Donna Mayhew was a University of Cardiff graduate with a 2.2 in Business and Finance. Once her tenancy had run out she dumped her boyfriend, who she had never really loved, and moved back to Abergavenny to live with her parents. Once there she got so fed up living under someone else’s roof and she was so desperate to get out that she hastily wrote thirty CV’s. She included details of her part-time job in the cake store she’d had while she was at uni and tried briefly to highlight the benefits and lessons she had learnt whilst there. She promptly went out at three that afternoon and distributed them all over town. Three weeks passed. She didn’t get a single reply to one of them. However she was determined that she would find work and applied to the local job centre and paid £30 in order to take a two day course on CV writing.
The course was led by a plucky empowered young temptress named Cindy, who not only brought fiery inspiration to all who she trained, but also provided detailed handouts which all the students of the class could take away. Late one night after her invigorating two-day course, Donna sat down and utilised everything she had been taught. One page of details became two, her paragraphs became bullet points, her hobbies became achievements, her job in the cake store became a powerhouse of experience and knowledge that would allow her to turn the sky purple and declare world peace; she utilized positive “power words”. She was no longer merely a young woman with a degree, she was now an adaptor, an invigorator, an estimator, an incorporator, an updater, an organiser, a systematiser, a tester, a detector, a responder, a rehabilitator, a volunteerer, a counsellor, a designer, a forecaster, a retriever, an assessor, a planner, a reducer, a chair, a lecturer, a motivator, an overhauler, a transmitter, a transformer, a communicator, a guide and a delegator. She made her regular tasks seem like the means to a better life: She had writing skills, serving skills, people skills, analysing skills, intuitive skills, metaphysical skills, professional skills, talking skills, sitting skills, standing skills, in short there was nothing she couldn’t do and do better than anybody who had ever lived or had been thought to have lived, even if they hadn’t lived or they had lived and been exaggerated to look better like Tom Jones or Florence Nightingale or Jordan.... sorry Katie Price. Once she had finished, she admired her handy work and sent the CV by email as an attachment with a polite covering letter to the local bank, for it was after dark and they would be closed. She then put the kettle on and had an early night.
The following morning at eight-thirty Norma Premble, secretary at said bank turned on her PC and started reading emails in the official inbox. The first two emails were nothing unusual and the third, an application for work, she assumed would be the same. She glanced over the CV attached to a polite covering letter, she stopped and re-read it properly... and suddenly she was in tears. This CV was the most beautiful CV, nay the most beautiful thing she had ever read. It completely mirrored her own feelings about life and reminded her of her childhood in a way that seemed to make the world make sense and suddenly she realised her place and her purpose in life. She immediately sent copies to hundreds of her friends, all of whom were stunned and emailed copies to all their friends who emailed colleagues, co-workers, acquaintances, flatmates, wives, husbands, girlfriends, boyfriends, casual flings and even sworn enemies as all animosity toward all fellow creatures had been blotted from their minds. Suddenly everyone in a position to employ anyone was clamouring to find this woman, this one hope for humanity who’s CV had changed the way they thought about their existence.
At ten o’clock Donna awoke from her long slumber to find herself listening to the sound of the sea. This was curious to her as she lived at least twenty miles inland. She opened her curtain a fraction and looked out at an ocean of faces, filling her road, all murmuring in anticipation outside her house. She went downstairs in her pyjamas and opened the door. A barrage of executives from hundreds of different companies suddenly started yelling job offers at her, quoting yearly pay figures, citing job descriptions, offering her the very best in company benefits, eight weeks vacation a year, her own parking space for her Mercedes company car and travel opportunities the likes of which had never been offered before. She was overwhelmed and when an offer came to work with disadvantaged children in Africa and be well paid for her troubles she immediately accepted. The agent in question from the United Nations handed her a pen and held out the contract. She was just about to sign when an irate business associate of Nescafe, who had been queuing for half an hour, bludgeoned the UN agent unconscious with his briefcase and shoved his own contract in place of the original. Pushing the paper against Donna’s outstretched pen, he obtained a scrawl from her by virtue of the fact that she was frozen in horror and declared his success in securing her contract to the crowd of business suitors, who unanimously turned into a lynch mob. In the ensuing chaos Donna barricaded herself in the house as the hoards outside formed factions in the hopes of reducing the competition.
The army arrived five minutes later and managed to defeat the third sector faction who had taken control of the east side of the front garden. It was a comparatively simple task as most of them were volunteer workers and weren’t ready to give up their lives. The Army promptly set up a perimeter where they were able to batter down the wall to the kitchen where infra red scans indicated Donna was hiding. Terrified and covered in debris, Donna was escorted upstairs under armed guard where a member of her majesty’s civil service offered her a job working in the Maldives. The BBC were having none of it though and Radio 2 proceeded to reduce the armed guard to tears by playing Jeff Buckley’s rendition of Hallelujah through heavy amplification. Just as Steve Wright and Chris Evans were getting ready to move in however, the RNLI, armed with ear defenders, dropped in and airlifted Donna out through the skylight in her bedroom.
Once safely on board the helicopter she was offered the position of national logistics manager by the head of the charity. For fear of causing further carnage Donna decided selflessly to throw herself from the aircraft in the hope that the bloodshed would cease after her death. Halfway down she was caught by a paraglider who saved her life and offered her the chance to be the sales executive for his paraglide-package-holiday company. She agreed until they were safely on the ground, where she swiftly kicked him in the nuts and ran for her life from the angry, yearning mob of reporters who wanted to interview this woman who had changed the face of everything they knew, but more importantly wanted to see if she wanted to a job as a journalist. Eventually, exhausted from running she collapsed in a desperate heap at the top of a hill and as the hoards of prospective employers approached her she cried out:
‘Oh God, if you exist, you must help me now!’
The skies blackened, a raging tempest covered the Sun and the Holy Father descended bodily from Heaven starting a second flood that all but wiped out the human race and smote all the impure who dared to distress this young woman. Donna looked out at the devastation from her vantage point and was awed by the power of the Supreme Being. When his work was finished, God turned to leave. He was just about to ascend up to Cloud ten again when he stopped and turned back, and addressing Donna in an inquisitive voice he asked:
‘Oh. By the way, you’re not still looking for a job are you?’
THE END
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