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    Overqualified
    Overqualified
    Overqualified
    Ebook77 pages1 hour

    Overqualified

    By Joey Comeau

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    "Overqualified's cover letters are like a slap in the face, but
    the slap is hilarious, and you can't stop laughing, and as soon
    as it's over you want to tell all your friends about the slap.
    You know the kind?"
    — Ryan North, Dinosaur Comics

    "Joey Comeau's Overqualified is Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret as chewed up and spit out by J. G. Ballard. . . . A book whose melancholy is leavened by a surprising
    hilarity.”
    — Paul Di Filippo, author of The Steampunk Trilogy and Cosmocopia

    Cover letters are all the same. They're useless. You write the same lies over and over again, listing the store-bought parts of yourself that you respect the least. God knows how they tell anyone apart, but this is how it's done.

    And then one day a car comes out of nowhere, and suddenly everything changes and you don't know if he'll ever wake up. You get out of bed in the morning, and when you sit down to write another paint-by-numbers cover letter, something entirely different comes out.

    You start threatening instead of begging. You tell impolite jokes. You talk about your childhood and your sexual fantasies. You sign your real name and you put yourself honestly into letter after letter and there is no way you are ever going to get this job. Not with a letter like this.

    And you send it anyway.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherECW Press
    Release dateApr 15, 2009
    ISBN9781554903429
    Overqualified

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    Reviews for Overqualified

    4/5

    54 ratings9 reviews

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    • 5/5
      This was one of the best books I have ever read. Joey Comeau represents a new style of writing that draws readers in and holds their interest. His writing is certainly unusual. All I can say is that I don't think there is anyone out there who wouldn't be affected in some way by his work.
    • 5/5
      Loved this book. There are more letters on his website than appear on the book, if you need more Overqualified.
    • 1/5
      Save your time, next.
    • 4/5
      Overqualified geniusly employs one of the most original concepts for a story: the author's collection of actual cover letters sent with résumés to major companies chronicle his complicated struggle with failed romance, cultural identity and the death of his younger brother. Hilariously uncomfortable and totally flawed, Comeau's job-seeking persona is not only funny but painfully charming as he inappropriately indulges in cathartic prose in cover letters. Overqualified has genuine charm and is brilliantly funny but is also far too short. I would have loved to see more of this fleshed out before publication. The cost of admission is a bit steep for even this memorable trip down Joey's emotional baggage-laden path. On the other hand, you won't likely read a short story like this ever again.
    • 1/5
      Overqualified is not a fun or enjoyable book to read.Back cover blurb : "Cover letters are all the same, you write the same lies over and over again showing all the parts of yourself that you respect the least. God knows how they tell anyone apart but this is how it's done now .The entire book felt like either a joke *I* just wasn't getting, or a deeply unfunny prank. Disguised as a series of resume cover letters, what I was expecting was some kind of narrative thread that kept everything together. What I actually got was a thinly disguised epistolary rant, documenting the slow mental breakdown of the narrator via jumbled flashbacks.The a whole book runs to approximately 95 pages, with relatively large font, so its can feasibly be read by most people in under an hour. Its brevity is probably the best thing going for it.As a big fan of the authors on-going web comic "A Softer World" I was expecting the same style of dark humour that runs throughout the web comic. Instead of that, I just got a very dark depressing story.Reading this book, is like being trapped on a train carriage overhearing a strangers mobile phone conversation and slowly getting the distinct feeling that the speaker (in the train with you ) is a bit unsettled and is obviously unhappy with what's happening. As the conversation gets darker and darker and weirder, and more surreal, you really want to leave the carriage, but unfortunately you're stuck there with them, hearing one half of an slowly escalating sticky, dark, unsettling conversation. It's not that I'm not a fan of short stories I like short stories, but this book this book was not worth rrp of $9.95 .
    • 3/5
      Mostly funny, but sometimes touching and sad.
    • 4/5
      Hilarious. I laughed so hard when when he provided a cover letter for Spherion I thought I was going to die laughing. I've showed it to several people and they have the same reaction. Disturbing. The Gillette cover letter was very intense and graphic.Sarcastic. NYPD application and him trying to apply as an Aboriginal from the Great White North.You have to read it.
    • 3/5
      I think this is the first time I've bought a non-graphic work from a webcomic author, and, you know, I'm not going to claim that I found it too unpleasant. I mean, this is a collection of cover letters for job applications, and the discongruity of the proposed intent and the content of the letters that make up the novella, along with the content itself, was quite amusing.There really were light moments, with an offbeat sense of humor - you need such humor to even come up with the idea of an epistolary novel of cover letters - and more poignant moments that go with the telling of the story. You see into what's going on in the applicant's life through the stories that show up in the cover letters, and it's a neat concept, backed by solid enough writing.The thing is, the conceit gets lost more the further you go into it, and the glimpses of the background you can see aren't really enough to totally maintain interest. It's not a hard book to get through - it is quite short, after all - but somehow, I feel that it falls short of the mark set for it by the author. This one's enjoyable, but nothing great.
    • 5/5
      Overqualified doesn't seem like it should be a good book. A bunch of cover letters, no matter how funny, should get tiring after a few pages. Instead, Comeau weaves together a strange story of sadness, hope, and hilarity. The tone of the book swoops from incredibly funny to heartbreaking and back, and by the end, the reader feels like they've just staggered out of a twisted amusement park.

