The Spinal Tap

The interviewer offers me these standard questions:

What are your strengths and weaknesses?

What can you contribute to the company?

How do you see yourself five years from now?

These are usual questions. There’s a whole list of others, but these three, you won’t walk away from a job interview without having to answer them. They’re designed supposedly to allow the interviewer determine if you’re fit for the job. They also make interviews full of shit.

I’m not really looking for a job. I work at home. I have a steady income from my online projects. I own goats, pigs, chickens, guinea pigs, and some other fierce animals whose ownership indicates overlord status. Which means I’m an actual overlord. I also own an ukay-ukay-bought bald-headed albino slave who entertains me by popping out of nowhere in a pink tutu dancing to the first few waltzes of The Nutcracker (when available). Clearly, I have everything. But I was browsing the interwebs the other day and found this opening for a copywriter.

For those who don’t know, the copywriter is the writer version of a prostitute. In the advertising industry, the copywriter supplies the words. In a more general corporate sense, depending on the company and the overpaid weasel who manages it, a copywriter may be asked to write speeches, annual reports, letters to the editor of some annoying but important broadsheet, the English essay assignment of the CEO’s seven-year-old daughter.

Now this company is hiring a new copywriter and I thought I’ll go and have a look-see. Scratch the fabric of my complacent universe. I haven’t done the job hunting thing for a long while, and I missed the exchange of clinical lies and personal exaggerations.

I carefully reviewed my resume for this occasion. I made it compact, shaved off the deadwood, and transformed it into a shining beacon of frank truthfulness. To illustrate, while my old resume had this:

Objective: Career position where proven abilities as a writer / editor can be utilized.

My new, bullshit-free resume only had this:

Will write good copy for good money.

While my old resume had this:

Writes technology, lifestyle, medical and business articles for various national publications; well-versed with various computer applications such as Adobe Pagemaker, Quark Express, Adobe Premiere, Adobe Photoshop, CorelDraw and can learn and master new applications in a short time; proficient in HTML and knowledgeable in the principles of online and desktop layouts.

My new one only had this:

Can provide awesome, clever and effective descriptions to whatever shit you’re selling.

The interviewer reads my one-page resume and I can see he’s intrigued. He might have initially considered crumpling and tossing my application to the waste bin, but maybe he thought, “This dude’s different.”

So he’s speaking with me, judging my demeanor, weighing my words.

“So what are your strengths and weaknesses?”

“I have no weaknesses,” I say, “but only if you consider ‘writes amazing product copy with the enthusiasm of a horny Bonobo monkey’ a weakness.”

Interviewer raises an eyebrow. “How do you mean?”

“You need someone who can describe your product and sell its benefits to the consuming public. You need short and concise. You need high-impact. You need unforgettable lines. I’m the person who can do it. I can push its awesomeness as if it’s the best thing since the invention of tampons.”

“Our product is actually tampons.”

“Exactly!”

The above-mentioned part of the interview didn’t really happen the way I describe it now. I said irrelevant things, interviewer said irrelevant things and sometimes spaced out. I sometimes spaced out. I pointed at the tall buildings outside the window and clapped. He pointed at the tall buildings and clapped, too. But I wrote him some samples, wowed the beejesus out of him, and eventually got the job offer. Which of course I had to decline. I told him a rich uncle suddenly died leaving me a truckload of gold bullions sitting in my kitchen and guarded by my bald-headed, ukay-ukay-bought, pink-tutu-wearing albino slave, and that I might not need to work for a while, like, say, 200 years. Or something similarly outrageous.

But the moral lesson, boys and girls, is if you have what they need, and you know it, cut the crap, will you. Don’t add more bullshit to the world. Say what only needs to be said, and you’ll stand out. That’s what Tyler Durden would do.

{Image: Thobias Fäldt}

Other Cool Posts

• Manny Paqcuiao’s New Killer Combo Moves To Beat The Crap Out Of Oscar De La Hoya
• Dibs on ‘Dead Space’ [Xbox 360]
• When you care enough to send the very best anus picture
• From innocence, to knowledge and disillusionment
• And in the afterhours, you’ll see, I love you, almost madly*
• Mischief, mayhem, soap
• Why did the chicken cross the road and leap into the red-hot wok?
• If you’re an adult, you have the IQ of a squeezable ketchup bottle and deserve to have a car battery shocking your testicles
• In a perfect world, he’d be swimmin’ in a closed tub full of his own milky diarrhea until he says, “Sphincterboysayswaaaaat!”
• That’s the thing with greed, Archy. It’s blind.