Let's be extremists for a moment and say there are two camps when it comes to an author's motivation for writing: (1) what sells will sell, and (2) what's good will sell. At the risk of splitting hairs, we'll go so far as to identify a third: writing for the love of the art. While that is as perfectly acceptable an inclination to write as any, it is beyond the scope of this article.

Let's take this thought exercise a step further and set both camps at opposite ends of a continuum. Now ask yourself, where do you stand? If ever you're to get anyplace, you'll first need to know where you are.

These entrepreneurial writers have it in mind to sell their books before they're even written. They have their fingers on the pulse of public opinion. They know what genres are hot and will write to cater to those markets, giving readers more of what they want.

But this mindset is not without its risks. The first law of pop culture states that any time something becomes sufficiently popular, "me-too" examples always seem to crop up, hoping to ride its coattails. Pop culture's second law holds that consumer tastes can be fickle -- what sells at any given moment might flop the next. Case in point: remember that steamy paranormal romance between an Egyptian mummy and a shapeshifting were-moose sorceress? Yeah, we don't either.

Writers who fall into this camp place emphasis on producing exceptional work, and then later try to find a way to sell it. As sometimes happens, their work may be brilliant, but too ahead of its time to be commercially successful.

One extreme example of this type was Howard Phillips Lovecraft. The man sure could write, and yet Lovecraft never garnered much notoriety while alive. His work has since become astronomically famous and has been interpreted in subsequent literature, music, art, film, and even videogames. The almost unbelievable popularity of his writing underscores his talent and creativity. It's just a shame this all came too late for him to enjoy it.

It should go without saying that the illustrations above are extremes, but they help to draw boundaries. Every writer falls somewhere in between, and the first step to understanding yourself as a writer is identifying where you stand. Ask yourself:

* Do you write just to sell books, or because you believe in your story?
* Do you stay firmly within genre expectations, or do you defy convention?
* Would you mind if what you've written shocks your readers, or is that the reason you write?
* Do you write what you feel or know, or do you write what the audience wants to read?
* Are your characters based on people you've met, or are they characters your readers expect in your genre?
* Which is more important: a logical -- but mechanical -- plot, or an organic -- but convoluted -- storyline?
* Which is more important: heavy action or suspense with shallow emotional register, or vice versa?

The answers to questions like these may surprise with how much they say about you. They get to the heart of why you write, which ultimately defines who you are as a writer. They'll also help you spot potential problems in your writing. For instance: maybe overemphasis on tried-and-true genre elements has resulted in a story that rings of cliche; or maybe that genre-defying caveman/steampunk/space opera you've penned confuses readers.

Finding out who you are is your map. Figuring out why you write is your compass. The journey's in the writing.

Safe travels.

I've thought on it some, and I've found that I spend a lot of time in sandwich shops. (See: Fifty Dollar Cheese Sandwich Standoff). No matter how well stocked your local deli is, they can offer only so many combinations of bread, meat, cheese, and condiments before it gets boring. It's moments like these when you need to get subversive.

The deli I frequent makes the best egg salad sandwiches -- thick-sliced bread toasted until it achieves  the load-bearing strength for a half-pound of golden egg salad goodness inside. Add in a slice of yellow cheese and a dash of paprika, and you've got the best sandwich this side of New York State. Great as the sandwich is, man cannot live on egg salad alone, which is also why they offer foot-long hoagies. Having frequented this deli so often, it was only a matter of time before I ordered a foot-long egg salad sandwich.

The deli man's cocked eyebrow said it all: "Are you sure?" Without waiting for an answer, he got to work, piling into the hoagie bread three times as much egg salad as a normal sandwich -- and presumably a normal human -- should require. The sandwich was glorious, but I'm fairly certain that pain in my chest after eating it was not regret.

At lunch the next day the deli man shook his head as I stepped inside. He reached under the counter for the egg salad and started to made another foot-long, but I stopped him. Rarely have I seen more relief on another man's face. His expression was short-lived, however. It cut short abruptly when I told him I wanted a foot-long peanut butter and jelly.

With America being the land of the free where the customer is always right, it was a foregone conclusion that I would get my sandwich. Freedom to do such dumb things as this was practically written into our constitution.

