This is not a job application and I am not hiring

About a third of what I receive is formatted like a job application. Skills listed. Availability stated. Sometimes actual headings. One man sent me a document. I understand where it comes from, particularly in this city, where everybody is trained to present themselves as a package of capabilities, but it is the wrong instrument entirely.

Here is why. What I am choosing is not a set of services. It is whether I want this person in my kitchen at eight on a Wednesday for the next several years. No list of competencies answers that. The only thing that answers it is how somebody writes when they are being themselves.

Forty three, Manhattan, thirteen years leading, three arrangements of four, five and two years, and I am on good terms with all three of them, which I say because it is the most useful reference I could give.

What I want now is a fourth. Real duties, a standing structure, and a man who becomes part of the ordinary running of things rather than an event in the calendar. Nothing about it is professional and nothing about it involves money, and I am aware I share this board with a lot of women having to write that sentence.

So write me a letter. Badly, if necessary. Tell me what your week is actually like and what you would want somebody else to decide. That tells me more in four sentences than a page of qualifications.