REJECTION IS LIKE PROCESSED MEAT
Mechanically-separated, artfully synthetic and taste(fully) cheap.
After a year and a half, I was applying for another gig in the writing market. Making a Google search for jobs related to editing, I took a chance, as one is often obliged to do whilst job hunting, being amateur game theorists, choosing a listing, partially conscious and partially random.
In summary, the corresponding link redirected me to Grammarly’s website, from which I proceeded to the application process. Inputting all necessary details, omitting GPA by leaving the default of two oblong eyes with a dotted mouth, I had nearly forgotten about the necessity for résumés.
Fortunately, it’s hardly ever a hassle or mind twister. I simply made some emendations, a few tweaks here and there, insertion point blinking with the entry for reservations to and fro.
Knowing that the feedback, if observed by human scrutiny, would likely be one of a mildly squeezed citrus fruit, I made no expression of intimidation, subsequently remaining steadfast in my admittedly loquacious yet, largely, thorough advertisement of self.
After making a copy of the Google Doc as a PDF file and sending to the Downloads folder of my iPhone 7 Standard Model, I uploaded the document with a mediocre cocktail of apathy and confidence.
For those who are also uploading documents via phone, specifically iPhone, in this case, it should be noted to avoid copying as a word document (e.g., .doc or . docx).
Microsoft Word and its corresponding applications can be variable in respect to formatting. After experimenting and transitioning the Google Doc to Word processing, I chose to share and export the copy, for the first time, to the Pages app, an Apple proprietary.
Once imported, I received a number of notifications regarding changes made to the document.
The majority, if not all, were concerned with typeface. My original typeface triage of Merriweather, Roboto and Open Sans was replaced with alternatives that were left anonymous due to a cursory, slightly miffed glance, followed by a prompt exit and return to choose the reliable cloning technology of portable document formats.
Back to irregularly scheduled programming, I proceeded to click ‘Submit’, or other equivalent, being redirected to the endearing, automated message computed by saccharin circuits, proclaiming gratitude for my taking interest.
Nearly three hours later, an e-mail was received, detailing the next steps. This time, I was redirected to a Proofit proxy, adjacent to Grammarly. From there, I was asked to take a pre-screening assessment. A multiple-choice test, consisting of 100 questions, timed for 60 minutes.
Finishing with 16 minutes to spare, what followed was another automated response. The server processed for all of three seconds before presenting me with a text field containing an AI’s formally-coded letter of rejection. Or, pending, as it were.
Whatever the case may be, it was clear that the factor of time was salient. I posited an outcome where I completed the assessment with about three-quarters to spare, measuring to approximately 15–20 minutes of total test-taking time.
For a static test, limited to multiple-choice and fill-in-the-blank, it seems I should have anticipated an automated message, in hindsight. Faux sincerity, lazily spreading the salve of an implicit waiting list.
The most emphatic indicators being “however” and “at this time”.
“Other freelancers are being considered […].”
Not for lack of analysis, but rather an excess, much like that performed for the presentation of that noisome self-advertisement, my time was extended.
The assessment could have easily been completed in 30 minutes or less, however, it was my instinct and intuition, my inherent function for highlighting errancy, that prolonged the duration.
English, like its siblings in the family of Humanities, is a “soft” science. However, that doesn’t define it as less complex in theory and application. The English language is not estranged from its programming counterparts.
To assess one’s skill and understanding via multiple-choice, with no additional text box for commentary discussing why the sentence is incorrect, is convenient, at best.
Reductionist, at worst.
English was no more complex than any other language. Simply a tool used for facilitating communication where ataxia symbolised the limitations of doing so with the body.
Not even a quarter through the assessment did arrhythmia seize my heart with vibrant butterflies fleeing their cocoons prematurely amid my gut biota.
Nevertheless, it might appear so to both native and non-native speakers who become confounded by the rules.
As I answered each question, the cogs were whirring faster than the grease could yield production. Inevitably, I started transitioning to statements and queries that were, by all accounts, dubious. Ipso facto, there was a clear ambiguity demonstrated.
Samuel Beckett, take the wheel.
