Lured by fancy job titles
> These days, employers are using all sorts of euphemisms to dress up uninteresting positions to attract unsuspecting applicants
M Yson is applying for jobs. I told him that if he was informed that “we have no suitable vacancy at this time”, it really means: “Dude, you are too cool for us.”
I noticed that many jobs now are dressed up in sneaky disguises.
About half of them, with titles ranging from marketing executive to account manager to chick sexer to cheese sprayer, actually mean ‘salesperson’.
There are lots of euphemisms, or do I mean euphoniums? Hospitality specialist actually means ‘dishwasher’; beverage disseminator means ‘bartender’; and communications executive means ‘telesales pest’.
A colleague showed me a recent news item about an American man arrested for faking a job by ordering copied Secret Service badges from China. Christopher Diiorio, 53, needed a cool-sounding job because he had signed up with a dating website, and his real job was too awful to admit to: he was a dog poop picker-upper.
I felt sorry for him. While I hate to generalise – wait, no I don’t, I’m a journalist – women never put dog poop picker-uppers on top of their lists of desirable marriage partners.
He should have just made himself a post: senior chief vice president for canine sanitation deposit collection, for example.
When I was single, I would have dated someone with that title. But then, I would have dated anyone.
In the newspaper was a tale about a man in Germany who designed his own job, and that was awful too.
He decided to cheat an automatic bottle recycling machine. He found a way of putting a bottle in, collecting a tiny sum of money, and then getting it out again.
He turned this into a full-time job, netting € 44,000 (RM208,617) by inserting and extracting a single bottle 177,451 times. The judge expressed astonishment at what a horribly dull way he’d found to spend his days.
The man agreed: “It was really boring,” and skipped to a relatively fun future of sitting in a jail cell.
You see, jobs should never be just about making money, as proved by a UK toiletfixer who recently won £14 million (RM78.6 million) in a lottery.
John Doherty, 52, celebrated and then went straight back to fixing toilets. Just because the numbers in your bank account change, that doesn’t mean that your purpose in life changes. He even signed up for a fulltime course to improve his toilet-fixing skills.
These news stories reminded me of the time I sat in on a friend’s school reunion, where everyone was deliberately vague about what they did.
“I’m in the restaurant business” probably meant “I’m a waiter” and the guy who said “I’m a writer” I knew for a fact was a blogger.
And we all know that “independent new media consultants” are people who try to trick you into paying them to show you how to use Facebook.
There are cool job titles out there. The neon light industry employs ‘light benders’ and the guy who sells tickets on Virgin Galactic has ‘space travel agent’ on his card.
Worth applying for? Maybe. And anyway, I’ve met Richard Branson and he’s a fun guy who probably would send a rejection letter saying: “Dude, you are too cool for us.”