journal features

old job search

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Toronto, 2005.03.11

I had an insight today into how communications styles have changed in the business world in the past decade. While throwing out a bunch of crap from various boxes in the storage locker, I found all of the rejection correspondence from my mid-1994 job search.

What struck me was that in the absence of the Internet, everyon would actually pay to mail a (signed) letter to every candidate that applied, even if it was just to tell the candidate that the job was already filled. I miss that! Today, even letters that you mail in to employers are ignored, let alone resume/cover letters that that you submit by email.

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)