I know a lot of people that are chafing at the bit to get out of university. And in some small way, I understand. They came, they saw, they conquered. Now, on to the real stuff, the making of “mad” money and so on. But these people, have they seen a newspaper in the last six months? We’re completely fucked! Ten years from now, those of us who haven’t been enslaved in the Bolivian lithium mines will be hoofing it around a post-apocalytpic North America in search of work, rewriting the hobo code to include “has wi-fi” and “can haz cheeseburger”. I’m deadly serious: start working on your hobo names/bindle skills now.
With the lithium mines in mind, I have begun a desperate and ultimately doomed effort to find a job. I know it is doomed, and I with it, because I have sown the seeds of my own destruction. Over the past few years, I have sabotaged my future self so many times and in so many ways that it is almost remarkable that the future me has not designed a time machine to come back and beat my ass twenty or thirty years backwards. The only comfort I derive from this harsh truth is that I am not alone in this: you, dear reader, you are also fucked. You are fucked because of the pictures your friends put on Facebook.
We’ve all heard the stories, of employers snooping around on the internet for dirt before they make their hires. As such, we should all know better. And probably, when it comes to ourselves, we do. But unfortunately, this does not apply to our friends, who bear no love in their hearts for us, and even less for our future selves. You cannot control it. One day, you will be out and you will get caught in a compromising photo. Maybe you bumped into somebody, and they were bent over, and it looked like you were plowing them. Maybe “someone near you” was throwing up, but the light and the angles and all the other excuses you can think of made it look like you were doing it. Try as you might, these photos will wind up online, resurfacing just when you thought you’d forgotten them as part of some terrible internet meme.
These photos fall into three simple categories, each of which devastating in its own way. The first are the plain old unfortunate-angle shots. You weren’t doing anything wrong; maybe you were even doing something right. What you were doing, though, is irrelevant, because you look horrifying, like someone hit you with a bag of animal parts. Your eyes are half-lidded and red, your jowls are frozen in mid-oscillation, and the camera has unprecedented access to the inside of your nose. These are pictures are innocent in nature, but murder for your career. They tell your employer “This person is so ugly that they will make you ugly. From a biological standpoint, this person is probably only debatably a human.”
The second category encompasses pictures that make you look like you’re doing something you aren’t. These pictures get a lot of mileage among your friends, and are especially pernicious because they are hard to refute. You weren’t wearing a man-thong, you say? Just a trick of the light? Well, it’s your word versus a pretty convincing picture, and, mysteriously, no one who was there is able to back you up. Were you punching that girl in the breast? No? Mighty strange way to “shake someone’s hand”, pal. Your prospective boss will look at some of these and think, do I want someone who punches all kinds of breasts working here?
The third category is undeniably the worst. These are the unforced errors of the gaffe world, the Lynndie Englands, the pictures that only made sense to pose for in the very small, demented context in which they were taken. You know these. Everyone does. No one forced you to have these photos taken, and you were positive that they were good ideas. Oh man, you might think to yourself, humping this statue is the shit! Then you will ask someone you know to take a picture of you humping this statue. It will turn out that this statue is of a recently deceased oncologist, or a civil rights activist, or a blind child that wrote a ground-breaking Broadway play right before getting eaten by wolverines. Later, you will look at the picture, and wonder why humping anything is the shit, especially because it offers the possibility, however remote, that you will impose your stupendously defective genes upon a whole new generation. These pictures will offer an unaltered glimpse into your mind, the place you routinely assault with pornography, drugs, and American Gladiator re-runs. Not only will employers reject you upon seeing them, it is probable that your family will as well. This is why I know I will not get a job.
~ David Groves
I saw something about this on TV last night