Since opening our doors, we've culled through plenty of letters from job-seekers here at the Syndicate. Usually we forward them on to our Human Resources Department, which happens to share office space with our paper shredding vendor. On an unrelated point, we've not had any job candidate interviews since we relocated our HR department, but that's likely an unrelated point.

Some letters never make it out our door. Out of the reams of paper that cross our desks each day, we keep a select few in our main office. These get copied and circulated, posted up in break rooms and on cafeteria refrigerators us to laugh at.

If you're starting to think we're insensitive for making light of others' joblessness, we ask you to hold your judgment for a moment. You should keep in mind two things: (1) the authors of these letters wrote us inquiring about staff writer positions, and (2) these people write letters as well as we draw, and that's saying plenty.

We've reproduced one such job seeker's letter below. Line by line, we'll parse what it says to get at what it really means to say.

Dear Sir or Madam:

Right off the bat, this candidate gets it wrong because he doesn't know whether we're men or women. We'll forgive him (or her) this and move on, as there's still a chance to net an "A" for effort.

My objective is to secure a rewarding position at your company.

By which is meant: "Hey, hiring manager, you're so dumb that I have to tell you why I'm writing you, as if sending you my résumé weren't enough of a giveaway."

I am a very hardworking, dedicated, and motivated man. Just ask any of my references. I'm accomplished and results-driven.

Ah, so our candidate is male, as if that would influence our hiring decision any. The rest of this phrase means: "I have no skills applicable to your business but am desperate enough to cold call you on the off-chance you'll write back." And that bit about being accomplished and results-driven means he would punt his own mother in the teeth if enough money were offered.

As a team player, I work best in a collaborative environment.

That's a loaded statement. Saying you're a team player is shorthand for: "I don't know how to do anything, so I pass everything off to other people." And knowing how to work in a collaborative environment means he's good at blaming others for his failures while taking credit for their achievements.

In light of these, he does appear to have management potential.

I strive for challenging work.

"Please hire me, I'll do anything."

While I'm best suited for the senior supervisory analyst job, I'm also available for any other positions.

What the hell is a senior supervisory analyst? We're not sure there's such a position in our corporate structure. That aside, the sentence above parses out to: "While I would prefer the job that pays the most, I really am that hard-up for cash that I'll mop your floors if you let me."

Current market bellwethers indicate a clear paradigm shift in the global economy...

"I have no idea what I'm saying, so here are some big words."

...and I am uniquely positioned to leverage my individual attributes to our mutual benefit.

"I went to college. Hire me."

My primary motivator is the sense of satisfaction I get after a job well done.

Such a lie. Our accountants would go into ecstatic fits if everyone who worked here were paid in personal satisfaction and not money. Banks would sure have a hard time cashing those checks, but that's beside the point.

I invite you to briefly peruse my two-page resume. You will see that because of the fact that my accomplishments speak for themselves, I would make for a fine addition to your team.

Ugh. So many errors per square inch of page that someone ought to develop a specialized unit of measurement to track them. Something like:

Dunce Coefficient = (Errors / Surface Area of a Page) x Number of Pages

First, he uses the word "peruse" in a sense contrary to what the word means. To peruse means to perform an in-depth analysis of something. If we understand him correctly, he'd invite us to take a cursory yet thorough review of his materials? Unfortunately, his "invitation" did not come with an RSVP section where we could decline with regrets.

And his resume is two pages long -- that's twice as long as it needs to be, unless the three letters after his name are Ph.D.

Something else bears mentioning: "...because of the fact that my accomplishments..." We'd love to call this candidate in for an interview just to ask, "So, which of your accomplishments is because of the fiction?"

I would be happy to supply references upon your request.

Earlier in the letter he stressed how all his references would vouch for him, and yet he doesn't have the decency to identify those references for us. We understand discretion is the better part of valor, especially when your job references are CIA agents or international spies. Chances are his references are his parents, so why the secrecy?

That letter was painful. Our bosses sent us home with hazard pay after reading it. Thankfully, our nausea had passed in a few hours and we were back to work  the following morning. To this day, the letter hangs on an office whiteboard. We use it to haze new employees.

We did eventually call this candidate in for an interview. It lasted all of three minutes. Check out the comic strip below to see how it went.

The phone company giveth, and the phone company taketh. Such is the nature of our universe, that a big phone company can promise its clients an unlimited free service and then complain to its customers when they take full advantage of it. The world has gone mad, I say.

For our purposes, I'll call the aforesaid big corporation "MonsterTelco." As a global leader in worldwide cellular telecommunications, MonsterTelco (TM) offers its customers free services to sucker them into lucrative phone contracts. These services aren't really free, because the services you do pay for are marked up to absorb the cost of offering you those free services, but that's a different story altogether. As it happens, my wireless plan with MonsterTelco afforded me free nighttime cellphone minutes between the hours of 9:00 p.m. and 5:00 a.m. -- you know, in case I ever needed to place an emergency call to my insomniac support group.

