In the Social Studies column of today's Globe and Mail appears this paragraph:

For older job seekers

"Los Gatos [Calif.] resident Doug Horan, 62, with degrees in physics and business administration, has applied for more than 1,000 jobs over the past 18 months," Julian Guthrie reports in the San Francisco Chronicle. "After a promising in-person interview last week, he received a call back and was told, 'You don't fit with our culture.' 'That means I'm old and they're young,' Horan said with a wry laugh. 'I get a lot of phony baloney excuses when I'm rejected. ...' " Mr. Horan has two résumés he sends out: one with all his experience and another that is shorter. "You always need to look like you're less experienced and knowledgeable than the person you're interviewing with," he said.

It's nice that the piece closes with a résumé suggestion from Mr. Horan, but I do wonder about one thing:

Are you going to take job-seeking advice from a guy who has sent out over 1,000 applications in a year-and-a-half and still doesn't have a job?

Last night your humble scribe was treated to an evening out by denizens of the Financial Services Company For Which I Worked until my recent ouster. I thought I would send them an email expressing my gratitude for the event and for their valiant attempts to add some life and fun to the FSCFWIW. This was my first draft of the note.

Dear gang,

Thank you all so much for coming out to Cafe Fifth last night. It was great to see you all again and neat to meet some of the spouses who get so much trash talked about them during the work week. It was also not great to not see those of you who who could not come: rest assured my vengeance will be merciless, swift, brutal and carried out against someone else randomly selected from The List Of My Enemies which I have been compiling since I was a wee lad (the element of surprise, and all that).

I was deeply touched by all the warm words on the card which I thought were wonderfully summarized by one of you, who wrote something I will never forget:

BRZUM

BEOF OF
LUCER

RUGA

Ruga, buddy, I couldn't have said it better myself.

And thank you so much for the gifts. I have a confession to make, though: I had a little to drink and it may have led to some confusion later, for I woke up this morning to find that I'd melted the Canadian flag candle on some waffles and set the maple syrup ablaze. Non-traditional uses for those items to be sure, but I have to tell you that the waffles were dee-lish and the burning maple syrup made the apartment smell just like a Quebecois sugar shack.

Finally, I don't know exactly how it happened, but I seem to have exchanged underwear with one of you. (My wife doesn't know whose pair I wore home and has not been in a mood to help me figure it out, so I would ask whoever's got my Amazing Spider-Man Underoos to contact me privately.)

So again, thank you so much for everything - for last night, and for making work bearable for the last six and a half years.

b

I wasted $6 on parking today: I drove myself to work, paid the guy at the lot, walked to the office and got the sack. As in, I was displaced, downsized, rightsized, let go, canned.

A word of caution: unless you have (a) won the lottery or (b) something already lined up or (c) a fairly generous severance package or (d) a job that is utterly and/or literally unbearable, DO NOT try this at your current place of employment. (I chose door "C", although door "D" was making inroads. Door "A" was its usual uncooperative bastard self and as for Door "B", well, if I'd wanted to work, I already had a job.)

Now I just need to figure whether to tell Van Pool Bob or just keep riding and writing about it.