If I Was Honest On My Job Applications
‘Arrogant, selfish, unable to cooperate.’
What interests you about this position? Why do you want to work here?
Are you kidding me?
I want to sit at home, write, read, go on runs, listen to sad Russian songs, and play with my cat.
But because London is slowly turning into a third-world city, I need the money to pay rent, which keeps increasing in geometric proportion. So I am saving up until I can buy a shoebox of a flat in a ghetto, which I would rent out to someone with properly rich parents so that they can cover my mortgage. Then, maybe in a few decades, I’ll get to move in there, change the carpets, get rid of the weed smell, and wipe the urine from the walls. My future kids would call it their “childhood home.”
Also, I am pretty sure I am on borrowed time until my girlfriend gets fed up with me being a freeloader and her paying most of the rent, so that’s an issue as well.
What are your greatest strengths?
People tell me I write well.
But I can also fill the dishwasher in under a minute.
Tell me about yourself.
I am a twenty-six-year-old dude who is still wondering who he will become when he grows up.
I am from Russia – though I am one of the good ones, honestly – I also lived in the US, then moved back to Moscow, spent a year in Georgia (the country), and now I am in the UK.
I miss Russia, but I also hate the Russian government and can’t go back home for even a day because I will either be sent to prison or to the war straight from the airport. So I stay put in the UK because it’s the only place that doesn’t give me the creeps and has a nice filter so that if you want to live here, you have to either be rich or smart or work a lot or all of the above.
I write things down because it makes me feel important and real – my shrink believes it’s due to having narcissistic parents who never really saw me – and I’d like one day to make enough money with my writing so that I don’t have to answer questions like these, ever.
I have three sisters; my mother is a sexologist and likes to talk about penises, and my dad is forty-seven and is also wondering who he will become when he grows up.
Too Much Information? I am only just getting started.
What are your biggest weaknesses?
When I went to university – the seven months I managed – our MBA-decorated professors made us create fake businesses, such as selling university-branded scarves, putting out vending machines, or giving out condoms to students who didn’t need them but took them anyway. The idea was to work in groups of ten (!) and make progress by meeting up each day in a library for three hours. It was supposed to teach us the basics of entrepreneurship but really just made me want to kill everyone involved.
After the first meeting of our scarf business, when we spent two hours arguing whether we should call ourselves Scarfs-r-Us or Uni Scarf, Inc., I stopped coming to those sessions because I couldn’t stand the stupidity of it all. My classmates finally found something to agree on, which was to boycott me. When the time came to make a 360-assessment of our strengths and weaknesses, my report came out as: “Arrogant, selfish, unable to cooperate.” I am proud to say, I dropped out shortly afterwards.
I am also bad with money.
Up until the age of 25, I didn’t for a second consider that I should be saving up for some future because, in my family, there was, to quote my mother, either money or there isn’t.
When we had money, we spent summers in the Canary Islands, and when we didn’t, I wore the same shoes five long Moscow winters in a row. When I finally did get my hands on some money, I walked the streets of my city, stopping at ATMs and withdrawing cash, just to hold the hard-earned (or rather simply, earned) rubles in my hands. I went to expensive cafes and ordered coffee I knew would cost me that month’s rent and was happy for just about thirteen minutes until anxiety kicked in and I seriously debated not paying the check and just leaving.
In London, I once got a gym membership I went to three times only to realize I hated gyms – and prefer running outside to being stuck in a poorly AC’d room with bulky idiots who came there to take selfies with their biceps – so I cancelled my membership but had to pay two more months because of a scam they call a “cancellation policy.”
When, in early 2021, I moved back to Moscow for a brief period, the last time I was able to do so, I cancelled my Vodafone Direct Debit and thought that was the end of that. I was abroad so I didn’t need my phone. Upon return to London, I discovered that I was sought out by collection agencies and my credit rating was worse than those who live on the dole. Turns out, cancelling payments isn’t the same thing as cancelling the contract. Almost four years later, I am still recovering from that mistake.