    Book preview

    Overqualified - Joey Comeau

    Dort.

    part one.

    Dear Irving Oil,

    I am writing to apply for a job with your company, and I have included my resume for your review. You will find that every reference and each previous job will check out as valid, but I think that it’s important to be honest: my assigned mission is to take you down, from the inside.

    Little things, you know? I’m supposed to fudge your tax records a bit, leave you open to audit. Misdirect shipments. Eat away at your profits. I’m here to speed up the peak oil problem, because after that the world starts getting better.

    And it gets better and better, Irving. By the time I’m born, a hundred years from now, there’s no crime. There’s no pollution. Human beings are living to almost two hundred. Every year that number gets bigger. Scientists say my generation might live forever.

    I volunteered to be sent into the past. How could any kid grow up in a perfect world, hearing about crime and violence and war and sexually transmitted diseases, and not think, Fuck, that sounds exciting. My mission is sabotage, but that does neither of us any good. I want to help you. I don’t want to live forever, Irving. I want to live fast and die young. That’s a thing, right? I want to be injured in a daring rooftop escape.

    I spent seventy years sitting around in classrooms, just learning. Oh, how can we live longer? Oh, how can we make ourselves more perfect? Oh, we’re all very wise. But I want to kill something. I want to get drunk in a bar and take a pool cue and fuck up a dude with a scar down the side of his face. I want a scar down the side of my own face. I want to get an alcoholic woman pregnant, and when that little freak squirts out, nine months later, I want to tell him, Live for today, you retarded little shit. The end is near.

    Joey Comeau

    Dear HBO,

    I want a job fighting professional boxers on your cable network. I have no training. I have no resume. I am small but I am nearly invincible, HBO. Ask anyone. My brother Adrian is in the hospital. He got hit by a drunk driver, and our doctor put a hand on my shoulder and said, We have to stay optimistic. My girlfriend Susan told me, He’s going to pull through, and my mother keeps saying, A mother should never have to outlive her children. They’ve been watching too much daytime TV, I think. Everyone dies in daytime TV. In the movies, the hero lives forever. My brother and I have always lived in a buddy-cop movie. Like good cop bad cop, only we’re both the bad cop.

    Sometimes my phone rings in the middle of the night and it’s John Wayne, crying. He’s afraid, and he needs me to tell him everything will be okay. There’s a beep and I switch over to the other line and it’s Bruce Willis and he’s heard that I have a good heart. Maybe I can help him get through this rough patch.

    Clint Eastwood is at the door, and he’s fallen off his bike. Have I got a Band-Aid? I don’t have time for this shit, man, because I’ve got a train to stop. I have to bring down a madman. I have to unmask the president. I have to punch holes in manholes. I have to tear up payphones like they were phone books.

    I don’t make collect calls, I make the operator pay.

    Motherfucker, I tell him.

    Joey Comeau

    Dear Xerox Canada,

    Thank you for taking the time to consider my resume, even though I don’t have one.

    MICROSOFT CANADA JOB HISTORY IBM

    I have been programming Perl for eight years, on every business-appropriate platform there is, and I’ve been around long enough to understand that there are no human beings reading this.

    PENTIUM APPLE PARAMOUNT STUDIOS GENERAL MOTORS ENGINEERING

    You’re a room of machines looking for keywords, the same way that my ISP searches for flagged keywords in my emails and lets the authorities know if I talk about certain subjects.

    PERL, UNIX, LINUX, WINDOWS, PRIME MINISTER, PONY, MY PET MONSTER, MIKE DOUGHTY, DANCE, DANCE, DRUNK DRIVER, REVOLUTION, COBOL, PASCAL, ART, DECO, ADRIAN

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