... Is because job applications nowadays are almost impossible to get through without thinking about killing yourself at least twice. Long gone are the days when a job application required that you fill in some personal details, an overview of your education and employment history, provide references, maybe even include a smartly typed up CV if you had one and then write a few paragraphs about what a goddamn legend of a person you are and how if you aren't hired then said company will surely end up bankrupt within the quarter. Now a job application consists of all of that plus at least a dozen needlessly expansive and irrelevant questions like "Explain how your views on the reluctance of certain South American nations to encourage freemarket reforms will provide you with a better understanding of how to prioritise your workload during a leap year" and "Describe your estimated reaction to entering the staff common area during your daily rest period and discovering the engine room of a Mississippi river steam boat instead of a broke down coffee machine and half of a ping pong table and how this highly improbable series of events would impact on your ability to adhere to the company-wide clear desk policy". I honestly have no idea what the fuck these companies are trying to achieve with these unneccessarily complicated application forms. The applications I'm referring to aren't those for a high-level national security coordinator or goddamn Alan Sugars accountant, they are jobs like stacking a motherfucking shelf in a supermarket and selling a goddamn Blackberry. Surely the only questions one need be asked regarding these positions are "Can you lift things up from one place and set them down in another?", "Can your hear and understand when people speak to you?", "Do you speak English?" and "Are you secretly a ghost trapped in corporeal form until such times as you can complete some vital part of life you never got around to the first time?". Those should be the only questions asked by these employers.
If one were look at the application process for these companies, or similar employers, and try to imagine the calibre of employee one might imagine a smartly dressed charmer with an impressive education and career background with excellent people skills and the ability to work under pressure that would make motherfucking James Bond look like a tightly-wound knot of anxiety. This would be frighteningly inaccurate as the people who inhabit the drab aisles of these victuallers of provisions and the overly bright and noisy beehive-like environment of the dreaded technology pushers aren't the scholarly smooth talkers you may have imagined but lifeless, soulless, and in most cases, brainlesses husks in an ill fitting company-issued uniform who have neither the knowledge, nor the desire to help you or even acknowledge your presence. I generally have no problem with this as I have no desire to interact with anyone when I'm unfortunate enough to have to enter a shop. I just want to pay for what I need and get the fuck out without having to as much as make eye contact with anyone. You may now be asking yourself "well in that case, why have such a whinge about it you stupid bald useless waste of life?!". The reason I'm having a whinge about it is because I don't see the point in designing an application to weed out those who haven't the mental agility or general wherewithal to deal with overly detailed and far from pedestrian scenarios they are presented with during the application process when they are going to go ahead and hire the type of person you wouldn't trust to make a cup of tea. For the sake of my own sanity I'm going to go ahead and believe that the application processes are designed to pick out those who may cause trouble for the management, aka, the smart ones. Weed out the thinkers and you won't have a revolution on your hands when you try to implement a mandatory company pension fund. No one with half a brain is going to argue with us or make us feel like the falsely superior cretins that we are. This is how I'm going to choose to rationalise it, it's the only way I'll be able to get through another one of these bastard forms is to think that while I may have wasted an hour and a half of my life filling out a form for a job I could do drunk and blindfolded I will have made the management feel small with my well constructed and pseudo-modest answers to their preposterous questions. Either that or they'll just think I'm a pompous dickhead and they'll offer me the job because they think I'm one of them, either way, I win. At least that's what I'll tell myself.
Here. Fucking. Here
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