Masha and I tried doing budget planning a couple of times and keeping track of our expenses. To her, it comes naturally. She treats her Monzo statements the same way she does Instagram Reels.
“Oh, look,” she might say, handing me the phone with the bank app open, excited as if showing me a funny cat video, “I’ve spent 4% less this month on utilities than last month!”
But to me, it’s a special brand of torture. If I want to buy a water bottle at Waitrose, I don’t want to wonder whether it falls under Amusement or Necessities.
What else, let’s see.
My 23andMe says I might have Alzheimer’s in a few decades, I am impatient, and I am chronically late to appointments, including the ones I set for myself. Also, I am pretty sure I have an eating disorder, daddy issues, mommy issues, emotional co-dependency, early-stage alcoholism, depression, and anxiety, I hate most people, and my family’s history with bipolar isn’t helping my case.
Why do you ask?
Tell me about a time you faced a challenge at work. How did you handle it?
When I was fourteen and working for my dad’s e-commerce company in Moscow, answering calls from angry customers (nobody ever calls the hotline if they are happy), a man called one day and said that he couldn’t return the package.
I asked what the problem was, and he said, “Dear lady,” – my voice then (and now) was high-pitched and girlish – “I punched the security guard in the face and after that, he didn’t want to take my package.”
When I kept silent, unsure how to respond, he continued, “Please don’t make me go back there! He might bring backup, and honestly, I wouldn’t handle five security guards.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” I said finally.
“Thanks, miss,” he said. “I am counting on you to–”
But I didn’t hear what he was counting on me for because I hung up and watched Family Guy instead.
It was, after all, my lunch break.
What are your career goals? Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
Two options.
Either I’ll be living out my dream in a wooden house filled with plants, cats, dogs, and kids, writing for large magazines and having book deals and teaching in my spare time, going on runs in the forest, eating avocado toasts with seeds and expensive olive oil sprinkled on top, feeling what Freddie Mercury played by Rami Malek felt when he said in Bohemian Rhapsody, “I am exactly who I need to be…”
OR
…I’ll end up as one of those sad middle-aged white men living in Bali or South America chasing after twenty-year-old girls, pretending I have life figured out, on the verge of becoming someone, telling everyone about That New Big Thing I Am Working On, trading Bitcoin, while secretly paying my bills with a remote Project Manager job at an obscure Indian startup and battling an existential crisis that started roughly when I was born, putting myself to sleep with a Sims 4 version of a life that could have been.
Why are you leaving your current job (or why did you leave your last job)?
I was overpaid and underworked for three years, but then my dad’s last company tanked, and I realized I needed to actually, well, find a real job.
Describe a time you worked as part of a team. What was your role, and what was the outcome?
When I was a teenager, I spent my after-school hours throwing eggs at police cars near Moscow’s Frunzenskaya station.
One time, after a group of idiots – yours truly included – did a successful round and entered the subway to exit on the other side and grab a snack at a local McDonald’s, a friend of mine was dragged by a police officer by the neck. Turned out, they had been watching us for quite a while and on that day, decided to finally bring us in.
We spent several hours in “jail,” answering police questions, lying our asses off.
When the officers asked us what our parents did for a living, the answers flew out without a beat.
“Court judge!”
“Lawyers!”
“Thugs!”
I said that my parents worked for the FSB and that my grandparents worked for its Soviet equivalent, the KGB, which is only half a lie.
The police didn’t believe us but decided not to take chances, so they let us go.
If that’s not teamwork, tell me what is.
How do you prioritize your daily tasks when juggling multiple responsibilities?
These days, I wake up to a crushing hangover and lack of sleep because our cat Perchik felt it was a cool idea to throw things off the nightstand from roughly 2 to 6 AM.
Still in bed, I sip my coffee with a shaking hand, take a pill of Prozac, and watch Instagram Reels with Masha for half an hour, fighting the desire to check my bank account because I know I won’t find anything life-affirming there.
