Obama Won’t Hire You If You’ve Ever Been Online

Brace yourself for this one. What you are about to read will seem incredibly shocking and absolutely ridiculous at first, but as you continue to read on, you’ll understand why it’s going to be virtually impossible for Barack Obama to ever hire you for any position in his office, including cleaning lady! You say you’re willing to work your way up to the top. That you’ve gone to the best schools, obtained the highest grades, and had countless job offers to work on Wall Street and overseas. You say that you’ve polished up your resume, put together an impressive reference list, and your credentials are impeccable! You’re a hard worker. A true go-getter. A visionary. All of this and more is true and you say that you are even willing to fetch coffee and photocopy documents, without pay, if that’s what it takes to get your foot in the door of the White House. You are determined and you are persistent, but sadly, that won’t matter here. So you want to work for Obama, huh? Well Gen-X and Gen-Y need not apply. Here’s why...

The application for jobs in the Obama administration is, without a doubt, the most "complex" (that is nice talk for "ridiculous") piece of work I have ever seen. If I ever intend to work in politics, I have just killed my career before it has even started by writing this very post. In fact, I killed my future political career sometime back in high school when I logged on to the Internet for the very first time...or as we called the Internet back in the day, AOL. I’ll explain what I mean in a minute. But first, let’s put aside all my teenage hacker run-ins with a certain Fortune 500 company, who will remain nameless. And let’s put aside the fact that I just barely escaped being brought up on charges with the FBI and other law enforcement agencies for my "curiosity" of a certain network and its inner workings. So let’s put aside all of that and just look at what makes me no different than you. I’m online. You’re online. I’ve left a digital trace. You’ve left a digital trace. Let me give you some examples that a prospective Obama employee is asked to answer. These come straight from the intrusive and extensive list of queries the Obama Transition Team has put together, which expands over 7-pages and 63-questions in length! It’s a revealing glimpse into the Obama team's determination not to repeat the mistakes of its predecessors, as well as the new era on which he will lead.

"If you have ever sent an electronic communication, including but not limited to an email, text message or instant message, that could suggest a conflict of interest or be a possible source of embarrassment to you, your family, or the President-elect if it were made public, please describe."
Uh, duh, of course. What other good kind of e-mail, txt or IM is there to send that isn't embarrassing in some way?

"Please provide the URL address of any websites that feature you in either a personal or professional capacity (e.g. Facebook, My Space, etc.)"
Good God! Where should I even begin and how many lines are you providing to write all these web addresses out?

"If you keep or have ever kept a diary that contains anything that could suggest a conflict of interest or be a possible source of embarrassment to you, your family, or the President-Elect if it were made public, please describe."
Umm, like this blog you are reading? Guilty.

And my personal favorite:
"Please list, and, if readily available, provide a copy of each book, article, column, or publication (including but not limited to any posts or comments on blogs or other websites) you have authored, individually or with others. Please list all aliases or 'handles' you have used to communicate on the internet."
Ah fuck it. I can't even comment on this!

If your mind is reeling right now, you’re not alone. As tech-savvy as Obama's campaign was, his new transition team is not. Maybe the balding middle-aged executives they're hiring into senior positions in the administration have never used electronic communication, but for anyone under the age of 35, this application is a nightmare! What packrat can track down every blog post and blog comment they've ever written? Many people our age have run blogs since they were kids! So from the past 20 years or so, we are expected to go dig up Facebook photos, blog comments, text messages, and old emails we exchanged even with our sweet Nana? We have an electronic paper trail following us everywhere we go, something today's politicians obviously don’t seem to understand the extent of. We can’t just go collect it like it’s a pile of change that fell off the bedroom dresser. This task is a little more complicated than that. It’s pretty much an impossible feat even for the likes of 007, let alone your average Joe. This is basically like looking for a needle in a haystack, or rather lots of needles spread out across the field-filled state of Texas!

Who has even thought about how to deal with this? Seriously. Just imagine the future 50th President of the United States. Right now, he is probably some random, backward-baseball-cap-wearing, class-ditching, hard-partying frat boy. He’s posting drunk pictures of himself on Facebook and writing on his friends' walls about tomorrow's barcrawl, oblivious to the fact that modern technology means that this will all resurface when he runs for office later in life. My point is, this application doesn’t even work for 2008, let alone 2020. By then EVERYONE, young and old, will have a digital footprint that stretches back into cyberspace for years and years. That is, unless the federal government's HR department wants to drive themselves insane.

Good luck to anyone crazy enough to apply! Personally, if I had that application before me, I would have ripped up the paper after reading the very first question. There’s just nooo waaay in hell this guy would ever hire me. And I’m willing to bet there is nooo waaay in hell he is ever going to hire you either. The truth hurts, doesn’t it?