The Cave's X-Files archives: humor: Dear Applicant


June 9, 1999
Dear Applicant, Thank you for your interest in the employment opportunities at Syndicate Nouveau, and for your participation in our screening process. As you know, we were quite impressed with your credentials. Your background in crude oil refining, coupled with your hobbyist beekeeping activities seemed ideally suited to the needs of our organization. We appreciated, of course, your candor over lack of formal education in the area of incurable, virulent disease dissemination, however, we have found vague or inaccurate knowledge is often key to the accomplishment of our corporate objectives. We were pleased by the scores on your personality assessment. Our ideal employee is somewhat introverted, unmarried but agreeable to fathering children should it further the aims of the organization, and demonstrates a heightened sensitivity to light. Our most successful employees eschew colorful clothing, as do you. Your responses fell well within acceptable parameters and the interviewer felt that you, with your garbled, thickly-accented pattern of speech, would effectively fill a recently vacated niche within our group. Plus, your unique hairstyle lends itself well to our personalized anonymity program; I felt confident you would quickly become endeared to the moniker of Unruly Cowlick Man. You were asked to return for the second portion of our applicant appraisal process, truly a testament to our high regard, and you did not disappoint with your inventive solutions to our creative problem-solving examination scenarios. In fact, your configuration of five, seemingly random items into a weapon of global destruction so impressed our Vice-President of Population Truncation, he has begun research on the use of Post-It Note adhesive to spread fatal toxins. I also shared with him your trepidation over our policy of using bees for disease dispersion, citing your concerns over the insects' unpredictable behavior when confronted with marigold blooms, their vulnerability to Raid Bee and Wasp Killer, and their lethargy in cold climates. He subsequently launched a three-year cost and feasibility analysis on the use of moose and/or snow rabbits as alternate disease vectors. When you were invited to proceed to our third and final evaluation, "Recognizing the Enemy," we felt it was a mere formality and were prepared to make you a generous offer that would include our exclusive post-apocalypse survival benefit. Unfortunately, I was informed by our Executive Director of Threat Management that your performance on our very simple point-to-the-enemy multimedia demonstration was quite substandard. I realize the video used in this assessment has been damaged. There is some significant distortion on the tape which our engineers have been unable to identify or eliminate. I have been assured by my staff that you were told about the flaw, yet, despite this guidance, you persisted in pointing to the distorted portion of the videotape and identifying it as an enemy. Granted, you were able to locate Special Agent Fox Mulder on the tape, but your emphatic assertion that the indistinct smudge to the right of his image was a threat of equal import is not only absurd, but also potentially disruptive to the smooth operation of this organization. Should your heretic opinion that there is a second individual with the requisite knowledge and determination to undermine our organization be adopted and espoused by other impressionable employees, it could put at risk the peaceful transition of governments during the forthcoming alien colonization period. As a consequence of your poor achievement on this evaluation, we will be unable to offer you a position at this time. Syndicate Nouveau once again extends our sincere thanks for the time you invested in our employee recruiting process, and for your generous contribution of ideas, including that of implanting deadly bacteria into the laser print of all company correspondence. Trials on that innovation are already underway. Warmest regards, Oddly Inflated Chest Man Vice President of Personnel DF/js

* Originally we had a link to this file on the author's site. Her notes requested that the piece not be archived, but stated that permission would gladly be granted on request, as it was in our case. Later, the author's site disappeared. When I wrote to ask if we could house this wonderful creative effort here on-site, my mail was returned as undeliverable. I do not know if the author wished, as some have, to remove her presence completely from the online fan community now that the show is over. Assuming that is a possibility, I have removed the author's name from this presentation. However, as we had permission originally to link to this piece, I will make it available here unless I hear from the author that she wishes it to be removed. This version was reconstructed from the original, obtained through the Wayback Machine.
-bardsmaid