When the guilt of not being productive becomes unbearable and my dad’s voice inside my head – the one that tells me what a lazy fat asshole I am – gets too loud, I jump out of bed and rush into the shower to at least look like something resembling a human being. As I turn on the tap, I try not to look in the mirror while I am naked because I am afraid I might not like what I see.
I come out of the shower and make myself a triple-shot cup of coffee that makes my left eye twitch and doesn’t help the headache. After two pills of paracetamol and something resembling a writing session – read: staring at a blank page, wondering what the fuck I am doing with my life – I scroll through a daily round of “Thanks for applying, but we decided not to proceed with your application…” emails and check tickets to Bali on Skyscanner as a meditative ritual.
When I realize I don’t have enough money to buy even a one-way ticket, I begin applying to jobs for which I am overqualified and which would barely allow me to pay London rent. I prepare myself mentally for the day’s interviews, during which I’ll have to say that when I was a seven-year-old, my biggest dream was becoming a Social Media Coordinator for a skincare company.
If you hire me, I won’t like to juggle multiple responsibilities or even just one responsibility, so I’ll give things I don’t want to be doing – which is pretty much everything – to other people and call it “delegation” and “building processes within a company.”
It will work out nicely and you’ll buy my bullshit until someone realizes I haven’t been to the office in weeks and nobody in the company knows what I am doing.
Then I’ll get fired.
Describe a time when you failed. What did you learn from it?
In November 2017, I woke up in an overpriced Airbnb flat in Rome and realized I’d lost north of $200,000 of other people’s money on a stupid crypto trading bet I placed the previous night because a person I trusted money stole from me. I didn’t wake my then-girlfriend up, put on my headphones, and went for a run along the Tiber.
As I ran, rain hitting my face with the force of a lawn sprinkler, I listened to Metallica’s Master of Puppets on full volume, tears running down my cheeks, yelling “FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK!!!!!” bypassing innocent Italians holding their espressos and Aperol Spritz and croissants, on their way to whatever it is Italians are up to in the early November mornings, knowing full well that my life as I knew it was over and that I might get killed or worse: I’d have to grow up.
What did I learn?
People don’t like it when you tell them you have lost their money.
How do you handle criticism? Can you give an example?
When my girlfriend tells me I should spend less money because I am unemployed, I pretend to listen to her and nod in all the right places. Then I spend $200 on tickets to a theatre production, which we leave during intermission because it sucks.
When my father told me I was an idiot for giving up college to move back to Moscow and start a business, I didn’t talk to him for several months.
I don’t read bad comments on my articles – or any comments at all – but I ask Masha to cherry-pick the good ones and send them to me as screenshots because my fragile writer’s ego can’t handle when people say things like, “I unsubscribed from Medium because of this.”
So it depends.
Why should we hire you?
I often fantasize about jobs I would never be able to hold – a Personal Assistant (I’d poison my boss), a Waiter (I’d spit in people’s food), a Project Manager (I’d call my team up every two hours and yell, “What the fuck is taking you so long?!”), a Construction Worker (instead of a bookcase, I’d nail my hand to a wall), a Software Engineer (I’d spend the first day coding a website-sized penis), a Bank Teller (I’d give myself a 0% mortgage with no deposit and no property), and, of course, this one.
So let’s save everybody some time and just – don’t.
Thanks for reading. With all the news about Mr. T in the White House, I think we need to consider other things as well. Life is multifaceted, and politics isn’t everything.
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– S
Wonderful, thank-you Serge for making me laugh....after Weds I needed that ! You are also way too intelligent, non-conformist and unique to waste your life working for a bunch of over-paid, over-weight corporate monsters . Try to do whatever you can to be your own boss, set your own hours and rates, and profit directly from what you do rather than sell your soul to benefit the fat cats. I have done this for the last 35 years, a life well lived :)