Like many other GenXers, I’ve watched hours and hours of the Olympic Games, recognizing the amazing abilities of athletes who have spent thousands of hours training to get to the starting line or starting block, ready to put it all out there just to obtain an elusive gold medal, competing against athletes who have trained just as hard, or harder, to reach the same goal.

As a runner, I understand training. So, I chose writing anything and everything I could, showing up in every post, essay, or email. I know what it is to give emotionally everything you’ve got and still not make the team, much less the podium. The difference is Olympians at least get to compete.

But I’ve got a bigger problem. Did you know you can be overqualified, overeducated, and too old to be hired for the most remedial of jobs?

Let me explain.

For the better part of two decades now, I have been writing, telling stories, and crafting narratives specifically for engagement. The whole idea behind telling stories, for me at least, is to communicate one idea, one message that I hope impacts one person on planet Earth. I wrote and developed a prayer email campaign — by invitation only — for more than two hundred weekly messages, watching prayers answered and seeing more than fifty-six readers open them sixty percent of the time. For the last three years, I’ve driven research participants to their appointments as part of a federal drug study, navigating the streets of Cape Girardeau in a Nissan Versa with professionalism and only moderate GPS dependency. I have consulted for mission-driven organizations on how to find their voice and use it. I have published over five hundred posts on my blog, Five Minute Observations, at fiveminuteobservations.com. I have a short essay currently appearing on bioStories.

I am also fifty-something years old, which the job market has decided is its own separate disqualification, unrelated to but perfectly complementary with being overqualified. A twofer.

Lucky me.

None of this, it turns out, qualifies me to answer phones. Or deliver pizza. And flipping burgers? Forget it. Go figure.

The modern job market has a very specific kind of genius, and it works like this: if you’ve done too much, you are automatically suspected of planning to leave the moment something better comes along. Which is fair. Except that something better is not coming along, which is precisely why I applied for this job. We have arrived at a logical impasse.

This is where nobody wins.

I have been told, in various cheerful corporate language, that I am “overqualified,” or “overeducated,” or “why are you applying for this job?” This is the professional equivalent of being told that your Dick Blick paintbrushes and Portland Art Institute art classes are too good for painting address numbers on a curb. You could do the work, easy enough, faster than most. But you? You are way too good for us. Flattering, at least in theory. Completely useless in practice. Nobody has told me I’m too old. That would be illegal. Add an applicant tracking system. Then I am kicked out long before I can speak to anyone.

What they mean, I think, is this: they looked at my resume and saw a man who once kept fifty-six prayer partners informed and inspired across more than two hundred consecutive dispatches, who has been doing this kind of work since before some of these hiring managers were born, and they thought, he’s going to be very bored answering our phones. Honestly? That’s a fair point. But I would like the chance to be bored. That’s the thing.

Boredom pays. I’ve checked.

I’ve written about this topic before. It was more direct. A lot less charitable, with considerably more visible frustration. One reader responded with a list of suggestions, starting with pivot, retrain, create your own space, and control what you can control. All reasonable. All given before asking one question. I politely thanked her for proving my point. Because that’s the thing about being invisible: when you finally say something about it? People rush to solve a problem, rather than see a person. So which is lonelier? The outright rejection? Or the unsolicited advice? I have no idea.

But this isn’t a grief post. It’s a comedy. So.

There exists a golden corridor of qualification. It’s narrow. Dimly lit. And, apparently, in my case, impossible to find. Somewhere between “you don’t have enough experience” and “you have too much experience.” I assume, in that corridor, there are also people under forty. I have spent years racing toward expertise and somehow sprinted clear past it without ever passing through.

I have applied for jobs I could do in my sleep. I have applied for jobs I could do while actually sleeping, if only there were a way to schedule that. I have written cover letters that are probably the best piece of content the company will receive all week. They won’t interview me.

So they will not hire me.

Five hundred blog posts. Two hundred prayer letters. A published creative nonfiction essay. A transportation coordinator for a national research study. A Nissan Versa. Fifty-something years of showing up.

At some point, you have to laugh. Or at least write a blog post about it. Which, come to think of it, is the most on-brand response I could possibly have. Post number five hundred and one. Filed under Things That Are Funny Now But Weren’t Last Tuesday.

I am choosing to believe this is temporary. That somewhere out there, an organization is looking for someone who can write a story, coordinate a prayer network across three continents, and navigate Cape Girardeau in a compact sedan — explaining all of it in four hundred words or fewer. Someone who has been doing exactly that, reliably, for a long time.

Until then? I remain available.

Overqualified.

Overeducated.

Over fifty.

Enthusiastic.

Reasonably caffeinated.

References upon request. I have several. They will use words like “visionary” and “self-starter,” which, as we have established, is part of the problem. But at least they’ll call back.