HIJINX ENSUE: Letter Rip!

Hi everyone. I’ve been really busy lately trying to find a job for when I graduate in May, so I didn’t have the opportunity to write a column this week. However, it occurred to me that some people might not know what a cover letter, a letter that gets sent to companies along with your resumé, looks like. So, as a public service, I’m reprinting here a cover letter indicative of the ones I’ve been using on my hunt for employment. Learn it well, for these will soon be your life.

Dear Sir, Madam or Dual-Organed-American,

Thank you for considering my application to work for your magazine. As I know, you are either a high-powered editor or a college student making $4 an hour to weed out the psychos. I’ll respect your time by cutting right to the chase: I want a job. Now. Gimme, gimme, gimme.

Enclosed, please find a copy of my resumé, most of which is completely fabricated. Well, not most of it. I’d say you can believe a good … oh, 52 percent of what you read. More importantly, notice how it uses lots of action words, taken from the list of words provided by the Boston University Office of Career Services for use in resumes. Pay special attention to how I “spearheaded” the cooking of the burger before I “surmounted” the bun. I also “unfurled” something.

I believe that, with my degree in English from Boston University, I will ultimately be much more valuable to your magazine than someone with a degree in journalism. My ability to analyze the meter and rhyme scheme of poems and to rattle off facts about 19th century comedies of manners is sure to come in handy at office cocktail parties. I also took several film classes. How incredibly useful.

However, the most impressive thing on my resumé, and the reason I’m applying to magazines even though I’m imminently unqualified to do so, is my work experience. Last summer I had a fantastic internship where I actually got to write extensively for a best-selling and well-known magazine. Unfortunately, you’ve never heard of it, so this point is moot. It’s called Wizard and it’s about comic books. Yay, comic books!

At this point you’re probably saying to yourself, “Why should I hire this nerdy yet highly literate pathological liar?” Well, if you don’t hire me, my children will starve. Not that I have children. But if I did, they’d be going on a hunger strike until you hired me. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and I have the good fortune of graduating into some desperate times indeed. But there’s more to a job than simply having a solid educational background in the field that you’re seeking employment in rather than some obscure discipline that will never help you in the real world, ever. Isn’t there?

Take, for example, my familiarity with your work. I have been reading your fine publication since I was a child, or since you started publishing — whichever came later. There’s also the matter of my impressive extracurricular activities. For instance, I was an editor of my high school paper. That’s kind of like working for a magazine, huh? Huh? Also, you’ll see that I was a weekly columnist for The Daily Free Press, the third-largest newspaper in Boston (That’s right, third. The Metro can suck it, as far as I’m concerned.). My writing samples are available upon request, and no, I assure you, I was not drunk while writing them. Revising them is another matter.

But I think the main reason you should hire me is that it would be good karma. Imagine the Rocky-like success story: A poor Italian kid from Philly trains really hard and gets to box against the heavyweight champion of the world. Now imagine my success story: A poor Jewish kid from New York gets to move in with his fiancée and doesn’t have to live in his mother’s basement after he graduates. Isn’t that moving? I’ll be the first comic book dork ever not to live in his mother’s basement. It will probably even get you into some record books, and any publicity is good publicity. I learned that at my last work-study job, in the marketing department of a theater, when I faked my own kidnapping. What good publicity that was!

To summarize, my degree is useless, the economic climate is wintry like the Arctic Circle and the government has the date of my graduation circled on its calendar so it can start bleeding me for every cent of a college loan I owe it. If you like what you read in my resumé, I would be happy to meet with you at your convenience — especially over lunch, if you’re buying. I have included my contact information, but it’s best to reach me via email, as I’m usually curled up in a corner of my room crying and unable to answer the phone. I look forward to being rejected by you and promise to take it as a personal invalidation of everything I stand for. Thank you for your time.

Love, Justin