To Whom It May Concern:

This letter serves as my strong recommendation of Jennifer Layton. Jennifer has worked with me for the past eight months and was recently laid off due to company restructuring. The fact that I found out about this layoff by walking past Jennifer’s office and seeing her throwing her personal possessions into a big box and muttering something like, "Thank God I’m finally leaving this armpit of a job," should be no reflection on her true attitude.

Jennifer has amazing computer skills. Her resume says so. We’ve never actually seen them at work because our dwindling company finances stopped us from getting her an actual computer. After she had been here two weeks, I managed to find a battered General Electric toaster oven at my neighbor’s garage sale, which I took downstairs to Stuart in our Information Services department. Stuart went out to the dumpster and (talk about luck) dug up a busted black and white television monitor. He also swiped the hubcap from an abandoned Pinto in the parking lot and managed to weld all these devices together to form something resembling a computer.

Jennifer didn’t even thank us for our efforts, but to be fair, I think she was stunned speechless when she saw the contraption we lugged into her office. Sometimes people get too overwhelmed with gratitude to speak.

Jennifer shows amazing self-control in the workplace. Just last week, our Executive Vice President (whom we have affectionately nicknamed "Satan") found her cleaning up the storage room. Jennifer was trying to keep a stack of boxes from collapsing on her and preserving some important documents by clenching them in her teeth, as well as trying to blink the sweat out of her eyes (a perfect example of her ability to multi-task). "Satan," who has a fax machine in his office and nothing on his schedule EVER, tossed a personal message at her and told her to fax it to one of his buddies. Now.

Jennifer didn’t kill him. The rest of us in New Business Development were amazed. Granted, once she crawled out from under the boxes that had collapsed on her, she grabbed a promotional penknife and started following him back to his office. The look on her face reminded me of that chick in The Exorcist just before she starts spewing all over the priest. But once Jainna, our Marketing Analyst, was able to wrestle her to the ground and grab the penknife, Jennifer was perfectly calm. I have never seen such maturity.

Speaking of maturity, Jennifer conducts herself in a moral and professional manner at all times. Well, for the most part. She used to wait until she got home before she started slamming Bacardi shots and grumbling vague death threats under her breath, but it is a stressful place to work around here. You could say that she finds creative ways to relieve stress on the job.

I’m sure you’re looking for someone with problem-solving skills. Well, Jennifer’s your woman. She’s had nothing but problems ever since she started working here. Her office, for example. It’s not really an office. It’s a former storage closet with no windows and no ventilation. We also keep the huge color printer in there, and when it’s been running a while, the fumes tend to build up. Jennifer solved that problem by spending as little time in her office as possible. Often I’d find her in the boss’ office while he was traveling, surfing the internet on his computer and logging him onto mailing lists for pornographic material. What a resourceful woman.

On a final note, I’d like to say that Jennifer shows great optimism and enthusiasm about the future. I base this statement on the fact that the last I saw of her, she was tearing out of the parking lot in her new Saturn, yelling something out the window about finally racing off into the clear blue skies of freedom. Before careening around the bend, I think I heard something like, "The future sure looks swell," although Jainna is pretty sure it sounded like, "I hope you all burn in hell." I’d like to give Jennifer the benefit of the doubt on that one.

If I can give you any further information about this remarkable young woman, please do not hesitate to call me. Now I must go. I’m getting hungry, and I found that if I put a couple of Pop-Tarts in the disk drive of Jennifer’s old "computer," they pop out delicious in just 10 seconds!

With best regards,

Dennis Warner
Vice President, New Business Development

Copyright 1999 by Jennifer Layton