Read Online Overqualified by Joey Comeau - Free Book Online

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 makeourselves 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.

    â€œMotherfucker,” 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,