Polishing my resume for the job hunt

So a few of you suggested to me that one of the reasons I couldn’t get a job was because of my lack of a solid resume. Of course, none of you have seen my resume, so none of you actually said that to me. Mostly you said it was because of my unrealistic salary demands, my wardrobe consisting mostly of cut-off jean shorts and replica jerseys and my general lack of oral hygiene. Again, none of you actually said that to me, but that’s generally the feedback I receive from people who interview me.

It’s a free country, so you’re allowed to question my oral hygiene, but last I checked the Bible doesn’t say anything about God creating toothbrushes. Why would he give you teeth but no toothbrushes? Think about it. Seems to me that the guy who made teeth would know a little bit more about taking care of them than some guy who works for a company called AquaFresh. This is what happens though when Big Toothpaste gets their hands on those Washington fat cats in Congress.

But I digress. I was reading up online about resumes and how to make them (turns out your birth certificate isn’t your resume), and it seems like an awful lot of work to me. I don’t think it’s fair for a company to expect me to put in work just so I can go interview with them and not pay me throughout the process. I’ve suggested this in various board meetings (that I’ve crashed) but no one seems to be interested in my ideas to get the best of the best to apply. I know I would apply to tons more jobs if I were getting paid $25 an hour to do it.

Still, I need a job and the whole freelance architecture thing still hasn’t really taken off yet despite the fact that I spend a lot of time sitting around and thinking about how to make it work, mostly by playing Sim City. I thought I had a pretty good project lined up when I heard my next door neighbor’s kid begging his dad for a treehouse. I took a little initiative and drew him up some plans for a pretty sweet treehouse/grotto that I could have built for him for about $15,000, but before I could show it to him the plans got thrown away after they got mixed up in my old newspaper collection that my mom threw out.

I know what you’re thinking. “Why do you have an old newspaper collection?” It’s because for a while I thought I had a pretty nice money-making scheme where I would stand on the street corner with a stack of newspapers and yell, “EXTRA! EXTRA! READ ALL ABOUT IT!” and peddle headlines from a few years ago as new ones. (Holy shit! The Twin Towers collapsed again!) Turned out those newspaper kids didn’t make as much money as I thought and on top of that old man Carter, the publisher of the local paper, took two-thirds of every nickel I made selling papers and kept it for himself. He also locked me in his basement and fed me nothing but gruel. Even worse, it turns out old man Carter wasn’t actually the publisher of the local paper but just some random old man who locked people in his basement. It all worked out in the end, though, when he fired me because he thought I was editorializing too much in my sales pitches.

Getting back on point, though – my resume. I need a resume. So here it is. Any advice would be welcome, or if you want to steal it and use it as your own, that’s cool, too. Just be warned that you’ll find yourself sorely overqualified for most jobs to which you apply.

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Bill Legarm
Address withheld (no way am I giving you creeps my address – unless you’re a lady – then we can talk)
Phone number withheld (see above note)

 

Experience

January 1997-February 1997 | Assistant cafeteria worker

Worked here as punishment for repeatedly calling science teacher a witch (True, by the way. How else could he have built a full working volcano in our classroom?); Washed dishes; Cleaned up trays; Ate leftover scraps for money; The story about the pickles in the back room is totally untrue and not why I got fired.

April 2001-April 2001 | Communist hunter

Rounding up communists for fringe organization in Michigan; Was responsible for the arrest of 14 communists, mostly children; Fired when group found out about my refusal to acknowledge a united Germany – also I don’t know what a communist is.

November 2001-December 2001 | Mall Santa

Point of clarification: By Mall Santa I mean Front Yard Santa. The company that hires the Mall Santas didn’t hire me, so I got my own costume and set up in my front yard. In hindsight that wasn’t the best idea, but if attempting to bring joy to the neighborhood is wrong (and, according the arrest warrant, it is), I don’t want to be right.

July 2005-May 2006 | Stalker

Long story short, apparently the girl I thought I was dating wasn’t actually dating me. More on that in a later post. Still, this counts as a job because I got a hold of her bank account number and so I was kind of getting paid to do it.

September 2008-present | Freelance Architect

Designing and building buildings for major cities and corporations. My designs can be seen in various places including in my head and scribbled on public restroom walls, which is where I do my best thinking.

Education

All my life | Street smarts

You could hire somebody that reads books and has a degree, but do they know how to make a weapon using some rope, a piece of gum and a medium Frosty? Neither do I, but while they’re reading and getting degrees, I’m sitting around in my underwear watching MacGyver. Who do you think is going to figure it out first?

Skills

• Bob Barker trivia
• Opening Excel on my computer
• Watching Knight Rider
• Driving exactly 7 miles per hour over the speed limit
• Playing the Flying W on the guitar
• Really good at I Spy
• Boiling water
• Pretending to be Jason Bourne
• Eating ravioli
• Huntin’ commies
• As a general rule, if Ronnie James Dio can do it, I can do it better

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By the way, I completely agree with you. I have no idea how I haven’t been hired yet.

 

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Answering comments I haven’t gotten

Even though I’m still awaiting my first real comment, that doesn’t mean I can’t make a few up for a brand new Friday tradition. For some reason, the made up people who posted these made up comments posted them in letter form. Also, someone actually sent me a letter. I didn’t even realize mail service still existed. Guess you learn new things every day.

Dear Bill,

I also get the chills whenever I think of KARR from Knight Rider. How can we prevent this from happening in real life?

Sincerely,

Mike, Florida

Dear Mike,

That’s just it. We can’t. If somebody happened to make two Pontiac Trans-Ams with artificial intelligence and one had a programming error that made it evil, there’s nothing we can do about it, mostly because David Hasselhoff is too old at this point to kick KARR’s ass.

I’ve sent numerous letters to my congressman demanding action be taken to prevent just this situation, but so far I’ve gotten no response. Isn’t it just like Washington fat cats to wait to fix a problem until it’s too late?

-Bill

Dear Bill,

Who’s to blame for the suckiness of The Matrix? Keanu Reeves?

Sincerely,

Dave, Ohio

Dear Dave,

First off, don’t you dare ever speak poorly of Keanu Reeves again. As a general rule, I don’t wallpaper my room with posters of bad actors, which is why I have my Wall of Keanu (and by “Wall of Keanu” I mean “Room of Keanu”).

Still, he could have really saved us all a lot of trouble by just picking the blue pill. So if anything, maybe blame Keanu’s dedication to his craft and therefore his unwillingness to go off script. Also, there’s a good chance he was getting paid by the hour, so it certainly benefitted him to drag things out as much as possible.

-Bill

Dear Bill,

I know you think it would be cool to “bone a mermaid,” but trust me, I dated a mermaid once. It seemed like a good idea at the time but, long story short, I forgot to put water in the bathtub one day and when I got home from work she had dried out and I was left to clean up the mess and flush her down the toilet. My landlord was not happy.

Sincerely,

Tyler, Texas

Dear Tyler,

That’s horrifying. Still. Totally worth it.

-Bill