Avoid This Job

Notable Quotables

Dear Everyone, 

Who told you you could use quotation marks for emphasis? 

No, seriously, this is not a rhetorical question: WHO WAS IT, and how did this nightmare begin? Who or what is responsible, so that we might blame and/or maim them? Is it your parents? Educators? The Internet? Is it the same person(s) who told you to repeatedly spell-slaughter the word "whoa" by writing "woah"? I KNEW IT.

Look: both mistakes are so excruciating, it is mystifying how anyone could make them even once, let alone fill the tubes of the Internet with this nonsense. Simply looking at the word "woah" immediately causes tear-ducts to fill with blood, unborn babies to spontaneously abort themselves and a plague of locusts to fall upon the land. Hyperbole? NOT AT ALL. 

Although other sites can offer an in-depth exploration of the rampant misuse of quotation marks, we thought it best to briefly review the basics here. Quotation marks are not used for emphasis. That is not why they exist, nor is it a neat thing they do on the side. There are lots and lots and lots and LOTS of different ways to express something emphatically. Quotation marks are not one of them. 

That said: here is today's "job" to avoid!

Got it. You want some...thing that is LIKE a girl to live with you for an unspecified price and the exchange of menial labor? Awesome. You also have a random capitalization fetish? Got it. It seems impossible that this could get any creepier!

Oh.

Oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh

It got creepier. 

But, to be fair... times are tough. I mean, sure, nobody wants to move in with a random stranger who uses the word "girl" even more repetitively than late-eighties NKOTB, but it's rough out there. It can be hard to find a place to crash. At least this is a way to get your own space, your own bed, and-- oh, I'm sorry, what's that?

I get to sleep on a SOFA.

In your BEDROOM. 

I mean, I do get access to the dinning room.... but come on, that's the noisiest room in the house!

It certainly sounds like you have a great life. Is anything missing?

Oh! IS "ll" that's missing l'il ol' me??? ME, the stranger reading this on craigslist?? How flattering and not at all weird or inappropriate! 

Two truly wonderful things about that paragraph: 

1) The deferential respect for how your future couch-sleeping-slave's sexual orientation might "turn out." 

2) The apparently sincere use of the word "sparkle"

So... there are a lot of questions that remain deeply, uncomfortably unanswered. I assume you will wrap up all the loose ends with your closing remarks?

Precisely my final question! Thanks! 

Read the full post here for more "fun". And hey: girls, "girls" and everyone else: AVOID THIS JOB. 

(thanks to the two different ATJ readers who submitted this "job" post, Herbelem and Anonymous. You guys are "awesome", and we "salute" you.)

 

Brevity Is The Soul Of Wit

Thanks to Twitter, texting and instant messaging, there has never been a more glorious time for creative abbreviations and shorthand. Though Shakespeare once wrote, "Brevity is the soul of wit," he could not in his wildest, Midsummeriest dreams have imagined the lengths to which future generations would go. 

And Shakespeare, was, like, TOTES awesome. So one might think, yeah! Why waste energy on all those extra letters?! One MIGHT think that, until that fateful night when one MIGHT be walking down a crowded city street with one's friend and one MIGHT loudly exclaim that one "can't wait to get some tasty cocktails!"  Only one MIGHT not say "cocktails". One MIGHT, before one realized the outcome, choose to abbreviate that word. One MIGHT never live it down. 

Something for one to think about. Not like that, you know... HAPPENED to anyone here. No.

It is, however, a cautionary tale this job poster would have done well to consider.

 

Highlights:

• The profoundly wrong (on so many levels) way in which "assistant" was abbreviated.
• The jarring juxtaposition of non-stop shorthand/random MySpace-style capitalization with the request for "a bright girl." Weird hypocrisy. Also, just plain weird. Like a brain was deposited into the poster's skull, mid-sentence: "u smart??? u got hott azzz? lol u shld apply 4 r jobz! [BRAIN DEPOSIT] What the-- oh. Well. Yes. Excuse me, miss? Would you kindly apply for this finance job? Wonderful. I am Laughing Out Loud!"
• The brazen, all-caps insistence on INTERNS ONLY aka SLAVES ONLY aka NO PAY DO YOU UNDERSTAND WE WILL NOT PAY YOU.
• The request for "pix". Sigh.

If the concept of an unpaid personal ass position sounds appealing to you, I suppose we cannot stop you from applying. Hopefully someone will stop you from procreating. Best of luck.

Everyone else: avoid this job. 

(thanks to Jessica for the submission!)

 

It's Not Rocket Science

For all of the fears, complaints and concerns about the current state of America's educational system, it's important to note that this country continues to foster and encourage some of the greatest minds in the world. Noam Chomsky, Bill Gates, whoever invented Take Five candy bars... oh, and this guy:

 

Sure. Why not? All those years of schooling may have failed you, but thank God there is a central hub of intelligent discourse on the internet. A virtual research library in cyberspace, where the world's greatest minds congregate to share their intellect and insight. It is, of course, known as CRAIGSLIST. 

Yes, craigslist, where you can barely go a few Debye lengths without running smack dab into a plasma physicist. Sure, you might interrupt his desperate Casual Encounters search, ("Looking for NSA oral. MUST HAVE stumpy toes. I can offer 420 and a lecture on on Birkeland currents in the Earth's aurora & plasma filaments. NO FATTIES."), but after he's done I'm sure he would totally love to help you work through that problem set. 

Plasma physicists: please avoid this job. If the future of plasma physics rests in the hands of someone whose first instinct is to turn to craigslist for answers, our country/planet/galaxy is doomed.

Everyone else: just know that PRETZEL + PEANUT BUTTER + CHOCOLATE + CARAMEL is the answer to the question you never even knew you asked.

Thanks to Caroline for this submission!