A long time ago, in a Little Rock not so far away, a marketing technologist was, in a perfectly modern fashion,
made redundant — and then asked an AI to help him fill out the unemployment paperwork.
This is what happened.
Scroll, brave reader ↓
Chapter I
The Layoff
"He was laid off. It was only a flesh wound."
On the 8th day of May, in the year of our lord 2026, a marketing technologist named Corey Boelkens was, in a perfectly modern fashion, made redundant. "'Tis but a flesh wound," he said, having read too much Monty Python. Reader, it was not but a flesh wound. It was, in fact, a layoff.
But what followed was so absurd that the only honest way to tell it is on a parchment scroll, with coconuts. In the days that followed, Corey — armed with little but a LinkedIn account, a half-finished cup of coffee, and a rapidly maturing relationship with an AI assistant — set out across the long grey land of online job applications.
Marginalia, in a smaller hand: In modern English, "redundant" means "laid off." In medieval English, it means "thou art surplus to requirements, fare thee well." The vibe is similar. — A. Knight
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Chapter II
The Quest Begins
"To find honest work, the Knight summoned a familiar."
The familiar was an AI assistant — a kind of digital wizard, if wizards were trained on Reddit and had read every résumé ever written. Corey, having a long history with both wizards and résumés, decided to let the familiar drive the browser.
This was, depending on whom you asked, either extremely 2026 or extremely lazy. Both turned out to be correct. The wizard read the Arkansas LAUNCH portal. The wizard parsed PDFs. The wizard, in a manner befitting all wizards, made small clucking noises about the user experience of government job boards.
Real talk: The actual experiment was using computer-use AI (Claude with browser access) to read job descriptions, map them to my résumé, and pre-fill applications. The medieval framing is a delivery vehicle. The boring lesson is: AI is great at the tedious 80% of job-hunt logistics. It is bad at deciding what you actually want next.
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Chapter III
The Bridge of Taxonomy
"STOP. Who would cross the Bridge of Death must answer me these questions three."
"What… is your name?" Corey. "What… is your quest?" To seek gainful employment. "What… is your occupation?" MarTech Solution Lead.
"AUUUUUUUGH—"
(The bridgekeeper falls into the chasm.)
Marginalia: The Arkansas LAUNCH job portal uses a Bureau of Labor Statistics taxonomy that does not contain the title "MarTech Solution Lead." The AI mapped my role to "Marketing Manager," with secondary mappings to "Chief Executive" and "Computer and Information Systems Manager." This was, as the bridgekeeper learned, the correct answer.
Choose thy occupation
The lesson, dear reader: your job title is not the same as your job category. AI is genuinely useful at this translation step — give it a résumé and a target taxonomy and it will produce a clean mapping in seconds. Doing it by hand, you will misclassify yourself out of half your opportunities.
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Chapter IV
The Knights Who Say "500"
"We are now the Knights Who Say… five hundred characters, or get out."
Every government job portal in the known world has a description field. Every description field has a character limit. The Knights Who Say "500" guard this field jealously. Type 501 characters and they will, with great solemnity, demand a shrubbery.
0 / 500 charactersThe Knights are content.
NI! NI! NI! Thou hast exceeded 500 characters. The Knights demand a shrubbery. (Also: shorten thy bullet.)
Real lesson: AI is excellent at character-budget compression. Paste your bullet, tell it the limit, ask for three variants — long, tight, headline. You'll learn more about your own bullets in 30 seconds than you will in an hour of staring at the field.
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Chapter V
The Skills Tournament
"'Tis but a skill," said the Black Knight, having lost three of them already."
Every skill on your résumé is a limb on the Black Knight. Some are essential. Some are decorative. Most are, frankly, neither — they are there because a recruiter once told you to put them there in 2014.
Click each skill to ask the Tournament whether it serves the quest. The honest ones stay. The decorative ones lose a limb.
The Knight's Skill List
Click a skill. The Tournament shall decide.
Real lesson: Ask the AI to rank your skills against a specific job description, not in the abstract. "Synergy" and "Team Player" don't survive that test. "CRM Architecture" does, but only because someone in the job description searched for "Salesforce."
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Chapter VI
The Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog
"It's just a harmless little bunny, isn't it?" — last words of many a job-seeker.
Behold the recruiter inbox. It looks cute. It chirps with little notification sounds. It will, given the chance, exsanguinate your entire week. Reader, you must triage.
🐰
Maeve from a real company9:14 AM
Re: Director of Product, hybrid in Little Rock — quick chat this week?
🐰
Brad — Top Talent Recruiting Solutions9:16 AM
URGENT contract opportunity, must relocate to Bangalore, $32/hr W2 only
🐰
noreply@ai-leadgen-buddy.io9:18 AM
Hi Corey, I saw your profile and you'd be PERFECT for our blockchain dental practice
🐰
Hiring Manager, an actual Arkansas company11:02 AM
Loved your RaftUp story — would you grab coffee at Mylo Coffee on Thursday?
Real lesson: AI triage on the inbox is the single highest-leverage move in a job hunt. Set up filters that flag (a) actual hiring managers vs. third-party recruiters, (b) local vs. relocation-required, (c) salary band disclosed vs. hidden. The rabbits are not all rabbits. But you cannot tell which is which by hand at the scale a layoff produces.
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Chapter VII
The Holy Grail
"He found, at last, the Holy Grail. It was not a chalice."
A job you actually want.
It is not a chalice. It is a job posting in Little Rock with a reasonable salary band, a thoughtful hiring manager, a hybrid schedule, and work that intersects with marine tech, outdoor recreation, or marketing engineering. Reader, I'm still looking for it. If you have one, I am at corey@talewatersandtides.com. Bring coconuts.
The actual takeaway: AI does not get you the job. AI gets you to the point where the job hunt is a human problem (network, fit, judgment) rather than a logistics problem (forms, taxonomies, character limits). That's worth a quest.
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Chapter VIII
The Credits Roll
And now, the credits.
Møøse wrangler: Corey Boelkens
Senior Coconut Percussionist: Also Corey
Holy Grail Consultant: Anyone with a job opening
Bridgekeeper, retired: The BLS Occupation Taxonomy
Familiar & co-author: Claude (Anthropic)
Knight Who Said "500": Every state unemployment portal