A Message To My Potential Employers

See? Teamwork!

Oh, why hello there. I was wondering when you'd show up.

Why, yes, I have been expecting you. I can’t tell you how prepared I am for this – honest to Pete, if I’ve heard it once I’ve heard it a thousand times from guidance counselors and professors, “Be careful what you post on Facebook or in your blog, because potential employers will Google your name! Whatever you post on the Internet is theirs to read!”

Hey, hey, don’t act all ashamed – you weren’t being nosy at all! I post this sort of thing on the Internet, don’t I? It’s out there for people to read, after all.

Yes, I am that Truman Capps, the one who came into your establishment not too long ago with a flashy resume and an even flashier smile. Welcome, Potential Employer, to my blog. By all means, have a look around! Can I get you anything? Some Perrier, or maybe a Fresca? I’ve just made some banana bread, you really have to try it.

Yep, home sweet hairguytruman.blogspot.com. Sure, it’s no Exploding Unicorn, but I’ve only been at this for nine months. I guess that, if I’d knocked up some HTML in October, this blog entry would be the screaming, writhing, passive voice using, run on sentence writing baby. Of course, the entries here on Blogspot only go back to December, but I got my start on Facebook way long ago. Oh, man, the stories I could tell you about me and Facebook – entire entries lost when it spontaneously decided to log me out of my account right after I pressed “Submit”, the ability to tag your friends in your blogs in order to exploit their most selfish urges to read what you think about them… It was fun and safe, but I had to move on, y’know? I’m motivated and I like to think big, which is part of why I feel that I’d make such a great employee.

Feel free to have a look at my Facebook too, if you haven’t already. It’ll tell you that I’m single and pretty liberal, and that I’m all too fond of Firefly and the notion of a zombie apocalypse – you could find all that crap out here, too, but you can’t play Jetman on my blog (which, come to think of it, might be why I don’t get so many hits). You can look through all of my pictures but you won’t find any shots of me smoking pot or knocking back Natural Ice or clubbing a state trooper with a sock full of batteries, both because I don’t engage in that sort of behavior and because my attacks are so swift and unpredictable that no cameraman can catch me in the act.

Perusing my blog might lead to a few awkward moments between you and I when next we meet. Yes, Large National Banking Chain, I did specify on my application that I was fluent in both English and Spanish, despite evidence to the contrary that, if you hadn’t found already, you are most certainly reading now. Saying that I’m fluent in Spanish may not be entirely truthful, but in my defense, you didn’t define your standard of fluency on the application. Sure, I’m not exactly the Daniel Webster of Spanish, but I could probably carry on a limited conversation with a small Mexican child, or perhaps a talking Chihuahua if it spoke slowly and didn’t use the future tense. For all you know, that could be how I define fluency. However, I meant every word in my cover letter about devotion to customer service and my abilities as both a team member and team leader. Hell, one of my favorite video games is Team Fortress 2 - the word “team” is right in the freakin’ title! How much more devotion to teamwork do you want? I’m not one of those half-hearted jocks who’ll talk up his ability to delegate until he’s blue in the face and then go home to play some “Me vs The World” game like Halo. I’m a team player at work and in my spare time! So whether it’s capturing the Red Team’s flag or just flipping burgers, know, Potential Employers, that I’m devoted to helping my team be all that it can be.

And since we’re having this little heart to heart, I suppose it’ll be pickles on parade if I tell you that one of the two previous jobs I list on my resume is not, in fact, a job in any sense of the word. Sprague High School Library Aide is not, and never will be, a job as you and I know it – I didn’t get paid, there was very little responsibility involved, and my supervisor was the cheerleading coach. However, my time in the Sprague Library was less than a job in every sense of the word: Not only was it less fulfilling and rewarding than an ordinary teenager’s first job, it was also considerably less enjoyable. As you are no doubt keenly aware, Potential Employers, the job that I hope any one of you will give me involves a great deal of contact with customers, even if it’s simply putting a burger in front of them or pleasantly asking for their money from behind a sheet of bulletproof glass. I think that working without pay at the front desk in a library attended only by surly 14-18 year olds and not having a major psychotic episode is more than enough qualification to work in the service industry. To be employed in a place where the clientele are at least there by choice, and where a paycheck is waiting for me at the end of every two weeks, would be a dream after spending a semester rotting amongst crusty Garfield comics and Goosebumps tomes, periodically rousting stubborn MySpace fiends from the computer lab and trolling the back room for amorous goth couples. So, yes, that was a bit of a fib on my resume: “Sprague High School Library Desk Assistant” was not a job – it was more a trial, nay, a sadistic character building exercise at the hands of the Salem-Keizier School District, from which I have emerged with the same attitude as a man who has just been cured of a terrifyingly painful disease. “Come on now, World! Is that all you’ve got!? After that, I can take anything! No sweat!"

Maybe it’s outright lunacy for me to come clean here, to lay out a couple of flaws and present myself as I actually am, as opposed to the charismatic and unobtrusive lad you all met earlier. If what you’ve read here has turned your opinion of me for the worse, be it due to my admission of fudging details on my application or my decidedly cheeky tone about the whole affair, then I’m quite sorry that it has to be that way. My reasoning was that if you, as my Potential Employers, had the wherewithal to look me up on the Internet to make sure I was legit, I had no chance of hiding the real me as archived in this blog, where I sign off with my full name twice a week. I wanted to have this relatively reasonable (and profanity free) message be the first thing you saw of my online presence, rather than my flagrant disbelief in the existence of math or my pleas to the government for an XBox 360.

If you don’t want to believe anything else about me, at least know that I’m honest and I’ve got nothing to hide. That, coupled with being able to look a man in the eye and ask him if he wants fries with his cheeseburger, makes me one hell of a good employee, in my own estimate. If I were running a business, I would undoubtedly hire myself to work there as well – but of course, if we were living in a world populated by numerous Truman doppelgangers, I’d give up on that small business owner crap right away and try to unite an army, or at least a special interest group and Congressional lobby.

The point, Potential Employers, is that I really want a job. I want more money in my bank account, I want more ink on my resume, and I really want to have a reason to get out of bed this summer that doesn’t just involve eating or the toilet.

Thanks for your time, and be sure to give me a call. Don’t be a stranger, now!

Truman Capps hopes that at least one of his Potential Employers continued reading past the third paragraph.