Girl on the Brink: Surviving Desperate Times with Desperate Measures

Everybody needs a good pickup line, whether you’re picking up a man or woman, or applying for a job.

When we lived in a more verbal word, our voices got a much more vigorous workout to fulfill our desires. In today’s flat-screen society, we rely too much on the keyboard and canned responses that we forward on to our recipients with the “send” button.

I miss suave, charming, and the verbal playfulness and eye contact of the in-person date and job interview.

On some online job applications, the employer doesn’t even leave room for you to trumpet your experience by including a cover letter; it’s just upload your resume, answer that voluntary affirmative action form, and wait for a canned autoresponder that thanks you for your interest but lowers your expectations that you’ll get a response because of the “volume of applicants.”

That response leaves me with the same we’re-not-a-match feeling as some of the pickup lines guys leave in my inbox after discovering my online dating profile.

Some of them begin with a subject line that says, “- No Subject -,” and opens up to a sentence that reads, “What do you think of male exotic dancers?” Attached is a picture of a burly guy posing in a bathrobe with a loosely knotted belt.

Sometimes they include a gimmicky animated emoticon, such as the dancing pickle (really a cucumber), to let me know their mood or facial expression.

I could only find the dancing hairy banana , but I think you get the idea.

What possesses guys to do these things? A man wouldn’t, I hope, approach a woman at a party and ask what I would consider to be weird questions. Do women sport similarly bad behavior?

The other extreme is the generic “Profile Interest Message” followed by the canned, “I liked your profile. What do you think of mine?”

The no-imagination approach is meant to be a safe play, which is not unlike the cover letter lead that reads: “I would like to be considered for the [insert job title] of [insert company name] that was advertised [insert date] in the [insert source of job lead].”

That’s okay, but there should be a second sentence that illuminates a kernel of personality and intrigues the other person enough to write a reply.

Now, send me your best pickup lines or cover letter leads, and I’ll post them in another blog entry. Send to Ann Powers at ann.powers@girlonthebrink.com.