Overqualified?

Now that I'm once again shooting for that Big Fancy Job, I'm also once again getting a regular diet of rejection letters in the mail. I don't really mind them--it puts a slight damper on what is usually a productive day, but it's the nature of the beast.

What's funny, however, is the lengths some firms go to convince you that you're awesome, but that they just don't have a position right now. I know they're just form letters, but "your academic credentials and experience are impressive" sounds silly coming from a firm that doesn't want you. Think about it: impressive means "striking or vivid" and thus implies that my particular resume stood out from the crowd.

Now, it's just as likely that it stood out for its complete lack of anything resembling useful qualifications (impressively bad) but the end result is still funny to me. "We recognize that you're one of the brightest legal minds in California, and possibly in the western hemisphere, and that by all accounts you should be teaching at Stanford or a justice of the California Supreme Court. However, your experience and interests do not meet our present employment needs."