It’s been a very good week for Canadian students on the internet. Or perhaps a very bad one.
First, York University student Vanessa Hojda went viral after she accidentally attached a picture of actor Nicolas Cage to a job application, rather than her resumé.
It wasn’t so much the fact that she made a mistake that earned her her celebrity, but the picture itself . . .
. . . which somehow made Cage look even crazier than usual. After she realized her error, Hojda, 20, who was applying for a campus intern position, did what most tech-savvy millennials do about life’s misfortunes: She blogged it.
“Jesus Christ I accidently sent my potential future boss a picture of Nic Cage rather than my cover letter+resume, which was a zip file titled with a bunch of numbers like the JPG I accidentally attached oh my God,” she wrote on her Tumblr account.
Within 48 hours, Gawker had written about it, under the headline “Employment Seeker Mistakes Nic Cage JPEG for CV, Inadvertently Sends Out Greatest Job Application Ever.” Then the Huffington Post picked up on it, then The Washington Post, and then pretty much everybody.
Hojda tells ABC News that so far she’s received two part-time internship offers as a result of her internet fame, but she’s holding out for something full-time. Meanwhile, she has resaved her resume as ThisIsYourResumeThisIsNotAPictureOfNicolasCage.doc.
Then later in the week, a Vancouver Island TV station’s report on a particularly “crumby crime” turned a pair of unwitting University of Victoria students into YouTube stars.
The two young women were arrested last month when, after a night of drinking, they spotted a bag of BBQ chips beckoning from an open garage. Unable to resist — did we mention they’d been drinking? — they took off with the chips, but not before their owner was alerted to the theft by her growling Chihauhua.
She called 911. Three police detachments converged on the scene and, with the help of a canine unit, not to mention a trail of chips, managed to track down and arrest the offenders. CTV’s Victoria outlet dutifully reported the story, but it wasn’t until CNN’s Anderson Cooper picked it up for his “Ridiculist” feature that it went worldwide.
Gawker and “The View” have now also chipped-in (thankyou, we kill ourselves), and at last count the original news report, featuring a hilariously deadpan performance by a police representative, had received over half-a-million views.
The two students, however, have chosen to remain anonymous. Charges were dropped after they wrote a note of apology to the chip-owner.
By Emily Olesen