Compressed into that one sandwich experience were all the summer vacation days of every year of grade school --  endless summers of days in the park, and always with peanut butter and jelly as a packed lunch. I might have lost a few summers -- you know, taken off the tail end -- by eating the whole thing in one sitting, but it was completely worth it if only to revel in the horribly perplexed look of the deli man.

It should come as no surprise that insurance companies don't get rich by writing their customers checks. Like any enterprise, they're in the business of making money. Sometimes that means raising premiums, other times it means cutting costs. To an insurance company, you are a cost -- that's why people in the industry lovingly refer to their customers not as clients but as "risks", as in, "Well Mr. Stevenson, we normally wouldn't insure rabble like you, but since you're such a good risk..."

This entry is the first in a series of insurance horror stories, stories which -- although they have been massaged a bit to protect the innocent (and fend off insurance companies' attorneys) -- are still too true for comfort.

Consider yourself warned, these stories are not for the faint of heart.

Ira sat with an expectant smile on his face, his wife's hand in his. Today was his first visit to the obstetrician. Judith was pregnant after several weeks of trying. It was still too early for her to be showing but they both knew, and just knowing was enough to bring proud smiles to their faces.

It sure hadn't been easy. While Judith had children from her prior marriage, Ira had none. It meant a lot to him that he'd be a father soon, and as much to her that she could finally give him what he'd sought after.

He eased back in his seat. The faux wood chair in which he sat did little in terms of comfort or looks for the doctor's office. His tailbone hurt from sitting. They'd been fifteen minutes early to their appointment. A glance at Ira's watch revealed that the doctor was already twenty minutes late.

As if summoned by Ira's thoughts, Dr. Mossberg bustled in through the door of his practice, the slat blinds in the door slapping against the glass as he stepped in. The doctor hadn't time for so much as a hello as he left the reception area for the office in back. The reception window slid open a minute later, revealing the face of the all-too-bored-with-her-job teenage girl who staffed the desk.

"Burnside?" she said.

Ira nearly sprang out of his chair. "Yes, that's us."

"Enter, please."

Ira held open the door for Judith as the receptionist buzzed them in. They rounded the corner and met Dr. Mossberg at his  desk. "Come, sit," said the doctor, holding out his arms to indicate the two chairs across from him.

"I understand you're coming to me because your wife is having a baby," the doctor went on.

"Yes," said Ira. "My first."

Dr. Mossberg's eyes flitted over to Judith. An uncomfortable silence set in.

"My third," Judith volunteered.

Mossberg nodded, and it was an exaggerated gesture, as though he knew something they didn't and was on the verge of telling them. "I thought as much," he said, snapping shut the folder on his desk. "I just got off the phone with your insurance company. They're declining coverage."

"What!" Ira leapt out of his chair. "That's not possible. My company's health plan covers my wife and I for all maternity expenses."

"Well, yes and no," Mossberg was hesitant to say. "You," he said, looking at Ira,"are covered for all maternity expenses." He shifted over to Judith. "You are not."

Ira was flabbergasted. "That's ridiculous. I'm not the one carrying this child, she is!"

"I'm sorry," Mossberg cut in.

"No! That's inexcusable! What am I paying their premiums for, if not this?"

"Insurance is about risk, Mister Burnside. You pay them to take a gamble on you not getting sick, or in your case..." He trailed off, jabbed his pen in Judith's direction. "Much like you took a risk that your wife wouldn't be covered under your insurance policy when you married her. I'm sorry, but like any game, there are winners and losers."

Ira brought a cold look to bear on Dr. Mossberg.

"Don't be angry with me," said the doctor. "I don't write insurance policies, but they are how I get paid. Unless you want to go out of pocket."

Judith was on the verge of tears. "We... we can't afford that."

Mossberg gave such a thoughtful nod that it couldn't have been more insincere.

"On what grounds is our coverage denied?" Ira asked.

Mossberg paused. "Pre-existing condition."

Ira stared at Judith. She looked back at him with panicked eyes.

"What condition, doctor?" Ira asked.

Mossberg shrugged with his palms up. "Well, she did say she'd been pregnant before, and that settles it in their book. Your health plan explicitly excludes pre-existing conditions from coverage."

Ira was beside himself. "So you're saying working people like us can't have more than two children?"

