Dear APPLICANT:

Thank you for your interest in joining the customer-service team at the Philadelphia-area Olive Garden restaurant. We here at Olive Garden Store #239 and the entire family of restaurants and casual dining experiences of the Darden Restaurants thank you for your application.

Unfortunately, we cannot move forward with your application at this time. Although your résumé and work experience were impressive, we feel that your past employment as UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT–UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA does not fit our current needs. An Olive Garden Customer Service Representative must interface with the customer at the table and the kitchen staff in a clear, concise, and direct manner, and while your work experience was, as you said in your cover letter, “a great place to learn about making people feel welcome,” we do not see anything in your skill set that suggests that you would be a successful addition to our service team.

Furthermore, in your one-on-one interview at our Open Interview Career Fair, you seemed reluctant to answer questions from the “customer” during the simple role-playing exercise. When asked by the “customer” if the Chicken Tortelloni Alfredo entrée contained nuts or other allergens, you replied that it depended entirely on “the context,” which sadly is an immediate disqualification from being considered for our service team.

We wish you the very best in your job search.

HUMAN RESOURCES TEAM

OLIVE GARDEN EAST DIVISION

DARDEN RESTAURANTS

* * *

Dear Dr. Kornbluth:

Thank you for submitting your résumé and cover letter to us via our online job-seeking portal. We appreciate your interest in joining Labcorp Inc. as a member of the Test/Diagnostic Technician Team.

While your application has many strong points, particularly your recent experience as the President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, we do not feel that your background is the right fit for the work we do here at Labcorp, specifically in the Test/Diagnostic division, which requires precise answers and readings of important patient diagnostics.

As you know, our customers require — and current medical and health regulations demand — that we issue complete and definitive results for all diagnostic tests. In your practice test, unfortunately, you failed to do this crucial task.

For instance, the test you analyzed showed a PSA score for a man between the ages of 40 and 50 of 2.8 ng/ml. The median PSA for this age range is 0.6 to 0.7 ng/ml. Therefore, this value should have been flagged. Instead, you wrote in, by hand, a comment suggesting that it was impossible to say anything definitive about this result without more information about the patient and you neglected several times to flag the result for further cancer screening. This was not in keeping with Labcorp procedure or federal health regulations. And the smiley-face addition was unprofessional and inappropriate, especially with a PSA score nearly 4x beyond the acceptable range.

We wish you best of luck in your job search, and recommend that you focus your energies in a sector that does not require direct answers, such as the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Sincerely,

HIRING/ONBOARDING

TEST/DIAGNOSTICS

LABCORP, INC.

* * *

DEAR DR. GAY:

Many thanks for submitting your manuscript for inclusion in our Science Fiction/Fantasy list. We have reviewed your materials carefully and have read through the chapters and synopses that you included. We have also received your many letters of recommendation from other authors who publish with us, and we appreciate their thoughts as well. It is clear that in your tenure as President of Harvard University you have interacted with many fine authors.

While your writing has many fine points, we unfortunately cannot move forward as publishers of your manuscript.

The decision was reached after much internal discussion, both by our editorial teams and our legal department. As you may or may not know, there was a very popular series of novels written by J. R. R. Tolkien entitled Lord of the Rings to which your series of novels, Lords of the Round Objects, bears an uncanny — and, to our legal team, troubling — resemblance. In addition, many of the story events and characters are entirely too similar for us to ignore. Where Tolkien created Gandalf, Frodo, and the Eye of Sauron, you have included characters named Handawlf, Brondo, and the Orbs of Lauren. To publish this work would open our company to extreme legal exposure.

Furthermore, the second book proposal you enclosed, for a novel entitled Their Eyes Were Watching God, is a direct synopsis of the master-work written by author Zora Neale Hurston entitled Their Eyes Were Watching God. It’s the same book.

We wish you the best in your writing career post-Harvard.

EDITORIAL TEAM

LEGAL TEAM

HARPER COLLINS