I was habitually guilty of wireless minute overages. Too often I burned through my 600-minutes-a-month plan, and was forced to pay the inflated per-minute penalty charges for the overage. I soon learned my lesson and shifted my social calls to start at 9:01 p.m. These calls typically ran on into the wee hours of the following morning. When MonsterTelco's monthly statement came in, it was no slight  pleasure to see that I'd been billed for a scant 600 minutes but had used several times that in free minutes.

Mere days after the billing statement came in the mail, I got a call from an unlisted phone number. A cheery young man answered. While I don't remember his name, for our purposes I'll call him "Josh." Josh (TM) was a MonsterTelco (TM) customer service agent. After getting through those trite pleasantries that phone etiquette requires, he thrust for the heart of the matter.

"You really like that phone plan, don't ya?" Josh said. It was more a statement than a question.

"Sure," I replied.

"I mean, you really like that plan, huh?" he went on.

Here's where I got suspicious. MonsterTelco didn't make its money chatting with subscribers.

"Yes," I replied, giving Josh nothing else to go on. 

Silence. Your move, Josh.

"Well..." he stammered. "Have you ever thought to upgrade your plan? I mean, you used 5,000 minutes last month."

Pinning the phone to my ear with my shoulder, I dug last month's wireless bill out of my desk drawer. Josh was right, I had used 5,000 minutes: 400 of them were peak-time minutes I had paid for, and the other 4,600 were free.

"Actually," I said, "I think I am due for an upgrade. Tell me about cheaper plans with less peak-time minutes and more free minutes."

The call dropped just then, or at least that's what I'd like to believe. The cynical side of me, the one that's usually right, said Josh hung up. 

In any event, MonsterTelco's customer relations department dropped the ball. Its employee, "Josh," had handled the call poorly. That they even called in the first place is reprehensible in itself. Think how it might reflect on a purportedly world-class corporation that they should complain to me, their customer, for using their services in a legal and contractually-permissible manner. After all, they wrote that contract, not me. They shouldn't cry if I find creative ways to use it to my advantage.

I shared this story with family and friends, and they recommended I write MonsterTelco a nasty letter. I gave that thought ample consideration that took all of two heartbeats. After researching it some, I found out that the street address for MonsterTelco's customer service concerns was a rental mailbox at its paper shredding vendor. Any mail sent there was sifted into a bin and dumped into an industrial paper shredder, to be destroyed unopened. To make MonsterTelco feel my frustration, I would have to resort to diplomacy by other means.

First, I pored over the service contract. Interestingly, my wireless plan included handset replacement insurance for just $5 monthly, with a $10 per-claim deductible. This was a hold-over from when my parents first signed up and bought me an inexpensive brick-phone. Because we had renewed the same plan over the years, these terms were grandfathered-in to apply to my current high-tech pocket computer that did everything but make you a breakfast smoothie on demand.

I launched my plan at the start of the next billing cycle. At exactly 9:01 p.m. I placed a call from my cellphone to my parents' home line. I picked up the home line at the first ring and plugged my cellphone into the wall charger, so it wouldn't drop the call when the battery ran down. Both lines were tied up all night, for an eight-hour window through 5:00 a.m. the following morning. This went on every evening for a month. That month's billing statement showed I'd burned through 14,000 free wireless minutes. I did this for three months straight, until the screen on my handset shorted out. By then, I'd racked up over 40,000 free wireless minutes.

MonsterTelco must have known what I was doing, and why I was doing it, because they did not call during those three months of intense wireless use. Since they weren't forthcoming, I phoned them to make an insurance claim.

"Oh no, sorry," the nameless lady in MonsterTelco's employ explained. "Your insurance policy doesn't cover your phone. That policy was written up too long ago."

Oh, how wrong she was. After nearly an hour's wait on hold, I worked my way up through her assistant supervisor, her supervisor, and finally into insurance underwriting. Grudgingly, MonsterTelco admitted it was contractually bound to ship a replacement phone, and sure enough, one identical to the phone I had burnt out arrived in the mail a week later. A brand-new $200 phone for a mere $10. 

After another three months and 50,000 free minutes, the replacement phone burned out and I placed another call to MonsterTelco. This time, the conversation went smoothly -- it was almost pleasant, even. The company apologized for the technical problems and agreed to ship a second replacement phone.

When the box containing the new phone arrived, I gleefully tore it open and went for the shrink-wrapped technological goodness inside. My hands stopped short. To be sure, the phone was inside, but atop it was a letter printed on cream-colored stationery. The string of names in bold type on the letterhead spoke to one thing: attorneys.

MonsterTelco had sicked its hired-gun attorneys on its own customer. 

My heart racing, I read the letter several times. If MonsterTelco sued me, my life would be over. They'd pull their political strings and have the judge order me never to come within fifty feet of a cellphone. Once the terror had passed, anger set in. For those of you who never have experienced it, reading while angry is an exhilarating thing, and highly productive in small doses.

With the fire in my gut roiling, I sat at my desk and penned a response. In a nutshell, the attorneys had accused me of fraud. Their flimsy allegations claimed that I was not using those free nighttime minutes to speak to other people, and that my tying up the phone lines caused "serious, ongoing, and irreparable damages upward of thousands of dollars."

