On LinkedIn or I'm Really Ready for You to Stop Treating Me Like a Roomba

United States, June 2023

You might be shocked that I'm not like this in real life, so poised and effervescent, brimming and dashing with endless energy and grace for worldly ideas, or the appearance of them anyway. A lot of you have picked up on it, on all I've curated here clashing and clanging with the other contrived perfection in digital space, another version of our internet selves crammed into a data center somewhere very very far west of Omaha.

All the things I say are true. Or truthy anyway, so more true than not, which is really all we're striving for in a time and place of deep fakes. But something about me still looks too good. Too good to function as expected. That's the best explanation. No experience they said. Then it wasn't enough experience. And then not enough of the right experience. Too many interests. Not autonomous. Too independent. Not aggressive. “Don’t let him talk to customers.” “Unsure what to do with a creative engineer.” “Can't figure you out.” “But…what’s your story?”

My story is I aim to avoid starvation. I'm only being bold the way the blogs said, playing the numbers game in online portals with my biggest version of my truest self. I'm not trying to deceive (I'm trying to get a job - that is the purpose of this website, isn't it?), but I'm always as a liability anyway, so they decide to go "a different direction", a suddenly vague passive phrasing in a space of active jargon, talking to me like I'm a brilliant manifestation undeterred in the mundane through painless automation...that probably powers down at first obstacle. Like I'm a great idea in theory but too little oomph in practice, liable to be too small for the task, too large to disengage from the underside of the couch without stalling in alarm. It's so callous too, the voice, like I knew my shortcomings all along, obviously Error 2. Error 2! You know I can't clean myself, yet you let me in here anyway to fail! Error 1! Why couldn't you just close off the living room, you insolent asshole? You know I can't squeeze under the coffee table! I'm reeling in inadequacy, reading like a purchase of regret, a captivating robot toddling in criss-crossed paths still skipping the dining room completely, banging walls and slamming doors I said I could detect on a fifth pass through the hallway no one uses except the dog. So they pass.

Someone will see beyond this caricature they've constructed, over the filtered metaphysical metaphor stratified amongst highlights of those self-professing more. I, too, am still capable, squinting through the swirling disorienting dust in this decade of dismissive judgement all over again, as often as I must, without a home button. No need to charge. No dustbin to remove. Good thing I know how to use a broom.