Overqualified (2 page)

Joey Comeau

Dear Park Lane Mall,

Hello, I am seeking a position as Santa Claus. I am including my resume, but I ask that you also pay special attention to this cover letter — I hope to show why you should look beyond my lack of experience with children to my other outstanding qualifications.

My resume will indicate that I worked for ten years as the foreman of an assembly line at Mattel. Day after day I oversaw the construction of thousands and thousands of toys for children. My employees were mostly middle-aged men, which didn't sit right with me. I used my considerable sway in the company to influence hiring practices, instituting signing bonuses and additional benefits for people of small stature.

I had new uniforms designed! Green slippers and ridiculous hats. I made everyone sing in time as they worked. This was my workshop full of elves. Everything was perfect.

For a while.

You will notice a period of unemployment on my resume, as I faced several harassment suits and three charges of racism from Irish midgets I allegedly referred to as “my North Pole leprechauns.” They charged me with theft, too, when they found my bag of toys hidden away behind the lockers.

When I became unemployed I had nowhere else to go. I got very hungry, very fast, and took to sneaking into people's
houses, looking for milk and cookies. That's all I ever took, no matter what the police reports said. Milk and cookies. The Jones family filed a fraudulent insurance claim, and they are no longer on my “nice” list. I found that it was impossible to get in through chimneys, so usually I just busted in a window.

I think that my qualifications speak for themselves, and frankly, I think you'd be lucky to have me as a Santa. What kind of person applies for a job like that, anyway, having little kids sit on their johnson all day? Perverts, man. Perverts. I'm doing this because I have no other choice. It's my calling. I don't even like kids.

Joey Comeau

Dear RAND,

I am writing to apply for a job with the RAND Corporation. The first time I heard of the RAND Corporation was on
The X-Files
, the conspiracy-theory-heavy television show I was obsessed with in high school. I watched every episode. That was the beginning of my paranoia, my belief that there are huge corporations behind everything. That everything that happens in the world happens for a reason.

This isn't the first letter I've written you, though I don't know if you remember. When I was just out of high school, there was a shooting in Colorado. Thirteen dead and twenty-three wounded. Children killed by other children. I spent a lot of time sitting in front of the television with the sound off. I found your address on the Internet, RAND, and I wrote you the following letter.

“I don't understand about Columbine. Please write back.”

I know exactly what it said, RAND, because it came back to me unopened. I still have it.

Two years later, when two planes full of people flew into the side of those buildings in New York City, I wrote to you again. I was in university, sitting in a cafeteria full of people, looking up at the television monitors and trying not to think about that old radio program they made from
The War of the Worlds.

I wrote you the following letter, there in the cafeteria: “Dear RAND, right now I feel like I felt in the Museum of Modern Art, looking at those paintings. I know that they must mean something. I know that there must be some reason for them. But I can't see it. All I see is a mess. Those are people jumping from the windows. That is too high up.”

And you sent the letter back then, too, RAND. But I understand. The world is full of letters, pointing fingers at the problems, at faults, without suggesting a solution. This letter is a solution.

Why not fake every disaster? Empty planes look just the same on TV. Nobody needs to know the passengers are safe. Empty buildings. Robot jumpers. You could have put a look-alike dummy of my brother on his skateboard in front of a robot drunk driver. It was nighttime, who would know? Fake everyone's death for the cameras, but let them live.

Give me the moon, RAND. I can be your backup plan. We can start a secret lunar colony for the secret survivors! A place where nothing dies, where smiles are free. There won't be any war or pollution or over-population. Every night at six we'll listen to
The Shadow,
and later on there'll be a comedy for mom and dad.

It's Christmas Eve. We could have a roaring fire.

Yours,
Joey Comeau

Dear Gillette,

Do you remember when you were the best a man could get? Before you decided that the best that men could get were faces as soft as baby bottoms? Before you decided that being a man meant being a woman? You need to go back to your roots, Gillette. Forget these gaudy lozenge shaped miracles of modern technology. Bring back the straight razor. That was a product.

You want dangerous? Forget about drunk businessmen and speeding cars. You want Gillette razors against a businessman's throat in an alley. Gillette razors hidden in the mouths of inmates. Hidden under their skin. Scabbed over. Finally dug out with dirty fingers in the dark.

You want coming of age? That has nothing to do with a clean shave. You want a young boy sneaking into his stepfather's bathroom. Sneaking a razor from the box. Hiding it in the brim of his baseball cap. Riding his bike hard and fast to meet his best friend in the woods. A Gillette razor digging into their palms. That one handshake. Blood brothers. You want romance? Nobody gives a fuck about kisses. Gillette razors in bed, cutting while they move against one another. Both of them tearing open, bright and bleeding, eyes wide. Sex, Gillette. Sex.

They're going to buy your razor and shave and go to work, sure, but they're going to buy it because they know they're animals inside. They don't want smiling clean faces. They
want blood swirling down the drain. You're selling a product to men who have no other way of touching that part of themselves, the suicide and the murder and the rape.

I can help.

Joey Comeau

Dear Parker Brothers,

Last night I dreamed my brother and I were hanging out at a party, trying to drink as many little bottles of alcohol as possible. We were hoping to get very drunk without anyone noticing. Then I was trying to explain to Adrian how we had the exact same Muppets toothbrush. He was pissed because someone gave him a stale sandwich. All of the other models were sitting around in a classroom, laughing and talking. We were models? Someone was talking about waves. We could hear the waves crashing on the rocks. The whole room went dark, and a girl in the middle was lit from above. Her skin was rotted and bloody black and she looked right at me and she said, very calmly, “A catastrophe is coming.”

I have never designed a board game before, but I think I'd be good at it. You roll the dice and make your move. How hard can it be? All you need is a theme. What about disaster? I like that. It's harrowing without being too immediate. Those things happen to other people.

