Well, Mr. Horgenfliegen, under normal circumstances, we’d be happy to offer you employment here at Waterhouse, Waterhouse, and Waterhouse. After all, your CV is excellent, your cover letter is in English, and you attended the same theatre camp as our CEO.
However, when we ran our routine background check, we found something alarming.
Apparently, when you were eleven years old, you said you had to go to the bathroom during church, but instead you stole three bags of Werther’s Originals that were stashed in the office cabinet. And when it was brought up at the next Sunday service, you let Paul Beerus blame the janitor over and over until they finally agreed to replace her with a fleet of Roombas.
Naturally, such a scandalous action would cast a pall over the entire organization, so we will be terminating our offer of employment forthwith. We trust you will find a workplace more suitable for your personality. Like WalMart.
Hi, is this John? John Horgenfliegen?
Hi, John, it’s Mandy, I just wanted to call and let you know that I’m going to have to cancel our date for tonight. Your Hinge profile looks great—you know I love The Office!—but my girlfriends told me to do a background check, and, well, we found out that for a whole six months of junior year you got really, really into Doctor Who and Sherlock. Like, fanfiction level.
According to this report, you wore a blazer and bowtie to class, said words like “indubitably,” and yes, even affected a weird sort of semi-British accent, as if the people at school didn’t already know how you talked—and as if you weren’t from southern Virginia.
Obviously, I don’t want to be a jerk or anything, but this is the kind of behavior I can’t really allow in the gene pool. I’ve reported your hinge account and posted all of your information on the Bad Dudes of New York Facebook group. I hope you atone with yourself!
Alright, Mr. Horgenfliegen, everything seems to be in order. You have proof of eighty times rent, multiple guarantors, and you passed our credit pull with flying colors. There’s just your background check left, and–
Oh. Oh no.
Mr. Horgenfliegen, are you aware of this? It says here on your background check that you literally never learned to swim. How do you not know how to swim?
Additionally, it says here that your college actually had a mandatory swim test that you put off until the week before graduation, and then, when you finally took it, you failed to swim a complete lap even one time and instead had to lie about having a medical condition in order for the “did not complete” to not show up on your transcript.
In most circumstances, I wouldn’t reject a tenant without a felony conviction or a pack of fighting dogs, but this makes me sick. You are blacklisted from our rental properties, and I’ll be alerting the other area landlords to this knowledge.
Have fun living in a box!
Now, Mr. Horgenfliegen, I don’t know what you’re playing at here. You know that our bank can only offer a loan to those without… unsavory pasts.
Unfortunately, your background check returned several red flags.
From approximately 2016 until 2017, you had a whole era where you were doing “softboy” Twitter posts, and we have hard evidence that you purposefully turned off the caps lock on your iPhone and posted about your favorite beanie babies in order to appeal to bisexual Tumblr girls. Our background check also alerted us to several Jomny Sun retweets.
Now, our bank has dealt with criminals before—Lord knows, we hosted Jeffrey Epstein’s fund for decades—but a background this horrifying is truly beyond the pale. We have denied your loan and will be freezing your assets, effective immediately.
Mr. Horgenfliegen, normally we’d be interested in offering you enrollment in our graduate program here at Dunwald Community College. After all, we know that grad school is the absolute last resort of a person with no alternatives or possibilities left in their life. However, your background check informed us of some deeply troubling information.
We have learned that you once used your roommate’s toothbrush to clean kief out of a grinder, you once dated a girl for eight months because you accidentally said “I love you” on the first date, and you were known as “the fart guy” on the JV baseball team.
We have been informed about your ingrown toenail problem, your oddly hairy back, and your recurring earwax issues.
We know what those stains on the wall are from. We know about the whole “poetry phase.” We know about the beret.
We know about your crippling self-doubt, your fear of rejection, your internal pain, all of the things you want to deny, want to force down into yourself but cannot.
And, Mr. Horgenfliegen, our background check has informed us that you have weird balls.
Unfortunately, you must understand why this confluence of information makes it impossible for us to extend our prior offer at this time. Cordially, and with all due respect, consider ending things.
Or apply to Brown. They’ll take anyone.