Dear Hiring Manager,
I am excited to apply for a seasonal position at Hobby Lobby. The holidays are a time of joy, and I look forward to creating a timeless masterpiece in big-box retail.
References (attached) say I’m a “Renaissance Man,” an unsurpassed polymath, the most curious man who ever lived. But the title I covet most is customer service associate.
Working the Christmas rush at Hobby Lobby would be my grandest vision fulfilled. No disrespect to your brand name, but crafts are no hobby to me. My whole life, my being, my soul, is DIY. Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art. Or crocheted bobble beards.
I’m a dreamer, but more importantly, I’m a doer. Even a talent-free hack like Michelangelo had to admit, “Give Leo a glue gun and some balsa wood, and he’ll come back with an ornithopter.”
As a painter and sculptor, I fused geometry and physiology to conjure visually striking displays, each with the exquisite detail for which Hobby Lobby has awed generations. My work must be popular too—I spotted a throw rug of The Last Supper for sale in aisle seven. Art is never finished, only abandoned.
Hobby Lobby is a career peak for an inventor who loves a complex problem. I once engineered a plan to redirect the river Arno around the city of Pisa to cut off their water supply and harbor. The project, which would weaken our hated enemy Pisa and benefit my beloved Florence, involved constructing a wide channel—deeper than the Arno itself—combined with a dam to divert the river into marshland. It’s not important that my plan didn’t work or my calculations prove that Hobby Lobby may never need to divert water on that scale—the takeaway here is Black Friday chaos does not scare me.
I can see myself making profound and enduring contributions to home decor, wall art and prints, craft supplies, paints and brushes, birdhouses and garden statues, fabric and sewing, needlework and embroidery, woodworking, power tools, and, obviously, everything DIY.
Apprenticing in any of these departments would be an honor, but if I could choose, I pretty much invented scrapbooking.
Plus? My codex on the mechanics of birds in flight is bound to come in handy at some point.
Hobby Lobby’s culture is important to me, so let me just say: I am all about working long hours and definitely do not have an exasperating same-sex partner named Salai just hanging out at home. Trust me when I say I am super available to work evenings, weekends, and extended hours to meet the needs of your religious-freedom-loving cisgender team.
As for pay, I don’t need a Medici or a Borgia to install me in a villa; I just need a patron who appreciates lasting quality at a reasonable price. Ask around—my portrait of Lisa del Giocondo is worth at least three times more than when I painted it.
Please hire me. I am consumed with the urgency of doing. As I always say, “Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do. And if we must do, we must do it at Hobby Lobby up to and including New Year’s.”
If you find me sketching constantly, that’s only because I have a hundred ideas for speeding up the checkout system based on the spirals of the chambered Nautilus. If you don’t understand it, no worries, I’m used to that. In five hundred years, maybe you will. Learning never exhausts the mind.
Sincerely,
Leonardo of Vinci
VitruvianGuy@gmail.com