Joey Comeau

Dear Paramount Pictures,

I want to write horror movies. When I was a kid, I was terrified of horror movies. I remember watching
Pet Sematary
four times before I ever saw more than a flash of the dead guy. I hid underneath a blanket every time anything happened, every time the music came up. I covered my ears.

I liked being scared, though. My grandparents owned a farm, and my brother Adrian and I used to sneak out to the barn in the middle of the night. My grandfather used that barn to store the tractor. It used to be a real barn, though. It was left over from when there had been a farm, not just a vineyard back there. It was old and broken down and perfect for us.

Adrian and I went in there with our flashlights, and there was a room underneath the hayloft. It was small and dark and slick and there were no windows. It was a room where your imagination became full of snorting stomping animals all wet with sweat. Even in the middle of the day, that room was black like horse eyes.

One of us would sit outside and the other would go in, without his flashlight, and see how long he could stand to be alone in that black room. It wasn't the sort of game that anybody won or lost.

I've thought about this a lot, Paramount. I want to write horror movies that scare you, but leave you with the
feeling that your brother is right outside the door, waiting, flashlight in hand.

Only, when you call out, there's no answer. And the barn is empty, like your stomach.

Joey Comeau

Dear Bell Canada,

Thank you for taking the time to review my resume. I have to apologize for the bluntness of this cover letter. I need your help. I think the Internet is trying to kill me. It is only through this channel, this job application, that I have any chance of fooling it into letting my message get through.

I spent six hours online this morning, reading job postings and writing terrible cover letters, and having shallow conversations with a dozen of my friends. They kept asking, “How do you feel?” and posting the little hug icon from instant messenger. When was the last time I really paid attention to a conversation? I have all these old emails from my brother, and none of them say anything.

He ended every one with, “Love yah, bro.” I've read it so many times today.

I'm multitasking all the time now. I can do a hundred different things at once, and at the end of the day I can't remember any of them. I honestly can't remember.

It's your fault. The Internet has tendrils in millions of homes, all through the country. You feed it. And I understand why you feed it, why you're doing this. You get thirty dollars a month for every home, for every connection. You're feeding it, but you're getting fat, too. Only, it can't go on. I can't let you profit from the lives of my friends and family.

You have to tell me where it lives. If I can find the head, the heart, the brain, I can destroy it. I can set everyone free with one small act of violence. I need to burn the Internet to the ground. I need to find out if it has had a chance to lay eggs yet.

Have you had trouble breathing lately? When was your last x-ray? There could be eggs anywhere in your body. I have to tear out its backbone. I have to clean your server rooms with fire. If I am in the computers as an employee, it won't see me coming, gasoline can in hand.

Hire me.

Joey Comeau

Dear Queen Elizabeth Hospital,

I'm applying for the position of systems analyst in the Transplantation Services department of your hospital, as advertised on the Internet. I'm currently working as a systems analyst for Ford Motor Company of Canada, but I am looking to make the transition to medicine, and I am including my resume for your review. I have always had a strong interest in medicine, and it is that interest which originally attracted me to the sciences. Circumstances led me to computer science, but it seems that now I am being given the chance to follow my original dreams. I can leave behind the cold and lifeless world of automotive manufacturing, and embrace the emotionally satisfying warmth of health care.

I know it won't be an easy transition, and this is why I am applying to your hospital. Your hospital is the perfect balance of medicine and assembly line. I can work with bodies, but won't be expected to treat them as people. Over time, of course, I might learn to understand human emotion and move on to another hospital where that is more appropriate, but in the meantime I think you will find my qualifications and skills very useful.

As my resume indicates, my duties at Ford have included leading the programming team in charge of assembly line robotics. My experience taught me about the maximum speed and force with which you could have the robot insert a new part without damaging a vehicle's chassis. I feel this
experience will translate almost seamlessly to transplantation services, and I think you will agree.

While at Ford I've also led a team in designing a system for locating defects in the assembly line vehicles. It is a waste of resources and time to assemble vehicles that are not up to standard, and I wonder if this philosophy might not be something that the medical world is ready to embrace.

What it all comes down to is this: I am a resourceful and innovative programmer. I am not afraid of learning new things, and I know when trial and error is a faster way to get something done than research. I can be a hard taskmaster to those beneath me in the chain of command, but the results of that show in my production figures.

I believe that I would make a vital and innovative member of your team. Too often industries are the victims of over-specialization, and I feel that my breadth of experience and attitudes toward transplantation services would give your department the distinction that it may well require.

Yours in anticipation,

Joey Comeau

Dear Goodyear,

I'd like a job, please. You probably don't hire strangers. I used to climb mountains of your tires in my grandfather's salvage yard. My name's Joey Comeau. There. Now we aren't strangers anymore.

It's Joey, not Joe or Joseph. My grandfather was Joe Comeau, and Joseph is my mother's name for me, but I have always been Joey. I worry sometimes that it's a childish name. Would a “Joe” tell jokes in bed, perform puppet shows after sex, and give every body part a different high-pitched voice? It seems unlikely. The names we choose for ourselves aren't meaningless. They're self-fulfilling prophecies.

So, I'm Joey and I will never be Joe. When my grandfather died, I lost my chance to know him as anything more than a kiss on the cheek and a drive to the video store. I remember his oxygen tank, and his chair in the living room. Every night at seven or eight o'clock my grandmother would move to the kitchen and pour herself a glass of wine from a box, because it was time for wrestling and the TV was his for hours. Their furniture was old and dark brown, and it hid dimes and nickels. My grandmother lives in another city now, with new furniture, and I wonder if every night at seven or eight o'clock, she still finds something else to do. She hated wrestling.