MonsterTelco's attorneys' letter rambled on for three pages. My response took all of three sentences. I've reproduced it here:

"I understand you are upset with my use of those free nighttime minutes that you are contractually required to give me. If you are concerned that I am not actually using those minutes to speak to people, then please tell me how long you have been tapping into my phone conversations without my knowledge. I'm sure federal prosecutors would care to investigate your invasion of my privacy, and that of everyone I call using your wireless service."

This happened over a decade ago. I'm still waiting on their reply.

Some people lament giving up on pursuing their dream jobs. I don't. In fact, I'm glad I did. I was just barely out of kindergarten when I'd decided on my dream job. Here's how it happened.

1981. George Lucas and Steven Spielberg team up to make a film about a world-traveling, whip-snapping, fedora-wearing archaeologist.

1988. Yours truly, at seven years old, watches the aforesaid film for the first time on television. It, and its oft-maligned sequel instantly become my favorite movies.

1989. The intrepid archaeologist returns to the big screen to save his kidnapped father, and both team up to foil a nefarious plot.

I was among those lucky to catch the third film's theater premiere. As I watched the titular character's daring exploits on the big screen, my life plans cemented as quickly as they had formed, at the tender age of eight years old. My purpose in life was to become an archaeologist. I was so certain of this that one of my recurring nightmares at the time was of my adult self (decked out in a leather jacket and fedora, no less) falling prey to an ancient booby trap while plundering the contents of an Egyptian pyramid. It was scary because I knew it could happen, and probably would happen frequently, over the course of my treasure-hunting career.

Knowing that it would take many years of instruction and lots of money, I begged my parents for a hat. The whip and revolver could come later, I figured, once I was old enough to drive. For my purposes as an enterprising eight-year-old, a length of rope and cap-gun sufficed.

Throughout high school I clung to my childhood dream of looting the treasures of antiquity. Imagine how utterly my plans got turned upside down on learning that there were laws against just this sort of behavior. Things only got worse when I found out that most archaeologists spent their lives unearthing buried pottery shards with toothbrushes.

"Impossible!" I shouted, storming out of the Archaeology 101 lecture with my fists upraised. My handwritten notes whirled at my heels in the breeze of my passing.

Sadly, all that I had heard was true, but abandoning my childhood dream was among the best decisions I've ever made. A close second would be pursuing a degree in liberal arts, because, you know, those types make loads of money.

We call that sarcasm, kids. They don't teach you to use it as well as we do in any school. No, it's something you pick up after you've run through miles of irony.

She longs and she waits, chin in hand and sitting pretty,
Innocent as a quiet sunset,
Quiet as the foam at shore.  

Many a night have I spent with her.
When I am with her it is cool and good.
I am tempted to stay with her forever.
Were she to have her way it would be so.

She loves me,
Wants to sweep me far away where I can be with her forever,
Take me to a secret place only she knows where we both can live,
Though the world rots,
Where she can hold me and envelop me and smother me and never let me go.
She loves me so that she is blind to what she does to me.

Right from the start it could never work out.
Though she would give me the sky and the sea,
Her love is the sky to a fish and the sea to a bird.

I never can stay long,
But she holds me just to keep me a little longer,
A tiny bit longer,
And a little longer after that.
She never knows what she’s doing until it’s too late.

As the women of old would dress in white
And wait by the shore for their loves to return,
So too does the ocean.
The ocean reflects their visages.
Foam topped waves are the lace of her veil
And her face the moon in the sea at night.

She wants and she watches and she waits and she searches
And she hungers and she preys and she takes and she mourns.

No one consoles the ocean. She drinks the salt of her tears forever.
And of all her fish and of all her whales she is intimately aware,
Though they never give her a passing thought.

The ocean truly is alone.
The seagulls on high sing her sorrows,
Echo her calls from places unseen.

Perched atop a narrow column rising high above the Thandobart School of Magic, Dean Ambert Genndes stands perfectly still, peering out into the horizon.

The wind howls as it whips past his body, casting his robes and long white beard into a sharp angle. He is wholly absorbed in silent meditation as his consciousness stretches for miles from where he stands, his field of vision flying across the landscape. Trees, rivers, mountains, and villages whiz by too fast for him to see little more than blotches.

He spurs his consciousness to fly faster. The blotches become streaks, then bands of color. He travels so quickly that he sees the curvature of the planet’s surface beneath him, but it lasts only for a moment before he starts a fast deceleration.

An imposing stone bulwark looms ahead. At one end of this fortress is an obelisk rising high above the citadel. His eyes waft gently on the breeze to the obelisk and then begin to spiral upward, until at last he reaches the top. At the peak stands a scrawny old man in flowing robes. A piece of paper taped to the man’s back flaps in the wind. Something is written on the paper:

I’M A SENILE OLD COOT.

Ambert snaps out of his trance and reaches backward, between his shoulder blades.

“So that’s why everyone was laughing,” he says as he crumples the paper into a tight little ball.

His curiosity satisfied at last, he turns toward the winding staircase cut into the obelisk and begins the long descent to ground level.