09/29/2009: "Fun With Cover Letters"

Hi All,

As my unemployment passes into the grey gauzy mists of true desperation, and with each and every job likely to be so hotly-contested by a vast panoply of like-minded strivers, one must do what one must to separate oneself from the herd. Short of kidnapping some HR people, locking them in a room and brainwashing them, the only real leverage or potential advantage one has (apart from the fistful of skills one may or may not possess) is the cover letter. Lately my cover letters are getting more and more fanciful and bizarre; I've done so many of them that at this point I'm trying to keep myself amused and keep the creeping phantods at bay half the time.

Today I came across a listing for 'King' at Medival Times Theme restaurant. So you dress up as a King, I guess, and put on a booming English accent and strut about and preen and peacock and drink mead and laugh a booming laugh as the knights joust for your favor. So I thought: I could do that. Maybe. It beats harvesting worms! So I just abandoned the typical cover letter altogether and wrote this:

Loyal Commoner,

Heartiest felicitations and hark! I didst awake on this fine autumnal morn to discover, to my great chagrin, that the royal coffers are nearly dry, pilfered by scoundrels, knaves, and highwaymen, and I---a King!---am down to my very last ingot, or dubloon, or silver penny or whatever crazed monetary unit is I should have in my dusty medieval vaults ... gone, I tell you! Alack and alay! And now my four ex-wives are baying like mad wildebeasts for their alimony patronage to keep my nelly offspring with names like Philip and Neville and Scroggins Fitzhugh in pantaloons and fancy jerkins, to keep them fat and sated on roast boar, to keep them drunk and sloppy as the flagons of wine pour forth with unstinting abundance. I should have had all their heads separated from their beanstalk necks when I had the chance! Oh, most hideous and unlucky day!

Tis a sad and damnable day, good sirrah, when a King such as I must approach a man such as you---a nobleman, prayhaps, but still a commoner in relation to my Kingly munificence---when I must approach on bended knee to grovel for your patronage. A job! A job! Tis nothing more dear in this world! A job to keep the jackals at bay, to prevent my creditors from storming my ramparts and hauling me off to the debtors prison! ME, a KING! Oh, I yearn for the days when I could thrash a commoner for no just cause at all, drunk as a lord on mead and lashing an innocent pleb harshly and most tempermentally with a hickory switch, and to laugh and laugh and laugh ... ah, but those halcyon days are all gone.

Zounds!

What is that I doth hear through yon chamber door? It is none but the royal fool who hath come to tender his letter of resignation. He says my last check bounced higher than a nettle-stung rabbit! He's leaving, he says, to enter the honeyed embrace of a new king three kingdoms over. Swine! Boor! Away with you and your capering minstrelry! Away from my sight!

Oh, but now I am beset by a melancholy most cruel. I am a King, you see. I was born a King and I will die a King ... of course, I won't really die, Kings never do, we merely ascend into the heavens to hang out with other Kings in a honeyed vale far removed from the typhoid-ridden commoners with their rotten teeth and leprosy. But times are dreary all over, even for a King such as I. I am a young King, granted, only 38---but a childhood case of the pox and an undiagnosed liver ailment that the royal medic treated by drilling a hole into my skull and filling said hole with leeches has aged me somewhat prematurely; I look rather dessicated and frail, and as such would surely make a fine King and well-suited to your needs. The photo I include is an old one; it was taken by the royal wizard with his nefarious 'flash-box'---which, sadly, stole my soul. But what use a soul to a King, I ask you? Worthless as the last breath of an aged crone, I say! Ha! Your King doth make a funny! LAUGH, thou impertinent cuckold, or I shalt thrash you roundly about the buttocks and humors!

If thou hast need for a King, as the grapevine doth indicate you do, do this old Regent a favor and call me on that enchanted 'telephone' contraption. In return I ask only your undying loyalty unto the end of time and your firstborn child, who I will use as a footstool for my chronically sore feet.

Heartiest felicitations, thou puling worm. Though pitiable, potato-picking, louse-ridden, donkey-dumb, fart-in-a-windstorm and truly most damnable commoner,

Your New King.

... Reverse psychology, bay-bee!

Of course, I'm not 38. But the ad said 38-55, so I lied. So sue me! I'd make a good King. I like bossing people around and eating drumsticks. Who better than me? Nobody, I tells ya!

All best,
Craig.