"Well, no," Mossberg stammered. "No one's preventing you from having a big family." He paused and his tone darkened. "As long as you don't mind paying for them yourself." Mossberg rocked back in his chair, knit his fingers at his chest. "So, what to do, folks?"

WARNING: The beverage we are about to describe is believed to contain an absurd amount of caffeine. It is dangerous, and you should not drink it. It may kill you. If it doesn't kill you, it likely won't make you stronger, despite Friedrich Nietzsche's claims. It may hurt you. Do not concoct, ingest, or serve this beverage to others, or allow anyone to do the same. We take no responsibility for any harm that may befall you or others in connection with this beverage.

The coffee bar guys in the employee cafeteria know their stuff. You want it black, no sugar, no cream? No sooner said than done -- they'll set a steaming mug of fresh roast right on the counter, just for you. Slap down a five-spot and they'll make a cappuccino to order, with the whipped cream and cinnamon to boot. Tea? You bet. And do they know espresso? How silly of you to ask.

Their drink-making prowess goes further than the chalkboard sign above the bar is long, and that's saying a lot. I counted a dozen types of drinks before I gave up counting. Yet for all their knowledge, there's a drink that only a select few know how to make. It's rarely ordered, and justifiably, because it's not on the menu. More so, because it's killed the odd summer intern or two over the years.

Although the exact formulation is not known (nor are we permitted to divulge that information, on our lawyers' orders), the beverage is essentially this: strong black tea brewed in a cup of steaming black coffee, with two shots of fresh espresso stirred in.

We call it "The Nightmare," because after one of those, you sure aren't sleeping.

Ten-hut! Look alive, you sap-sucking excuse for a soldier! Living among people is a dangerous enterprise. The problem with most people is that they are human beings, and I'm glad I'm not one. Learn these techniques, and there may be hope yet for your survival in modern society.

Tempered Indifference
 Sometimes, silence is the best answer. This is true when any answer other than silence can hurt your position. Since this tactic is effectively inaction, it is the least aggressive deployment in your arsenal. Even so, with shrewd usage it can be an effective weapon.
 
The Wife: "You left the toilet seat up again!"
You: "..."

In this example, you have neither conceded your position nor refuted the issue posited. You have also set yourself to plausibly deny the circumstances presented, if pressured. Taking it a step further, where circumstances permit, you can plausibly deny you actually heard the statement. When properly applied, the target may eventually forget why it accosted you in the first place, or simply give up altogether.

This is the weapon of choice of husbands everywhere.

The Radar Jammer
 This technique works best when you need to end a conversation quickly and there is little chance of collateral damage (i.e., causing an incident that might embarrass you). When done properly, it stuns the target into a perplexed silence, granting you a few precious moments in which to make a hasty retreat. It works best when delivered in a hurried, self-important, preferably deadpan tone of voice, and when the subject matter of your sentence is absurd or shocking.
 
Sidewalk Activist: "Sign my petition?"
You: "Can't, sorry. I left the oven on at home and my dog's on fire."
 
In the above example, clearly (hopefully), you have lied about your oven being left on. You have conducted a value judgment in which the benefit of escaping the conversation outweighs the cost of lying. Your dog will not be happy.
 
The radar jammer is a technique of moderate aggression. Thus, it should be used where the situation warrants, or when Tempered Indifference fails. Do not overuse this technique in too short a period, as its effects will sharply drop off after the first salvo. If, after launching the Radar Jammer you cannot escape in time, or the technique fails to work, it may be reattempted, but its chances of success are impaired.
 
The Punctuated Freakout
This is the flip-side of, and the payoff to, Tempered Indifference. It is the double-edged sword in your armory, honed to a ludicrous edge. Caution is advised when considering this weapon, for it is just as important to know when to use it as when not to, as it becomes markedly less effective each time it is deployed. Thus, it is the nuclear warhead of your armaments.

The reason this technique is called the Punctuated Freakout is because you must first have mastered Tempered Indifference. You must have cultivated a reputation for being even-tempered for this to work to its fullest. Hence, your "Freakout," as we'll discuss later, is "Punctuated," or rarely seen, but appropriately triggered given the circumstances.

