But What If The Beard Got Stuck In The Photocopier? Health And Safety, You See.

When I was a Very Important Executive, as opposed to the idle layabout that I am now, one of my more dubious management perks was that I would automatically receive all of the CVs sent in by people applying for jobs with us.

Normally I would read through these with a view to reaffirming my own snobby prejudices viz. that the entire country's education system is going to the dogs, with the result that young people these days can barely spell their own names, let alone muster the intellectual nous and wherewithal to, say, write a press release unaided*.

However, despite a frequent lack of grammatical expertise, not to mention a widespread tendency to sprinkle apostrophes where they were not needed while omitting them from places they should have been, most applicants at least managed to put together a fairly robust argument for why they should be considered for the job in question.

Except one.

This was a CV from a jobbing actor who was applying for a position with us - presumably because poncing about pretending to be someone else practising 'the craft' wasn't bringing in enough loot to support day-to-day existence in The World's Most Expensive City^TM.

As well as including a number of moody headshots and listing his screen appearances, the applicant in question also reassured us that among his key skills were the ability to:

a) Adopt a Yorkshire or Birmingham accent upon request

and

b) Grow a convincing beard in three days.

As these weren't necessarily attributes we were looking for in an office administrator, he didn't get invited in for interview.

I often wonder how things would have turned out if we had given him a job, though. Maybe we could have opened up a lucrative sideline as an undercover detective agency specialising in Northern and Midlands-based cases. Maybe we could have added another trophy to the groaning shelf by spectacularly winning the prestigious All-London Marketing Agency Facial Hair Growing Contest. Maybe we could all have been extras in an episode of Heartbeat. Who knows?


* A prejudice not actually borne out in reality, but that's the lovely thing about prejudices, isn't it - you can just ignore anything that doesn't fit them and only focus on the things that appear to back them up.