RE: **YOU FOUND IT!! Slam Dunk Candidate for Bicycle-Tour-Guide Position**
To whom it may concern,
I received your auto-generated response asking to disclose my “schedule and availability.”
However, were I to actually reveal the vast and ample nature of my “free time” and/or the utter dearth of appointments on my schedule, you might be inclined to believe that something about me is amiss.
No one should be “free,” literally, all the time. A person should not be available to do a bicycle tour of Fisherman’s Wharf, the Golden Gate Bridge and the seaside town of Sausalito at four o’clock in the morning on a Tuesday.
In my case, however, 4:00 a.m. on Tuesday is not merely a time that I am available; it is, in fact, the ideal time for me to conduct such a tour. For nothing routinely precedes nor follows that hour of my week save for the oblivion of sleep — and I’m getting plenty of that as matters now stand.
As I stated in my cover letter, I am a recent “transplant” to San Francisco. I love that word, as it reminds me that some don’t take — and this fact, coupled with depleted funds and the absence of family or friends in the area, means that I am without plans from now until doomsday.
I am compelled to admit that if a group of German tourists, characteristically stubborn about adjusting to the change in time zones, demanded to ride bikes several hours before sunrise while hearing trivia about Ghirardelli Square shouted over their tour guide’s shoulder, I would be uniquely suited to chaperone that experience.
In fact, you could conceivably ask me to lead a bicycle tour of San Francisco that ran half a century long, crisscrossing every street, alley and dead end and addressing every major and minor historical development, from the exalted to the mundane. And I wouldn’t be able to summon a single honest time conflict to beg my way out of the assignment.
(I would have to pull over and register for Medicare at some point 36 years from now. But by then my tour group should be ready for a smoke break.)
However, given that every “how to get employed” listicle I’ve read warns me against having “too much availability,” it’s wise, I think, for me to throw out some dates on which I would prefer not to work.
Predictably, I am opposed to working on Christmas Day along with the two days preceding and following that holiday. I can’t imagine that there are too many tourists who want to spend Christmas riding a rented hybrid with a front brake that rubs while learning that it took seven years to paint the Golden Gate Bridge. But if such persons exist, I will have to disappoint them by taking those days off for personal time.
In addition, I would like to no longer be working this job once the new year arrives. I will be turning 30 on New Year’s Eve and am averse to working as a bicycle tour guide after that important life threshold has been crossed. My 20s were a fine time to laugh my way through dead-end employment; but my 30s, I’ve vowed, shall be a turning point, during which I shall no longer “sell myself short.” Therefore, cross January through December of next year off my schedule.
It is plausible, however, that, during my brief employment as bicycle tour guide, I will become a sensation — perhaps even a renowned cultural institution. Would-be sightseers may swarm your office hoping to book a tour with “this garrulous (and handsome) young tour guide we’ve read so much about.” Participants of my tours, I anticipate, will be so enraptured by the deft manner with which I handle the position’s responsibilities — corralling the group, avoiding oncoming traffic and imparting little-known trivia about the 1906 earthquake — that such trivia will, I fear, remain to their minds little known.
After I reach the end of my brief employment, these fans will demand an encore, or an encore’s encore, until, with mounting agitation, they promise to toss their rented bikes into the bay should their demands not be met — the $500 deposit be damned.
It saddens me to think we will have to spend all of next year denying these travellers their fondest wish. And it depresses me further that, facing public pressure, you will, after a year of declining profits, be forced to lure me out of retirement to serve (albeit reluctantly) as tour guide for an exclusive “reunion run” bike tour at a compensation rate many times higher than what is currently being offered to entry-level guides.
(By the way, what is the compensation rate currently being offered? You managed to leave that information out of your automatically generated email. I see I’m not the only one playing coy in this negotiation!)
Unfortunately, I foresee the great personal harm both of us will face in having to deny that discussions of this “reunion run” are underway. I apologize in advance for the extra security you will have to hire to deal with these tenacious inquiries, as well as the physical damage your building will endure from the teeming mob of vacationers demanding that I treat them to “an insider’s view of San Francisco at a casual pace.”
Once the vicious horde has had its way — every window of your building broken, every bike tire slashed and the façade of your office defaced — and the “reunion run” has been announced, I whould prefer that all promotional materials surrounding this run of tours be designed, copy-written and executed under my full editorial and creative control.
This is a non-negotiable precondition of my accepting employment with you.
In fact, I can already tell that the marketing budget for this exclusive event will be a bone of contention between me and your company. I have struggled under the yoke of tightfisted penny pinchers like yourselves before. So let’s just put the idea of a limited run of highly compensated tour dates on hold for now and instead let leak that we are in “talks,” and see what the response is. At the very least, we should get some sense of when the public will be available for those tour dates and plot out 2017 from there.
Respectfully yours,
Bryan Kelly
P.S. On second scrutiny of my schedule, I noticed that I have an hour of coffee planned this Sunday with an ex-girlfriend who moved out to the Bay Area after college. After this likely awkward reunion, however, I should be totally and absolutely free.