The "Freakout" portion must be precisely that. Freaking out is an art that escapes precise definition, but one aspect remains constant: you must go all out. You cannot execute a halfway Punctuated Freakout, much as you cannot halfway launch a continent-incinerating nuclear missile. Common aspects of freakouts include: blind rage, shouting, flipping tables, tossing chairs, kicking down cubicle walls, tossing computer monitors out windows, flinging documents into the air, sweeping the contents of a desktop to the floor, punching wall plaques, etc.
 
A Punctuated Freakout may get you fired (or promoted, or arrested), will likely get your point across, and will certainly be memorable, but most importantly, it will get your point across.
 
Yes, I did repeat that part. Got a problem with that? I didn't think so.

All painted up, she looks like a Patrick Nagel portrait gone bad.

Meet Mabel. She's the last person you'd want to meet.

Her style is definitely locked in the early eighties, what with her hair up in a Pompadour poof. Below her padded shoulder jacket, Mabel's pencil skirt stretches at its seams like an overstuffed sack of potatoes. She isn't pretty, though no one would dare tell her that to her face.

Mabel's temper is on a hair-trigger. Differences of opinion often go her way after starting an impromptu shouting match. When that fails her (and it rarely does) she relies on the sort of persuasion that comes from shoving her pocket .357 into people's faces.

For Mabel, fear is an effective employee relations tool.

The alarm clock went off but it didn’t wake me, as I wasn’t asleep. I’d been up for hours lying in bed. Just thinking of the sleep I wasn’t getting was keeping me up, to say nothing of all the other tasks on the day’s punch list. I turned over to face the alarm clock. It blinked 5:05 a.m. in incandescent red. 5:05. SOS. In hindsight, I should have known better than to go to work that day.

This is the story of how I went insane.

The office was a long way off but the commute was short. At 5:20 a.m., expressway traffic was light. If I really stood on the gas, I could get to work in half an hour. All the better for me that there was no one on the road, as I was at the office in what seemed to me a blink. Piecing events together after the fact, I figured I’d dozed off at the wheel for a few miles. I was exhausted.

I pulled into the car park and took the elevator up to the eleventh floor. As usual, I was the first to arrive. The time-activated lights in the office wouldn’t come on for another ten minutes, at 6:00, but by then I’d already had a cup of coffee and gotten started on my second.

Well before the sunrise, I was already at work.

My desk was covered in file boxes, looking like an overstuffed filing cabinet had gone on a bender the night before and puked all over my desktop. Not a square inch of faux wood saw sunlight.

That last thought made me take pause. For nearly a year that I had been working for the firm of Banco Banque and Banquiao, I hadn’t seen any sunlight either. Every day I woke up before sunup, bedded down at midnight, and spent the hours in between at the office. Even at eleven stories up, the office never felt more like a subterranean cavern. My pasty white complexion was proof of this.

The boss checked in at 7:05. I met him in the break room and had a coffee with him. At 9:00 I was due for another, as the effects of the first were starting to wind down. The rest of the office staff filed in at 9:00, and so I thought it best to get a fresh mug before the support staff emptied the pot.

By 10:00 a.m. my caffeine-addled heartbeat felt like a flock of hummingbirds trapped in my chest, yet I was still nodding off at my desk. It annoyed me to no end that I was falling asleep where I least wanted to sleep, and just hours ago I could not sleep where most I wanted to.

There was no time to sleep. There was no time even to live. The billable hour is a thing of the devil, and it had me in its grip.

The office required me to account for every minute of my work time, and expected each minute to be devoted to making my boss money. This I did to an admirable extent: of the fourteen hours spent at work daily, on average I captured twelve billable hours. Two of those hours were spent doing those ancillary, non-billable things I needed to do to support the billable time, such as book-keeping, drinking coffee, and using the bathroom, though I knew of co-workers who had discovered ways to bill the client even while on the toilet.

Of those twelve billable hours, every day my boss skimmed another three off the top, nicking fractions off of each of the billable activities I’d completed. Every week, before writing big checks to the firm, the client would review my time report and knock off another hour or two each day. The firm where I worked would grudgingly acquiesce, thankful to accept some payment over none. By month end, half of my billable hours would be gone, and the boss would drag me into his office by the scruff of my neck. Our discussions were always the same: “Get your hours up, or you’ll get canned.”

