Yesterday I stumbled across a perfect job posting for a tech writer. I updated my resume to match their requirements, wrote an elegant and concise cover letter, and hit “send”; confident that they would be delighted at my sheer awesomeness and want to offer me untold fortunes within minutes.

Instead, I was utterly rejected. Not just form rejected, but a personal rejection from the department head saying “It is well known that you are completely incompetent and also a fraud, so it will be a cold day in hell before we hire you and also you suck.”

I might be hyperbolizing there a little bit, but I did get an email saying “lol, sorry, no”. I had a bit of back and forth with the guy to address his reasons for my consummate and rapid rejection, but the end result remains that I don’t have the skills they’re looking for to such a degree that it warranted a personal email of “no thx”.

Logically, I know that rejection is 99% of the game. I know that I’m lucky that I not only got an immediate response from my application, but had someone willing to answer my questions about why I was turned down – it’s a far cry from the waiting game I’m playing with companies I applied to last month. I know that my not being what this company is looking for doesn’t mean that I don’t have skills, or that there isn’t another company out there that would be thrilled to have me. I KNOW all this.

.. but that didn’t stop me from spending most of yesterday afternoon in a serious funk, convinced that I will never be employed again. There is very little room for logic inside this glittery unicorn head of mine, least of all when I am busy wallowing in my own crapulence. I feel slightly better about things today, but I am still full of illogical woe when I think about it (like when I write updates all about how much I suck).

I HATE job hunting.

And relentless logic.