Ask not what Safeway can do for you...

I contend that there is no more depressing an activity in the world than filling out a standardised job application for a low-pay, low-responsibility position within an anonymous megacorp. Besides the concomitant ignominy and self-esteem issues, the sheer cognitive dissonance involved in struggling to complete disingenuously you-oriented questions like ‘How do you see a role at HMV fitting in with your long-term career aspirations?’ is conducive to angst levels seldom encountered outside 19th century Russian literature. Not to mention that jobs menial enough to make the C.V.-based application process superfluous usually pursue an alternative that neatly sidesteps most of the early-life achievements (getting GCSEs, A Levels, degrees and such – hell, learning to read and write in general) that once seemed like a big deal. Instead, the applicant is required to explain his or her suitability for a series of tasks so mundane and unchallenging that they could just as easily be completed by a ten-year-old (provided that ten-year-old was doped-up on Ritalin), but which are dressed in absurdly grandiose jargon, so that stacking shelves becomes “Systematically realising procedures for high-impact product distribution throughout the site.” The worst part is that so much emphasis is put on using your own initiative (“Responding dynamically to unforeseen environmental challenges without managerial intervention,” or suchlike), and on producing explicit examples of past situations in which you did just such a thing. The last thing anyone working a minimum-wage job for which the core activity can be concisely described as ‘picking things up and putting them down elsewhere’ wants to do is get their higher brain functions involved.