It had gone on this way for ten months. As long as I’d been working there, the firm had had it in mind to fire me.

Things really started to get strange at 11:00 a.m. It was Monday, but I had to keep reminding myself because I’d worked fourteen days straight. To me, it felt like the middle of the week.

The days were running together, as though days past and days ahead had melted into a pudding and were blobbing up together. I kept reminding myself to do things I’d already done days ago, because I’d forgotten I’d done them, and because they were super important and needed to be done. I doubted whether I’d actually driven in this morning or just spent the night at the office. My dreams - when I could sleep - were of things I had done at the office or things I needed to do on arriving there. That I was sitting at my desk seemed surreal, like some bizarre yet mundane deja vu.

Lunchtime rolled around. At the bottom of my desk drawer was a bag of apples. I ate one whenever I got hungry. For several days straight I’d eaten nothing but apples, going through a half-dozen daily. At the time - and this is the scary part - it made perfect sense. Eating apples was a boon to efficiency. They were healthy, they needed only one hand to eat and left my other hand free to do work, and since they came in a bunch, I could eat these all day without ever having to leave my desk.

Hungry as I was, I tried to keep the drawer shut as much as I could. The bag of apples was see-through, and underneath it was the resignation letter I had written three months before. I hadn’t signed it, but I’d come very close. It wasn’t dated, but that was intentional, as I could just as easily write in the date when I felt it was time.

I called my wife to let her know I wouldn’t be joining her for dinner at home. Although I told her that I’d be home at 7:00 p.m., I’d already devised a plan for the day. I didn’t tell her this while on the call, but at 7:00 I’d call her and tell her that I needed to stay a while longer. Then, at 9:00, I’d send a text saying that I’d be at work ‘til midnight. Everyone would have gone home by then and the office would be quiet, making it an optimal environment to net a ton more billable hours. Then, when I needed to, I’d sleep at my desk and wake up at 5:00 a.m. the following day (still at my desk) to start the day off. Thankfully, I’d stashed extra clothes in my office, so I could change into them and none of my co-workers would be the wiser that I’d spent the night at the office.

I revised my plan after I’d had another coffee. I didn’t need to sleep. Sleep was beneath me. I shuddered with giddy laughter. I was thinking so fast I was almost prescient. It felt great. My hands shook and my typing speed took a tumble, but these losses could be recouped tonight since I had no need to sleep. And the feeling in my chest that my blood had turned to glass shards as it coursed through my heart could be ignored as a passing inconvenience.

Furtive whispers accompanied shuffling up the hall. “Someone’s fallen.” A man in the building across the street had hurled himself from the top of the car park. What a mess he’d made. He’d ruined his suit, which didn’t matter much anymore, because it didn’t fit him as well as it must have before he took the dive, as the man was spread out for yards across the asphalt.

A question struck me then, as suddenly as an open-palm blow to the forehead: what could drive a man to leap from an otherwise structurally sound office tower? This question may as well have been rhetorical, judging by how quickly the answer came.

I rubbed my eyes, elbowed past the crowd thronged at the glass to get a better look at the dead man lying in the street. In a blink he had gone from wearing pinstripes to brown trousers just like mine and back to pinstripes.

That was the wake-up call, more so than the alarm clock buzzer at 5:05 - SOS - a.m. I went back to my desk and wrote a two-sentence resignation email, completely forgetting about the carefully drafted letter that had sat in my desk drawer for months. I threw the bag of apples into the wastebasket. I didn’t know it just then, but I would develop a taste aversion to apples that would last months.

I powered down my PC and sat, elbows propped on the desk, with my face in my hands. A partner at the firm shoved through my office door without so much as knocking.

“Get your stuff and get out,” he said, which was polite enough, considering he refrained from punting me in the ass when he said that.

That same day my name was removed from the associate roster, and my profile and all signs that I had worked at the firm for nearly a year were obliterated. The Egyptians did no less a job with Hatshepsut.

I went home and slept for two days straight, not rousing even to eat. When I awoke, a shooting pain between my eyes rippled my vision and threw off my sense of balance. As I hadn’t had any coffee during those two days, my body was furious. You don’t come down easy from a ten-month caffeine binge.

