Post-Graduate Over-Educated Out of Work Blues...

(title for this post is a song title by Wally Pleasant)

On Friday of last week I received the first F.O.D. letter from an Ann Arbor company. For those of you not familiar with F.O.D., it literally means "F*ck Off and Die." Usually you get one of these in response to a job application, and - although the verbiage may differ - they all say essentially the same thing: "We're not hiring you. Piss off."

The letter I got on Friday took this a step further. While still pleasant in tone, it is the first F.O.D. letter I've received that had a scanned signature. Not just scanned, but scanned poorly. And at a low resolution, probably around 100-150dpi. The end result? A hard to read, pixelated, low-quality image on a letter that's already bad news. Not only does this say that they don't want to hire you, it says that they can't even be bothered to take five seconds to sign the letter telling you that they're not hiring you. In essence, this says: "We're not hiring you. We'd rather hire a three-day's dead yak in a bustier rather than hire you. In fact, we're so against hiring you that we're going to make this as impersonal as possible, in the hopes that you'll refrain from sending any more crap our way."

This from a small printing company in the Ann Arbor area. Not a large corporation. Perhaps they have aspirations of being larger and more impersonal, hence the F.O.D. letter of doom. After all, anyone can create a form rejection letter that pulls information from a database and spits it out onto a laserjet printer, but it takes a certain je ne sais quois to put a poorly processed signature image on it.

Now, I'm not turning up my nose at them and saying that they should hire me; that they don't know what they're missing; that I'm better than sliced bread, spaceflight, and three-day weekends all rolled into one. All I'm saying is this: How about a little compassion? Take the extra time to actually sign the rejection letter. You're already going to make the poor bastard (or bastardette) feel bad because they're not getting a shiny new job; why make it worse by telling them that they're not even worth the time it would take for you to apply pen to paper? Leave the impression; the little ink smear. That shows that someone actually looked at their submission; that it wasn't mechanically evaluated and spat remorselessly into the nearest circular file.

I can only hope that this is the last F.O.D. letter I get...