St. Remedius Radio: “Day of The Honored Jobhunters”

(Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?)

The last month of autumn traditionally marked particularly thin veils between life and the afterlife: in both hemispheres, the cooling of the earth and the fading of the green promised a quiescence as the restless dead finally settled in, in anticipation of rising again the next year to redress wrongs real and perceived. Plenty of thaumaturges and necromancers took advantage of both sides of the equator and the International Date Line for blatant and subtle effect, for their own reasons and to redress injustices. The Metaphysics researchers at St. Remedius Medical College only interfered in certain cases outside of their jurisdiction, and on the third Friday of November, they backed off and let the Zoetropes, those wanderers in the gaps between Law and Chaos, have some fun. That Friday started a week-long festival that harmed no one and threatened nobody…except the individuals stealing oxygen from candiru and coliform bacteria known as technical recruiters.

The great Tech Boom of the late 1990s fundamentally broke the market for career headhunters, replacing nominally trained recruiters with dolts barely knowing how to sit on a toilet seat, but the real repercussions didn’t become obvious until the beginning of the 21st Century. The move to online applications and application automation became a standard by 2005, where applying for any job became a matter of “get online and apply through our job portal.” Before then, it was possible for talented applicants for every position from coffeehouse barista to software developer to talk to a remotely knowledgeable human and argue their merits, or at least point out that a position asking for impossible standards was in fact impossible to fill. By 2010, though, the system was irrevocably broken, mostly by and for recruiting companies and HR departments that got more of a return on selling applicant data than on filling positions. Online job boards became virtual slaughterhouses, where fresh college graduates and freshly laid-off career veterans spent all day sifting through illiterate emails and voice mails mumbled in fluent Conversational Ichthyostegid in the hope of finding a single position that might be anything other than yet another attempt to get resumes, ID numbers, birthdate, and other opportunites for identity thieves. And it went on and on, for years and years, with the nightmares of Microsoft Teams, Workday, and LinkedIn just making jobhunts more and more pointless and morale-killing. Eventually, most of the queries from tech recruiters were about verifying contact information and selling that information to even worse recruiters, until all that remained were the worst bottomfeeders too stupid and untrustworthy to find gainful work in child pornography production and methamphetamine distribution, running phone centers out of the back of burned-out McDonald’s franchises and getting paid by the number of returned phone calls they received per hour.

As with most scavengers and parasites, the bottomfeeders thrived. Hosts eventually collapsed into puddles of crushed morale and self-esteem, unable to show any enthusiasm about the latest deceitful email, and many died while searching for honorable work. The pinworms and candiru moved on, occasionally returning to infect still-active email boxes and message networks with more lies and broken promises until they got their quota for the month. Some job boards showed signs of mercy and deleted profiles of the deceased if family and friends said anything, but others accumulated the dead as trophies to claim they had higher profile numbers than their competitors. Some networks even reminded others of their dead compatriots and coworkers every few months or years, just because. So much pain, so much mourning, so much anger at the bottomfeeding scum who led them to their current states.

The Zoetropes were famously reticent about exactly why they started resurrecting the online dead. It may have been because of a Zoetrope overhearing someone at a restaurant or bar weeping over seeing a still-active profile on LinkedIn, or it may have happened directly to a friend or companion denied final electronic rest. However it started, it continued every November, with reputable job placement firms and contractor and consulting companies frantically checking their databases to ensure the freshness and validity of every candidate. Those that didn’t found themselves Visited.

The Zoetropes never allowed actual physical harm to bottomfeeder recruiters and their managers, but waking up at 3 am to repeated “NO SIGNAL” calls crying “DEAD BY DAWN” or “Are your parents brother and sister?” and then disconnecting eventually wore out even the dullest and most mendacious. Even quitting and returning to cryptocurrency pig-butchering scams did little to protect the bottomfeeders: a year’s worth of “Hope you are doing good” personal messages on deceased accounts meant that dozens or even hundreds of functional illiterates had their phones wiped, their emails disabled, and their preferred contacts given the absolutely most horrible AI-generated slop videos available. For a week, their only hope involved complete contrition and public repentance, as well as special consideration to the deceased in removing their online presence, and since that required traces of empathy, compassion, and the intelligence and work ethic the Higher Powers gave to hookworms and sewer salps, the next year was even worse than before. The only complete solution was also the worst punishment: a complete and thorough wipe of a recruiter’s online presence. Merely change names or companies, and the companies changed their names for legal reasons about as often as the founders changed their underwear (more often, to hear former employees tell it), and the next year’s pranks and humiliations were even worse.

Eventually, the bottomfeeder recruiting companies attempted to fight back against the online dead. Their greatest mistake was, as usual, to be as cheap and chintzy as possible, usually by hiring open, blatant, and highly amused Zoetropes to handle the electronic incantations. Many of the worst offenders cannot order food, use a phone, or reserve a plane flight to this day.

And while you’re at it, the request lines are now open, complete with playlist.

Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. Questions, concerns, and disgust over generative AI? Check out Contact, Privacy Policy, and AI Policy. And feel free to visit the St. Remedius Medical College Redbubble shop for all of your Mandatory Parker needs.

bottomfeeder recruiters online dead St. Remedius Radio Zoetrope