I haven’t done the fake job application shtick for a long while, but this was too good to pass up. Duncan Garner found this beauty and posted it on Twitter.

Keen to work on a dairy farm? pic.twitter.com/wQNZa1YUjY

— Duncan Garner (@DuncanGarnerNZ) June 11, 2017

It has to be a joke of some kind. “Reply with handwritten CV”? Come on. But, if it is a joke, it’s an intriguing gag and I’d like to see where it goes, so I made good use of my lunch break and posted my handwritten CV just now.

Writing left-handed is hard.

Update: 14/06/2017

Well, this is weird. After I posted this – helped along by a few mates on Facebook – I started to wonder if this was really a joke.

I went through a few options:

1. It’s a weird joke. Nothing further. Which, on reflection, seems a bit off. Who’s it funny to? What’s the point?
2. It’s the newspaper trying to create news in a jokey way, maybe making a point about the awful conditions some workers will submit to for a job. “We placed a terrible ad for a dairy worker. What happened next is jaw-dropping!”
3. It’s a real ad for actual farm assistants. Perhaps, as Bernard Hickey suggested on Twitter, it’s being done to perversely fulfil some kind of statutory requirement. In which case… JFC.

So I rang the Timaru Herald just now to ask about it and… it’s not a joke.

The ad’s real. It was placed by some guy. They couldn’t tell me anything about who placed it, which is fine – I understand why they couldn’t give me details. That’s all I know.

So. What next? Who is this dude? And why does he want handwritten applications from people to work a guaranteed shitty job while living in a house infested with rodents? Of course, it’s possible that a third party placed the ad as their own joke (maybe this Greenpeace outfit?) but there’s still no obvious reason why. If it is a gag, maybe someone will come along to explain it.

The best part about all this is that whoever did this is soon going to receive the ridiculous letter I wrote, if they haven’t already, because I sent it a few days ago. I hope they get back to me soon. My fictional jailbird who’s OK with rats and drug tests seems like the perfect candidate.

Update 15/06/17

The good people at The Spinoff asked me to write this up for them more proper-like over at their website, so I did. I’ll do any further updates to this one over there.