I rolled out of bed. My first piss in two days looked like infield clay and collected into silt at the bottom of the toilet bowl. I felt like I was ninety-nine years old. Even shuffling around the apartment in sandals got me winded. It would be a month before I was in any shape to do anything more physically demanding than shopping for groceries.

Without any sense at all of the time, I went outside and stood in my apartment’s parking lot. The sun was out, shining in the center of a cloudless blue sky. A single tear rolled down my cheek. More followed. Many, many more.

It seemed such a trivial thing to forget over so short a time as a year, but I remembered then, that the sky is blue.

My banker is a troll. I don't mean the type that hide under bridges and exact a fee if you so much as look in their direction, but that's a close approximation.

Unless you're stuffing your money under a mattress, you probably have a bank account. Chances are you've probably also set foot in a bank. If you're still nodding your head so far, you might agree with me when I tell you that customer service at most banks is abysmal.

Years ago, when I had an account at TrollBank, I was one of the first to sign up for their new investment brokerage service. When other banks were offering savings accounts with 0.15% yearly gains, they touted an impressive 5% yield. My interest piqued, I went for their bait and swallowed the hook whole.

It turned out that the brokerage arm was in fact a wholly-owned subsidiary of the parent bank. They had similar names. TrollBank, the parent banking company, had spawned TrollBanque, an investment house. Both entities were so interrelated that they shared retail space -- every standalone TrollBank sectioned off a portion of its office space to TrollBanque. In fact, the  TrollBanque investment specialist had access to my deposit accounts from his computer. He was rather eager to wire funds from TrollBank checking account into my brand-new TrollBanque investment fund.

Despite the companies' symbiotic relationship, they were two separate entities. No employee of TrollBank could be said to also be an employee of TrollBanque, and vice versa. This all became painfully apparent when I needed to withdraw my invested funds. Although the investment specialist did not hesitate to oblige, the money was slow in coming. A week went by and my demand account at TrollBank was not funded. Flat broke and with the rent coming due soon, I was getting desperate.

I paid a visit to my local TrollBank and pulled the supervisor aside. When I told her of the problems with my investment account, she cut me off and directed me to the TrollBanque supervisor, whose office was the next door over. I sat for an hour  with the supervisor for TrollBanque, whose only recommendation was that I speak with the TrollBank supervisor, the lady with whom I'd first spoken, but by then she'd already gone out to lunch. 

Frustrated and without an inkling as to where my money had gone, I stormed out of TrollBank and dialed their customer service hotline. A plan was forming in my mind like craggy thunderheads priming up for a storm. After navigating their labyrinth of an automated phone menu, I was patched through to "Steve." By his accent I knew that he was speaking from somewhere on the other side of the world, and also that his name was not really Steve.

When "Steve" could not help me, I escalated the call. After another eternity on hold, a brusque man with a thick Boston accent came on the line. He said the money had been held up due to an accounting technicality. This was a lie, I knew, as TrollBank was likely holding onto my cash for a few more days to make money off of it. Banks don't simply forget where they put their customers' money.

The man's voice went up an octave as though he'd uncovered a leprechaun's buried gold.

"Oh hey," he said. "It looks like you made some interest on your money these past few days." His pitch dropped. "Not much though."

I could picture him rolling his eyes as he said that last part.

"How much?" I asked.

"Eleven cents. I'll wire it in to your checking account."

"Don't," I said. "My account is closed."

Fingers struck a keyboard on the other end of the line. "No, I see here that your account is still open."

"Send me a check," I insisted.

The man laughed. Discreetly, but still he laughed. "The postage stamp alone is more than the amount of the check."

"I know."

Silence.

"All right," the man relented. "We'll send you a check."

The check for eleven cents came the very next day via overnight delivery. Why anyone would spend upward of twenty dollars to express-deliver a check for eleven cents puzzles me to this day.

The day I received it, I tacked the eleven cent check to my refrigerator door. It hung there for weeks like some sort of exotic big-game trophy. In my mind, the eleven cents the check represented held far less value than the check itself. Banks, you see, are highly regulated entities. They have to account for every penny of their customers' money, or else the government comes down on them hard.

For the long string of weeks between when I got the check and when I cashed it, some poor sap at TrollBanque was losing sleep over how the bank's ledgers didn't balance by eleven cents.

That type of satisfaction is worth far more than just a dime and a penny.

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.