Center; I reserve an enormous amount of sympathy for the guy who either out of desperation or naiveté resorted to a commission-only wage of “Do you have a minute for equality?” Have I got a minute? Sure; I just don’t have a dollar for equality, not so long as I need several hundred more dollars for rent next month. Living in the bay is almost like living in a post-progressive civilization except not in a good post-progressive way. The cities of San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley have so many good-doing NGO’s and yet these dispatches seem almost more like homeless people than emissaries of social justice (one or two of them looked ragged enough to actually be homeless, though I suspect that most who are seriously poverty-stricken are smart enough to beg on behalf of themselves rather than a hopefully beneficent middleman; even the homeless must laugh at the peons of pyramid schemes and the like).

For the immediate future I’ll not pedestal myself above asking strangers, like the casually well-dressed middle-aged man across from me here at the café, for jobs – for anything short of a donation to a cause; though if the man wearing a down vest with the embroidered label “Marmot” in smart Georgia font should offer to buy me another fine tasse of espresso, I wouldn’t try to persuade him otherwise.