Jeremi on the job hunt

Last week Jeremi applied for his first job since getting here. This was a fair bit of work for both of us, as we decided after asking around a bit that it would be better to send the cover letter in German, even if the CV was in English. We also tried to "Germanize" the CV a bit, by changing the chronological order the way they do it here (oldest to most recent), and adding a birthdate and a photo. They also usually include family situation (i.e. single, married, how many kids) on CVs here, but it's not considered obligatory, unlike the date of birth. People here think it's hysterical that it's technically against the law in Canada to ask these sorts of questions when hiring people.

We'd written up a nice cover letter in English and then tried to translate it into the best German we could muster, but of course the nicely constructed phrases had to be broken into little chunks so that the grammar didn't get too complicated. I brought it to a native-speaking colleague to have a look over it, and she very kindly spent about an hour and a half with me rewriting the whole thing so that it sounded better.

But this still left the photo, so last week we had a little photo shoot, with Jeremi trying to look nice and professional. After taking several pictures, here's the one we settled on:
But of course the lighting could have been better, and it's not centred so well, and he's got a touch of red-eye, so I played around in iPhoto and magically transformed it into this:
Now not only is the lighting and colour better, the picture framed more nicely, and the red-eye fixed, but I also managed to get rid of the zit on his forehead and the shiny bits on his cheeks, nose and forehead. I'd hire him, wouldn't you?

That is, unless we sent in the full-body picture by mistake...
(Or maybe they're hire him all the more, but I don't know that I want him doing that sort of a job.)

In other news, we're heading to Niedernhausen this weekend, a town between Frankfurt and Wiesbaden, for the wedding party of our friends Jenny and Leo, who we know from Canada. We'll tell you all about it next week.