Stricken by Formophobia

Formophobia n. Paralyzing fear, distress, and nervousness caused by the act of entering personal information into a pre-made template. Making simple tasks such as applying for jobs, school, etc. almost impossible for the affected. (Urban Dictionary)

Until I began to job hunt on our return to the States last year, I hadn't actually filled out an employment application since 1972, when I applied for a student assistant position at the Undergraduate Library (aka the UGLI, a reference to its Soviet Bloc-style architecture). In the professional job search, you submitted a cover letter and a resume. Period. You had your resume typeset by professionals and you typed your cover letter v-e-e-r-r-y slowly, so that you wouldn't make a mistake and have to start over. (Using Wite-Out in a cover letter was verboten, especially for English majors. Maybe engineers got away with it.)

That was so 20th century.

As a job applicant (supplicant?) to a large corporation or a government agency in the brave new world of the online job search, you "will be allowed to attach a resume and cover letter later." This assumes, of course, that you will successfully answer every question on said application before losing (select any or all of the following) your confidence/your patience/your mind.

Fill out enough applications, and you will have to first recall all of your previous salaries and then report them—by the hour, the week, the month, or the year, depending on the prospective employer's way of thinking about compensation. If you held various positions at a single company over a five-year in the 1980s, you have to wrack your brain for the exact month and year when you left your position in Product Development to move to Marketing. You also have to come up with a bland version of your real reason ("homicidal tendencies towards supervisor") for leaving Product Development.

You may be confronted with questions so ridiculous that you conclude that you would rather be homeless than work for anyone stupid enough to ask them. For example, an application for a high tech firm presented a list of computer software products used in the job and then required the hapless applicant to rate on a scale of 1-5 how interested he/she would be in learning each product, with 1 being, for example:"I am not at all interested in learning Microsoft Access" and 5 being: "I cannot imagine anything more thrilling than learning Microsoft Access."

And, then there was today's online application psychodrama, in which I was applying for a different position at an organization to which I had previously applied. I won't get into it, but let me just say that I may be drinking Pinot Grigio directly from the bottle tonight, à la Cameron Diaz in my favorite scene from "The Holiday."