He then cast his mind back to 2016 when they last met, recalling, “Last time I saw Bob, it was a few years ago, we are at Coachella and they did the Desert Trip, so it was a lot of vintage acts. Us, Stones, Bob, Neil Young[".]

like the scenario described is a total mess, and you can see how the narrator bears a larger share of responsibility than she's willing to concede just for staying in there and putting up for it for so long, but you can totally relate to her position, because the questions it raises are so uncomfortable. It's this deeply miserable, intractable situation, and I was reading along expecting that it would either end in a horrible blowup or that this essay would itself be the horrible blowup, so I was completely startled by the, like, moral deus ex machina where all the uncomfortable details are revealed as illusory and swept away in a great hurry to make room for the happy ending.

I DuckDuckGo'd "puppygirl essay", the first result was this Substack post, which says it's a response to an article called "Dump your puppygirl" by Tara Knight, so then I searched that, and found this

Even as they continuously say that American energy independence is one of their chief concerns, they are trying to pay a billion dollars for nothing because if a wind farm gets built, the Democrats win and not letting the Democrats win is one of the few things they can even comprehend.

But they're still for-profit companies, where the potential patient either needs to have money to pay the company in exchange for this super-cool disruptive healthcare, or needs to have good insurance already

Like this

I'm a seasoned sales and customer service representative (I have worked in a shop or fast food place) looking for new challenges matching my skillset (to work at your shop or fast food place).

My experience in (a basically unrelated job that I have also had during my patchy work history) taught me to (transferable skill), which (describe the positive effect the transferable skill or experience has or could have on a work task or desired personal quality that was listed in the job ad.)

(Repeat this formula for all of the main points the job ad makes about the job description and qualities of the desired candidate, or as many as you can. If you're running out of space, focus on things that wouldn't necessarily be obvious just from reading your CV. This sounds harder than it is. Usually, you literally just need to say stuff like "well, sometimes at my other job we were busy, which taught me to handle busy periods well in a work context without calling anyone a cunt sandwich or making a significant mistake. This will be applicable to this job since you mentioned that this shop also gets busy."

Talk about jobs you've had where possible, but also you can use school/college or other stuff you have done in your life. For example, if they have listed communications and basic IT skills, you can talk about being the person in your family that everyone comes to for help with their computers, and having to work out how to effectively communicate about computers with people who don't find that stuff as intuitive as you do. What you are doing here is creating a narrative in which everything about your life (including stuff that might seem not connected or unimpressive when it's just listed on a CV) seems to add up to you being the person they're describing that they'd like to hire for this job.

I guess a lot of the time I do know basically what info I want to convey, and it has overlap with the things you mentioned. E.g. I got a bachelor's degree in environmental studies, I've had some administrative and customer service-type jobs, some of those definitely did get busy, I learned to think independently, I would say I'm good at communicating and being organized, and my bosses (well, most of them) and coworkers have generally liked me for being a friendly person who cares about doing things properly.

The challenge is just saying all of this in well-flowing sentences that sound professional but not robotic or generic. Part of it is figuring out how to avoid repetition: I can't just keep repeating "that role helped me develop strong skills with [thing]."

If you're not applying to a job where "composing elegant prose" is a job skill, it probably doesn't matter much if it's repetitive or clunky, and it's probably better for it to be those things than to not contain that information in an easy-to-find way because, as you point out, managers are literally just skimming to check if the stuff they want to see is in there. If it helps, literally use bullet points.

Some ideas for how to phrase things more interestingly:

Actually describe what you did at the old job that taught you the skill - bonus points if this reveals a similarity between the roles that not everyone would realise. For example, in my job as a librarian I need to operate a cash register, which people wouldn't assume the job entailed from reading it on a CV, but which would be relevant if I was going for a job in a shop. So instead of saying that it taught me cash handling skills I could explain that I literally needed to operate a till etc as part of our selling off the old editions of books we'd replaced in our collection.

Start the sentence with the skill - e.g. "excellent customer service, in-person, over the phone and via email, is something I have plenty of experience providing, e.g. from my time at (employer) and at (2nd employer)," This makes it easy to spot when skim-reading.

Link two requirements together - e.g. continue the above sentence: "... where I also handled customer's private information with discretion, and needed to speak to people about difficult topics with sensitivity." or "... where I also needed to use persuasion to meet sales targets."

Also: typically you don't want to just have one generic cover letter, because that will feel generic. You want to be responding to what's actually written on the job description/ person spec for this particular job. (If you're having to do lots of applications, you'll find that points on the job description re-occur ; keep your old cover letters and Frankenstein new ones together from sentences and paragraphs you wrote previously.) You likely don't need to waste space telling them what your degree is unless you're going to relate it to an item on the job description/person spec; they presumably also have your CV.

And ideally it would be reading- and images-based, maybe with GIFs, but without having to put headphones in and sit through videos of some person talking. Also, ideally it would be free. Maybe I'm asking for too much