Tell us why you’d love to be part of our team!
I’ve wanted to be part of something for so long, there’s this hole in me I try to hide, something I’ve jammed everything at; empty calories and half-hearted sex, travel and spending, starting and ending, any god’s guarantees… Now, I ask you, what if all along it was as simple as joining this company to fill the part of me missing? What if some deranged wiring or disease has forced me to isolate myself away instead of considering being part of a team like the one here at your company? I feel pretty good right now, and I’m not even officially part of anything. Just even filling out this application is fixing me. How weird would it be if it turned out I don’t even need the money, that I just need to be part of something, and I’ve idealized your team? That should be a movie. There’s probably a Preston Sturges movie like that.
Tell us a bit about some of your strengths
that you would bring to your work here.
A head on fire, a heart speeding through what days are left for me, a one hundred and forty beat per minute rocket ride back into the ether we all came from, and in the meantime longing to leave something behind, some kind of initials carved in wet cement, a stain on the planet, something proving I was here even just for the minute we get, you know what I mean? We look to leave a mark like a young drunk’s bruise, we stare at our arms to see the boats our fathers fished on, drawings of what we touched littering our limbs, tattoos. Okay, so, picture the company a hundred years from now: imagine my work is left here somehow, even if the projects and meetings that I led are long gone, it’s gone but my work is left here somehow, my strengths here in the muscle memory of these walls and desks and copiers and rooms—maybe some reports or memos or other documents I’ve typed are left in cabinets like ghosts in attics, dead flowers in the staff break room, thirty years later, come into bloom. Someone sees them and is like: “That’s from a great energy that someone put into their work here. That’s from a team member who was fucking extraordinary.” Everyone getting coffee that morning is just quiet like, “Yep, that’s what that is.”
What was something you didn’t like about
the last company you worked for?
If there’s one sort of revenge fantasy I have about them it is this: I’m kind of on a stage or in a big field that looks lunar, like when you leave Ketchum for Boise. And I’ve dropped a little weight, and I start to scream and kind of sing, but it’s kind of like reading or comedy, too. It’s cool, I’m not explaining it well here, but I’m kind of scream-sing-talking like a ’60s comedian or ’90s punk singer, and it’s lines like: Why naynay naynah I can’t manifest it! Baby, I! Can’t! Float when they drag me down, your company to me, was like swimming in concrete! The whole department, coming on like cherry candy, winding up my deadly make believe! You hired me, played me, caught me, cooked me. I could’ve walked away but I was weightless, on fire; you had me! But my burn faded until your want was wheezing, your devour sated. Me, a frozen moment, hypothermic, one dumb bug there so still, waiting to thaw, goodbye millennium, been here so long it feels like I’m gone. Picture the guitar parts sounding pretty dissonant while I scream that stuff. I’m not going to compare it to other bands you or other people at the company know, because it would be my own thing.
Aside from the position you’re applying for, are there any other skills you’d like to pursue that you feel you might learn here? Sometimes we offer schooling or classes in other areas of interest to employees that express interest in expanding into other fields or departments.
I wouldn’t mind learning more graphics stuff, I guess. I don’t know. Sometimes I think you start believing everything you write on an application or résumé, you know what I mean? It gets hard to remember what you’ve sold yourself. I’m not sure I even know the truth about me at this point.