Semicolons abound; Oxford commas with questionable virtue; raised capital for parental titles. It was unavoidable for time to be stretched with tension. Perforce, I tried and failed to impress with record time.
How could I?
Not when the rigidity of structure was far too maddening to ignore.
Language, English or otherwise, was a product of evolution. An ever-evolving entity was anything but rigid. It was arguable that English was one of the most flexible languages. If not the most flexible.
Always subject to change and bending of the rules. Granted, the rules were necessary. But, only to a certain extent determined by one’s degree of comprehension. Whether formal or informal, proper or slang, posh or ghetto, so long as a message was conveyed effectively, it mattered little for syntax.
In the case of writing over speech, the opposite was undoubtedly true. Semantics was of lesser import than its sibling with the Old English prefix of sin attached to a percentile of burden to the average American’s wallet or purse.
Courtesy of spilled tea and patriarchy.
But, I digress.
Again, it all simmers down to the frog being painfully self-aware of the contradictions and paradoxes performing behind the curtain, without the need for pressure to go unheeded.
With every sentence interrogating the credibility of semicolon usage, I again beseeched the presence of Samuel Beckett as a wrinkled, wizened face of arrant vexation, if not sheer disapproval.
Any wordsmith worth their single pinch of salt knows the mental anguish that semicolons can bring. It’s a tryst between period and comma. A wonderfully convenient yet confusing union.
Prioritising convenience over comprehension was the primary fault line I found myself spelunking through.
Naturally, I endured until the bittersweet end.
With thousands to millions of others competing for positions limited to the hundreds, it was an understandable fault where attention to those arbitrary rules of high school English was the best metric for being indiscriminate.
It was my keen observation to detail, provoked by this attention, that reminded me of the rampant, roach ancestry of the American education system.
Anti-intellectualism is too bold and reductive a claim. Which leaves the general summary of American schooling being akin to sweatshops where sweat is valued, but only from the pores of student athletes.
Otherwise, the analogy echoes through the general population who are taught in the same manner as CPUs in the infancy of machine learning.
However, through this course, there is no advancement. The same rudimentary, borderline primitive, principles of rote memorisation and other drill techniques are employed from primary to secondary school, throughout all grades and levels.
The prevailing purpose of public, private, boarding and charter schooling is to manufacture worker drones.
Even the CEOs and small business managers are attached to a dancing string.
I see the serial commas, the emphatic dashes, the hyphens, apostrophes, colons and semicolons. Most of all, I see those two sentences, in particular, inquiring about the validity of the sentence’s structure. 1 out of 4 choices alluding to the reliability of information expressed in the sentence.
The implied question was concerned with structure over meaning.
Still, I chose the option, in spite.
It should be no open secret that English, as a study, breaks its own rules. When reaching a certain level of apprehension, the rules begin to tremble, ultimately sliding free from the fetters due to severe famine of creativity.
Yes, applying for an editing job, especially one revolving around the grammatical correctness of academic and technical publications, should entail the turning of a blind eye to creativity.
The assessment was designed to test one’s expedience for spotting and righting the misuse of Beckett’s bane and other punches of punctuation.
With foresight, I expected my conflicting cerebration to result in another randomised rejection, unrelated to the skill I possessed.
This was not a metric for assessing and appreciating how passionate I am for language.
If given time and utility of a text box with no character limit, I would have readily embarked on a thumb marathon across my phone keyboard, giving a manuscript’s worth of explanation.
In any case, the test was, evidently, for assessing one’s capacity to be timely and fairly dismissive of any experimental approaches, tracing back to the aforementioned gravesite of creativity where the undead limbs of parroting and convention ambulate instead.
As it stands, the only drone I have an affinity for is the music genre. Although, of course, my cybersexuality also lends itself to the avian surveillance pets.
When all else fails, we return to our menial jobs at the factory. The ones we graduate to after training in the classrooms. We see the machines, too, are subject to drudgery.
Semiautomatic cognition operated by sentient engines.
There, amid the deboned muscle of dubious meats, you feel utterly and irrefutably complete.
Lost in woolgathering, afforded by the mundane task of pulling levers and pushing buttons, you think rejection was more propitious than portentous.
A vegan with a degree in Psychology would never have been a viable candidate.
