An Intelligent Service...

Remarkable story from the World of No - I will leave it to your personal level of paranoia to decide whether or not this qualifies as 'funny'.

I applied for a position as an Administrative Assistent with a branch of the Intelligence Services. I applied for it because the position was advertised on the website. I wrote in my cover letter that I was responding to their posting.

Four days later I receive a confirmation letter, thanking me for my unsolicited application. Unsolicited? I check the website again, and sure enough, the job posting has been removed - but that does not deter from the fact that it was very much a solicited application. I worried about the handling of their documentation already. The letter went on to say that I would receive final word on my application within 4 weeks. It was signed by a woman, whose first name contained FIVE 'i's - two double 'i's and a single. Her name was Tina - or at least, that was obviously the name her parents had chosen. This gave me a real reason to stop and wonder - what is this highly supersticious person doing working for an intelligence bureau? Do I really need people who believe that good fortune will come to them if they change the amount of letters in their first name, to be a part of my countrys defense against the Axis of Evilness?

Numerology as a general whole has me stumped - if you think that all letters have a numerical value, and that adding or subtracting letters to your name will add up to a perfect '8' or '1' or whatever the point is - why don't we just skip the alphabet and move straight on to binary code? "This is my son, 0010101110010". Is that the ultimate goal of numerology?

Anyway, I did not get the job (or an interview for that matter). What I got was another letter - not from Tiiniiai - but another civil servant, who informed me that they had just had a posting for the job I was applying for, and so had already hired the people they needed. "We thank you once more for your unsolicited application". I felt an supreme urge to bang my head against the table - and then a subsequent desire to start building a fall-out shelter.