Iron your shirt, wash behind your ears and spit-shine your shoes, Campus, the Career Fair has come to town!

This is a very important event for us media-industry hopefuls. Two employers, yes two as in one more than the loneliest number, will be in the Alumni Memorial Union Ballrooms today from 4 to 8 p.m. representing companies that hire for journalism- or advertising-related positions, and both claim to have positions available. How rare!

Spiffy. I'll clean myself up, practice my handshakes, Google stalk all of the employers (both of them!) and print off a zillion resumes. All I have to do is look and act professional, sell my past work and academic experience on a single sheet of paper and show with hardly more than a handshake and a "Glad to meet you," that I'm a qualified and driven job candidate deserving one of precious few positions in the market today. I've worked hard for many years to prepare for this, so I've completed every necessary step. Right?

Drat! I forgot the most important thing: undeserved press coverage!

You may remember the has-been from the 2008 presidential election buzz named Joe Wurzelbacher, better known as "Joe the Plumber." Well, he recently got a brand new gig. You'd be close if you'd guessed that he was an Illinois senator, although his alleged history of tax delinquency might make him feel a bit more at home if he were in Obama's cabinet. In any event, the correct answer is equally stunning. He traded his plumber's license for a press pass (and passport) and is now a political correspondent, having just recently returned to the states after covering the military conflict in Israel. Yeah, really.

Pajamas Media (stick that in your resume and smoke it!), a conservative-leaning blog site, gave Wurzelbacher the position in January and sent him from his Ohio home for 10 days in Israel to cover the fighting involving Hamas forces. Admirably, he said that he wanted to cut through the crap of media biases and report things from — sorry, I just have to — an "average Joe's" perspective.

The trouble is, you can give a plumber a microphone, but you can't make him report. At one point, an Israeli interviewee began an interview by asking Wurzelbacher (who was the interviewer, mind you) on camera what questions he had. Wurzelbacher responded he had so many questions he was having trouble choosing one. Which begs the question, did he not realize he has to ask questions when interviewing someone? Didn't he prepare questions in advance? If he were to be in commercials, he could introduce himself like this: "I'm not a reporter, but I play one on Internet TV."

Even more aggravating, what's he got that I ain't? Of the dozen summer internship applications I painstakingly edited, copied and mailed along with CDs of multimedia work and personal essays galore, I was lucky enough to have a few take the time to tell me that my application, while impressive, was up against highly talented and plentiful competition. At the career fair tonight, hundreds or even thousands of students will apply in all fields for disappearing job positions. Many hardworking, qualified candidates will be turned down (certainly not you, though) with one toss into the circular filing cabinet.

It goes to show it's not what you know, it's how many inexplicably know you through sensationalized media fame. But there is a lesson: asking good questions will take you places. And asking bad ones might just be good enough for a startup blog.

Bring your A-game to the career fair tonight. It's just too important to let your hard work and career preparations go down the drain (pun intended).