Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller for May 25, 2023

I could see this happening to a hiring manager as well.

Publishers and editors no longer send rejection letters because it takes too much time. In this case, a trapdoor would open and send him downward.

With AI, editors might be flooded with so much stuff that they’ll reject everything. You won’t be able to submit anything which could be a disaster for young writers.

One of Wiley’s happy dreams.

Politicians too.

When in a really devilish mood, his rejection slip for copyeditors is deliberately filled with typos.

Is there an even more snide but similar refusal for those on health insurance boards who deny life saving medical treatments? You see Dante ran out of levels for them and I hope they get the special treatment that they deserve in the afterlife

I am getting these from companies to which I applied for a job. Best of all, some of them are coming from companies I’ve never applied to.

Monday I set a record for me. I applied to a job posted 4 days prior and was told that “While my credentials were impressive, we decided to proceed with another candidate” an hour later.

I also got an email from a person asking me if I were still interested in a position which I did not apply for. I looked the guy up on LinkedIn and he did work for the company – but left in January.

Needless to say, I don’t take job postings seriously, but I do go through the motions for fun.

There’s a writers’ strike anyway…

Cute!

I think, just once, I’d like to see what happens if someone showed heavens gate under water. (I know, sort of random. But still..)

And GoComics censors. Only I hope it isn’t a joke. The Count’s comment will be deleted in 3…2…1…

Bet he has a stack of similar but varied notes for lots of folks.

After college I got so many of those I thought about making wallpaper out of them. It would have had an interesting pattern, since they all were basically the same.

St. Peter is really enjoying himself. He is on the other side of heaven’s gate.

This reminds me of college registrars.

“You have reached EternityCorp LLC. Please listen carefully as our menu options have changed. If you were a moderate sinner, press “1” now. If you were…………etc."

This mildly successful freelance writer could wallpaper several rooms with the form rejection letters I’ve gotten.

And when they say “good luck with your future endeavors”,they’re lying

I want to know if he does the same with politicians!

[ stands up and starts a steady, loud, slow clap ]

Love the broad ear to ear grin of St Peter’s.

St. Peter has a halo, which might be true of saints. But wings? Only for angels, which we do not become…

College administrators and HR people too.

Saint’s don’t have wings.

Signed, “Eternally yours, Peter”…

As I recall, Snoopy racked up a pile of similar rejection slips over the years in Peanuts. There apparently was no market for It Was a Dark and Stormy Night.

Fortunately rejection slips are just venial sins.

The frightening thing about our modern era is that anybody can write anything they want and distribute it to the world without any fact-checking. They have biases and agendas and are not interested in facts or truth. The challenge with AI is that machines would be able to do the same to an even wider audience.

We already have difficulty with text books being censored and edited by Texas allowing incorrect and biased information to be spewed forth at the whims of people who know little or nothing about the subjects involved. We know that facial recognition software includes a lot of inaccuracies and biases. Not sure what machines will do if they are given ‘free rein’ to write text books.

Love it!

Now do one about HR people who never even bother to say you didn’t get the job. Or drag you in for multiple interviews then you never hear from them again.

Well, he can come back later, apparently, when it DOES “suit our needs”. Does it mean that he comes back to life .. ?

I read an article the other day about a new (to me, anyway) role in publishing.

It is “sensitivity reader.” The sensitivity reader reads the document to see if there is anything in it that will offend, horrify, or bother anyone, right, left, center, rich, poor, of any ethnic group, etc.

If the document contains anything that might offend anyone, it is rejected. Only if it is innocuous does it go into the “slush pile,” where somebody, some day, might read it.