Your résumé.
It's a sparse little document that resides in a remote folder on your computer, seldom opened except for minor updates every few months, usually on the eve of a job fair. Recruiters click their tongues when they see it, and say, "I can't offer you a job, but how about a tee-shirt?" You graciously pick out a tee-shirt in your size from the messy pile at the back of the booth. "And how about a pen?" That's what you're here for! Some companies, to be sure, reserve their tee-shirts for those truly special personages who blow them away with their résumés alone. It's a real pity, because theirs tend to be the finest tee-shirts.
Is your suit professional enough? Perhaps you should have worn the blue shirt instead of the parchment-colored one. It looks more business, less museum; though as you wend your way through the crowded stuffy aisles, passing the same companies over and over without the slightest inclination to approach them, you begin to feel as if you were in a museum.
The ten or so copies of your résumé you blushingly printed out at the library this morning are limp and lifeless in your hands. You are loath to buy a portfolio. It's not as if it could make any difference, for the twenty or thirty dollars that it costs. It might add an outline of arrogance to your stooped and self-effacing figure, your ghostlike way of avoiding the eyes of the recruiters around you (no doubt they think you didn't notice them); and perhaps that would be a good thing.
It's been an hour, and all you have are leaflets and business cards. You're the lighter by two or three copies of your résumé, true, but that won't be of any use till you go back home, and upload your résumé to the companies' websites, repeating the dull process from the start. Examining your life once again. Answering questions about yourself that throw into sharp relief your want of accomplishments.
It's a sparse little document that resides in a remote folder on your computer, seldom opened except for minor updates every few months, usually on the eve of a job fair. Recruiters click their tongues when they see it, and say, "I can't offer you a job, but how about a tee-shirt?" You graciously pick out a tee-shirt in your size from the messy pile at the back of the booth. "And how about a pen?" That's what you're here for! Some companies, to be sure, reserve their tee-shirts for those truly special personages who blow them away with their résumés alone. It's a real pity, because theirs tend to be the finest tee-shirts.
Is your suit professional enough? Perhaps you should have worn the blue shirt instead of the parchment-colored one. It looks more business, less museum; though as you wend your way through the crowded stuffy aisles, passing the same companies over and over without the slightest inclination to approach them, you begin to feel as if you were in a museum.
The ten or so copies of your résumé you blushingly printed out at the library this morning are limp and lifeless in your hands. You are loath to buy a portfolio. It's not as if it could make any difference, for the twenty or thirty dollars that it costs. It might add an outline of arrogance to your stooped and self-effacing figure, your ghostlike way of avoiding the eyes of the recruiters around you (no doubt they think you didn't notice them); and perhaps that would be a good thing.
It's been an hour, and all you have are leaflets and business cards. You're the lighter by two or three copies of your résumé, true, but that won't be of any use till you go back home, and upload your résumé to the companies' websites, repeating the dull process from the start. Examining your life once again. Answering questions about yourself that throw into sharp relief your want of accomplishments.
Every exaggeration and every irrelevancy is a fresh blow to your pride. Perhaps you ought to add your skill for deception to your résumé? Alas, you've fooled no one.
No one will remember your face after you have slunk out of the career fair. If you forage in the dumpster behind the building later in the afternoon, you will doubtless find your résumé lying there, crumpled and stained with the remains of a hasty lunch. Or crumpled and stained with human indifference.
It's just as well, you tell yourself; you could never consent to prostituting yourself to people in comfortable positions in the hope that one of them might take pity on you, and toss you a few pennies every now and then in exchange for your freedom. You're much too proud for that.
Far better to sit in your dark room for the rest of your life, drawing moustaches on faces in newspapers, and reading storybooks late into the night.
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