Major Insurance Company Apparently DOES NOT Want You If You Are Wood

The Canadian-based financial services giant Sun Life Financial is undoubtedly a company that embraces diversity and inclusion. Yet as another casualty of poor spelling in business, the company evidently does not want employees who are wood.

That’s the implication in an Indeed job posting by Sun Life dated May 28, 2018, for a Digital Marketing Specialist.

Three paragraphs into the job description, the ad writer describes the ideal candidate as “someone that is never board as you keep yourself busy.”

If you’re encountering the English language for the first time, the word board is a noun denoting a long, thin piece of wood.

The adjective bored denotes a feeling of unhappiness caused by something that is completely uninteresting.

By using the noun "board” instead of the adjective bored, the writer may as well have written the following:

Dear candidate. Please do not apply if you turn yourself into a piece of wood while working. As an equal-opportunity employer who recognizes the value of people who can turn themselves into objects, we respect and admire your ability. Even so, it just won’t work for us.

To its credit, the job description does go on to describe Sun Life as an environment where “colleagues recognize potential, and encourage each other to perform at the highest level.”

To help reduce the negative impact that poor writing has on businesses, one can only hope that the day comes soon when someone will say, “I want to encourage you to perform at your highest level. That’s why I have to tell you. It’s bored, not board. But you’ll get it. You have potential.”