on The Vanity of Youth: Drinking Beer When I Was 23 Has Come Back to Bite Me in the Ass

Dear Applicant:

Thank you for applying to our marketing agency. Unfortunately, just as you were forewarned by your parents and teachers back in 2010, we have decided not to proceed with your application because our online background check revealed a photo of you doing a keg stand at a rager of a house party you threw when you were 23 years old.

You were very high on the list to be our new Project Manager. Your professional experience, your skills, and your interview: all superb. Sadly, we just can’t choose someone to join our team that hasn’t heard that the internet is forever. You also seemed to be enjoying yourself, so we won’t believe that you were coerced into taking the photo by your peers.

We had the papers to hire you drawn up, but when we did a quick ten-hour search online, we found that Mike’s Hard Lemonade-drinking photo from your high school friend Marty’s profile. You may have asked Marty to untag you all those years ago, but we still can find anything online. Marty says hey, by the way.

We saw that you requested your cousin Susie to be your neighbor on Farmville in August of 2012, and while that isn’t directly against company policy, it did annoy us.

We would usually wish you good luck in your career search, but we have little hope for you, considering your 2011 Instagram post with the Valencia filter where you wore a shirt with the Marlboro logo on it, sleeves rolled up, holding both middle fingers up. While it gave us a good chuckle, our HR department was quick to shut down any further consideration of you as a candidate.

We asked you whether you had anything in your background you wanted to disclose. We found you skipped a work day in 2012 to rent a pontoon boat with “Vinny and Goos.” You thought you looked cute in your little sailor cap that you kept from the previous year’s Halloween, and while some people here think you did, you made a crucial mistake: You posted the photo on your Instagram last year along with a caption that looked back on the occasion fondly. But you decided you had “nothing to disclose.” Next time, think about how your future employer might respond to you hiding this important information.

You are Facebook friends with Freddy Perez, who we know was the bad kid in school and would be a terrible influence on you and, therefore, our company’s future. Who cares if he’s the hardest working, most honest person you know and a family man? He broke a printer at your local public library once, which is one too many times for this agency. The founders of our company want to know that new hires have a straight moral compass, not seeing posts from Freddy’s little brother who was once caught giving you the middle finger through the Principal’s Office window.

Instead of offering you this position, we would recommend applying to work as a mascot for the Auntie Anne’s stand at the Fox Valley Mall. Perhaps consider spinning signs at your nearby car wash. Naturally, those would be the only jobs that would hire you, as your mom has warned you all along.