Take comfort in the knowledge that we are never truly alone, because an unexpected encounter is proving that the spirits of those who have passed from this earth may yet offer us their guidance in times of need: This man’s dead grandma just appeared in his Google Doc.
Wow. How wonderful to know that the departed are still looking out for us from the hereafter!
Earlier today, 24-year old Sean McKean felt truly stuck revising his cover letter for an important job application, his dream of managing the social media presence of a small nutritional supplement startup called CocoNourishment slipping further and further from reach. But just when things seemed completely hopeless, he suddenly felt the warmth of a benevolent, strangely familiar presence with him in the Google Doc: There, in the upper right hand corner of his screen, was an icon indicating that his grandmother Doris McKean was somehow now viewing the document, even though she wasn’t shared on it and had passed away from a stroke back in 2018. So powerful are the transcendent bonds of ancestry that neither the document’s privacy settings nor even death itself could stop her from appearing from beyond the grave to help shape Sean’s draft into a compelling pitch to a prospective future employer.
Doris’s spectral purple cursor has spent the last several minutes flitting all over Sean’s Google Doc, highlighting passages of flat, repetitive prose and using the comment feature to suggest punchier alternatives that emphasize Sean’s experience being a team player from four years of college lacrosse. Already, she’s caught two subject-verb agreement issues, an incorrect use of a semicolon, and no fewer than three capitalizations of the name CocoNourishment that do not match the particular style used in official CocoNourishment copy. Can science explain how Doris is using the Google Doc’s chat window to spitball strong closing sentences that demonstrate Sean’s eagerness to drive positive online engagement with the CocoNourishment brand? No, perhaps not. But when one considers the great love our ancestors must feel as they watch us make our way in the world they left behind for us, such a thing makes perfect sense.
What a beautiful testament to the bonds of kinship!
While Sean was understandably startled at first, typing things like “GRANDMA? HOW CAN THIS BE?” and “I WATCHED THEM BURY YOU,” he’s calmed down since realizing that her lingering spirit only wishes to help him keep that cover letter short, sweet, and on-message. And though Doris’s cursor will no doubt fade back into nothingness once she’s finished the last of her edits to the Google Doc, Sean will remember the strength of her undying love any time he cashes one of the fat CocoNourishment paychecks this cover letter is about to land him.
It’s nice to know that someone is always looking out for us. Here’s hoping that our own forebears will appear in our Google Docs whenever we need their wisdom!
