In response to a very small ad seeking applications to join their stable of freelancers, I dispatched a submission to The Onion. Five or six weeks and nine hundred Xanaxes later, I made callbacks. This was the first week of December. And now I am told that it might take them quote “a few more months to get around to evaluating the most recent submissions.”
I believe I’m not supposed to share the second-level application response (yet), but nobody said I couldn’t show you the article that got their attention….
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Local Writer Stops Loathing Self Long Enough To Submit Application
Al Surname, 35, enjoyed a brief but pleasant cease-fire with his own psyche Thursday. The unexpected respite from his relentless engine of criticism and self-doubt allowed him to dispatch a writing sample in response to an ad seeking freelancers for the Onion News Network.
Since leaving ABC Radio in Chicago in 2005 after an eight-year tenure as a producer and Internet Director, both positions at which he was seen as highly successful by everyone except himself, Surname has busied himself by running his wife’s wildly successful financial practice, consulting on corporate voiceover production, and writing freelance. A meeting earlier this year, described in typical desultory fashion by Surname as “something that coulda happened to anybody”, has led to a very successful six months as a topical gag writer for a national radio feature. Feature host Haul Parvey says of Surname’s work, “His overwhelming self-hatred makes his irony razor sharp,” a statement Surname half-heartedly disputes.
Despite Surname’s tenacious and exhausting insistence that he is neither amusing nor talented, and his whining that his work is rarely fit for anything better than bathroom tissue — “Not even the good quilted stuff,” says Surname — he has successfully written roughly thirty percent of the daily program material for a solid half-year. This unprecedented run of personal achievement and third-party approval led the tediously self-deprecating scribe to grudgingly admit that he was “perhaps on to something with the whole ‘being-funny’ thing”.
From a person entirely capable of arguing eloquently with friends and family about his complete lack of skill at everything except arguing eloquently with friends and family about his complete lack of skill, this was a step into uncharted territory. Family and friends privately speculate about late-onset maturity, while the asshole subject himself suspects a medical problem, possibly a brain injury or cognitive disorder.
Determined to make the most of it, and for once fighting off regular hammer-blows of self-doubt, Surname cast about for a suitably ambitious goal, and settled on “at least mailing something to The Onion, even though they probably get a million queries for every ad, and mine’ll probably never even get opened.
He spent several days procrastinating, either by constructing elaborate scenarios in which a successful application would have immediate negative repercussions while eventually leading to nothing but disappointment and heartbreak, or by checking his Facebook page every nine minutes.
He finally became sufficiently annoyed with himself to knock out an Onion-inspired cover letter, which resulted in something the tiresome, moody Broadcast Journalism major described as having “seemed like a good idea for five minutes, then slowly became obviously too cute by half, and finished with me hating it beyond the power of metaphor.”
Despite his disgust, he figured “What the hell”.
Reports of a complete conversion to insufferable self-congratulation were unconfirmed at press time.