career opportunists

 when it was time to go to his room i decided i wanted to know more about him. i would ask the questions this time. i would interview him. i knocked on the door. he opened it, still in his business suit. "how was your day, what will you tell me?" nothing much to tell, i answered, walked around a bit, took a bath, how was yours? "thats not the deal, i want to shut down, i want to go into another world. in want to invade the planet of your thoughts." he walked over to the water boiling machine, and made me some tea. "did you ever think this would be your career? a storyteller? i told him that once in the eighties i had thought of something like this. it was the time the yuppies emerged from out of nothing more than the dollarbills they  conjured up so effortlessly. back then, i was unemployed, and i thought, as i had enough time to sleep, i could sell my dreams -they were rather exiting and exotic- to tired businessmen who didnt have time for the luxury of sleep. "really, you had no job back then? what did you do all day, tell me that story." and i did.

career opportunists

the other day i when i was rummaging through my paperwork i found the draft of a job application a friend of mine once sent to a local museum.

"dear sirs,

on behalf of my unemployment benefits i herewith send you this letter. if you would be so kind as to send me an answer, stating that you do not have any job for me, it would be most highly appreciated."

mind you, those were the eightees, when being unemployed was considered a fashion statement, and having a job was an equivalent to selling your soul to that old devil called corporate united states of america. "no future" was the soundtrack to our everlasting leisure.

so, we made a career out of being on the dole.

our mornings were spent sleeping, our afternoons with applying make up and at night we would go out. 

guys would buy us drinks, other guys had put us on the guestlist, so life was easy, life was good.

to fulfil our duty towards the social security, we would sit together one afternoon a month and write the perfect job application letters. 

the true perfection lay in the fact these missives were written as if there was serious intent of getting the job. our potential bosses had to be motivated into writing  a refusal.

we needed at least three written rejections every half year, so you can envision the hardship of our labour at my kitchen-table.

we were the stars of the turndown:  the details we added in our letters made sure that we would, in the worst case,  be invited to a job interview.

at a certain point, we started to really dig these interviews more than the writing itself, looking back,  i think we promoted ourselves to a higher level of the cold-shoulder business. there even was a kind of competition between us to see how well each one of us fared in achieving the ultimate goal:  fail to get the position most majestically.  by subtle use of occasional swearwords, meticulously applied dirt under the fingernails, or by cunning display of complete under-qualification for even the easiest job.

ingredients we made sure were used sparingly, but effective nonetheless.

 in case of emergency, when the employers were desperate to take on just about anyone (which was probably the reason we had to show up in the first place), we always used our ultimate secret weapon: in the middle of a sentence, we would lapse in to complete mental withdrawal, and would stare at our interviewer whilst seeming to fade into the realms of consciousness for about just an instance too long, to then continue our story as if nothing had happened. repeated three or four times in ten minutes, this simple action was a guarantee to success: the rejection letter could be expected within less than a week.