The concept of networking implies an unspoken agreement that we should all treat each other like douchebags. Basically, when I "network," I am trying to make friends not because I am interested in getting to know a person, making them laugh, etc., but because I want to get a job or get a contract. We are brazenly admitting this to each other when we go to networking events, yet we still participate in this charade, pretend to be interested in what the other person is saying for the appropriate time interval, and then casually ask if his/her company has any positions open or if they would like to switch the toilet paper in the CFO's bathroom over to this really nice new toilet paper that I invented yesterday, as if it has naturally occurred in the course of the conversation. Or, I mean, that's how I imagine it works -- I don't go to networking events because I am not an asshole who likes to waste his time talking to people who he doesn't give a shit about and don't give a shit about him.

The consequences of the networking pandemic are at least twofold: 1) People at least partially lose touch with the concept of what it means to be a real person who lives in the real world with other real people, and 2) Nobody can ever get a decent job unless they know somebody, or at the very least know somebody who knows somebody. Isn't America supposed to be a meritocracy? Whatever happened to picking the most qualified/intelligent candidate, not the one whose sister performed in the circus with the cousin of Jim-Bob down in accounting, who only got his job because he won a fly-tying contest in Bumwad County, Alabama, that was judged by the CEO's mistress's dog's former kennel-master? Maybe if American companies pulled themselves up by their boot-straps and brought in people who knew what the fuck they were doing instead of turning the hiring process into a big, stupid game of Six Degrees of Separation, they wouldn't have sent the global economy spiraling into the shitter. ON THE LIST!!!!!

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