Letter after letter went unanswered, and he realized that he would grow old while waiting for a response; so he redoubled his efforts and started taking bundles to the mailbox, all in identical envelopes, but each with slightly different versions of his past. The mail folk got to know him since he always came in the afternoons after lunch’s rush time, with a stack of envelopes that he needed to send. The difficult part then was that someone would call and ask about the resume and he would forget which one he had sent or written. Even when he listed some of his qualifications so as to not appear overqualified, since even the overqualified must eat, he couldn’t always remember how much he had taken away, or even how much he had added. If he answered wrong it would mean the waste of a stamp. Finding a job, he told a friend, is a full time job in itself. Unfortunately, he did not expect to be so long unemployed.

Funding the pursuit was complicated, and it took so much time. And it always seemed that you were running out of the necessary materials just as you heard of a hot prospect. There were only two sheets of paper for your three sheet resume, or the only envelopes you were left with were the white ones from the drug store that didn’t have your name on them. Applying for a job was in a way like applying for a loan. No bank will give money to someone who cannot repay. The best candidate for a loan then, is someone who does not need one. If you were unemployed–a condition which would permit you to immediately undertake the service and labors of your new employer–you were somewhat suspect, because, after all, you were unemployed. And if you were employed, switching jobs implied a lack of stability, if not the outright betrayal of the current organization.

The submission in any case had to look consummately professional. Matching letterhead with envelopes, preferably letterpress, not the new thermographed or other money-saving versions. It was considered bad form to have a resume duplicated–the mimeograph was so difficult to read and if you were going to have it printed this meant you had no confidence whatsoever since why would you need so many resumes? Were you planning on sending a copy to every Tom, Dick and Harry, or was this to be a scientific, targeted job hunt that was so much more likely to yield a good result?

No, the only solution was to type every resume that went out, and keep a carbon. Carbons weren’t appreciated at all, and he knew that they wouldn’t even be read. This meant making no errors, since you couldn’t have a page with smeary white-out or erasures, and it always happened, it always seemed to happen, that there was at least one error lurking in every completed resume, which would mean retyping a page.

He reached the conclusion, one morning, that all he did was type and retype his own resume. He would wake up in the morning and if the drinks of the previous evening hadn’t been too bad, he would sit down right away and start typing his resume.

It took fifteen minutes per page, maybe twelve if he worked fast, but at twelve there would always be an error, no matter how careful he was with the keys on the Royal manual. After taking a break, in an hour he had a resume ready to go and the only thing missing was someone to send it to.

So he took another break and read through the newspaper looking for a suitable position, and not finding any, tried to find something less suitable. It was always to the less suitable that he sent the product of his morning’s work. There was only warm beer left in the refrigerator– the electricity had been turned off last night and he would have to go by the drug store and pay to have it reconnected–again, that is, if he could come up with the coin to do so, since, quite frankly, he was a little light.

That meant there was only a few hours of light, since the building across the street started to block the light after two and you really couldn’t do anything, not ever read. This meant that getting two or three resumes out by two in the afternoon required work at a breakneck pace, without interruption, with a clear, driven focus on the task ahead, looking only towards the goal and forgetting everything else. That was the theory at least, the only real way to get a job.

The idea of being able to work several hours without interruption, several focussed hours, now, that was something else entirely. Usually, it seemed, just after he had gotten a single sheet of paper into the typewriter, and heard the bell no more than once, did the phone ring. “Why haven’t you paid your bill here at Jewel? Do you think we cash checks for just anybody? Or should we ask the other shoppers to help us take up a collection for you, since you’re writing bad checks?”

“I’ll be down today to take care of it,” and he hung up the phone. Returning his attention to the paper in the typewriter in front of him, he had completely forgotten where he was, or what gloss was needed on his past. The bright shining idea had been destroyed by a creditor’s call, and it wasn’t coming back. So he took a break in order to try to remember, and after fifteen minutes or so passed, along with an uneventful reading of the paper, he went back to the typewriter and thought he would just copy a resume from the day before, but he couldn’t find the carbon because someone had come in the evening before when he was watching television and moved a couple of boxes around–just a couple–so it was impossible to find anything, and that required rearranging the room, and as he was stacking the boxes seven feet high, just before they fell over on his head, he saw part of the carbon folder sticking out from underneath the bottom of the sofa.

It was when he reached for it, before the boxes were fully secure, that they come tumbling down on top of him, and when he woke up, it was getting dark, almost two, and he realized that today would be another day without a resume. This was something they should have told us about in college, he thought, as he looked at the boxes and their spilled contents surrounding him. And there was still the matter of the electric bill. At least he didn’t have an electric typewriter. That was the bright side to all of this.