The past participle of pay paid. Not payed. There’s no such word as overpayed.
:smack:
Aw, hell. Gaudere’s law strikes again.
It may be “mean”, but it is extremetly useful. As others have said. This is a person’s cover letter here. The very first impression they have a chance to make upon the person interviewing and/or hiring them.
It’s not that someone is just dissing an every day mistake. It is a crucial (right or wrong) way to weed out who is serious and who isn’t.
It’s not the mistake itself that gets the resume tossed (I too have done resume screening and interviewing in my job). It is the potential personality trait behind how the typo or error got left on the cover letter or resume in the first place.
It absolutely REEKS of carelessness, laziness and sloppiness. What it says about a potential employee is not "oh ooops, this person is human and made a mistake (they can do that AFTER they’re hired, during the training process), it says “this person didn’t bother taking the time to make sure they presented themselves well”.
It is the same thing as wearing clothes with a stain, or not shaving, or having groomed properly. Whether or not the person intends to, it tells a story about them, and that story to potential employers, says LOUD and CLEAR “I don’t care enough about this job”.
When you’ve got other people who are just as well qualified and HAVE taken the time, they are going to get preference.
Now in my case, I didn’t toss resumes for a small spelling or grammatical error, if the resume was otherwise sterling, but then I wasn’t interviewing ENGLISH Professors either. And my interviews were the frontline interviews. If their resume and interview made it by me, they had the “big boss” to deal with. It was MY hide if they were duds. (Of all the people we hired while I was at that company, everyone fit in like gold and stayed, so I must have done something okay).
I did however, toss resumes for having industry specific errors. They either didn’t know a simple “should know this by now” term of our industry, or they didn’t care. If they truly didn’t know, then they weren’t qualified. If they knew and flubbed it anyway, and didn’t bother to proofread in order to catch it. Well…sorry, that spoke volumes to me.
How come you don’t blame it on your editor? [who chastizes the copy reader who goes home and kicks his dog, who thereupon goes looking for the cat (plagiarized from an author whose name I’ve forgotten)]
Perhaps you meant something different than what you actually said?
There’s a huge difference between proofreading and reading…
Use the del tag. [del]Like this.[/del] Click on reply to see the coding.
[del]Those bastard mods left the goddamned tag off of the row of buttons above the editor? My rage BURNS![/del] Oh, thanks! Looks like I missed the memo on that one. [del]To the MOON, Frank![/del]
I had a poem published where “ballpark” was spelled “balpark.”
I’m still cringing.
Sorry, you only get to nitpick rules that are still in force. The MLA has said that it is perfectly proper usage to end a sentence with a preposition, such as of.
Be happy with the ones you see. Last month, the head of my department brought in some blueberry drinks for everyone (commercially packaged juice drinks). The advertising line on the bottles clearly stated that the drinks:
I was once in a position to hire proofreaders. I was appalled at the number of misspellings and grammatical errors in their cover letters and resumes. If the position was anything but proofreader, I **might **have been a little more lenient, but these resumes went directly into the circular file.
As Winston Churchill once said:
Ending sentences with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.
Hah! Take that, wearer of shoes of canvas!
Off to MPSIMS.
Well, thanks loads…for still further reinforcing the negative attitude I’m questioning. Next time I get on the market, it’s going to be that much harder for me to care about any job.
A typo in a cover letter wouldn’t be a dealbreaker for me, but if I were to mention it and the person rolled their eyes at me? I’d end the interview right there. If they said, “My god, that’s embarrassing” then I would ignore the error and would, in fact, tend to like the applicant. I don’t expect people to be perfect. I expect them to try. There’s a huge difference. Working with people is way more about acknowledging error and trying to do better than it is about getting it all perfect the first time. I want to see how someone reacts when called on the carpet for something admittedly minor. Bluster or shrug and I have no interest in working with you.
How about if I said that ever-so-slightly-ironically?
Then you’re a softie compared to 95% of them out there.
It all depends what you mean by called on the carpet. if you just happen to point out something others might pass over, hey, fine. Good eye. If you ask me into your cube for the express purpose and act all super-serious about some trifle, I’m going to assume you’re on a power trip or want to mess with my head, and I’m going to act accordingly.
I once had an immediate supervisor who thought a good break-in routine for “the new guy” (me) was to point out mistakes in a letter one at a time, necessitating eight drafts of a one-paragraph letter instead of one. I called her on it, and our relationship was never less than tense thereafter.
I just tend to be very sensitized to petty people. They’re usually pretty aware of me, too, so we generally don’t end up facing off.
Sure, it’s annoying, but nothing to get your panites in a twist over.
If I caught the irony, I wouldn’t hire you.
My job is to make sure my employees are correcting errors if they are brought to my attention by my boss, my customers, etc. If you’re going to be snotty about a tiny error, how are you going to react to a big one?
I deal every day with a fucking moron who rolls her eyes when asked to correct errors–things like misspelling customer names, giving out wrong pricing, etc. She thinks it’s unreasonable to get things right. That’s the sort of attitude I can’t stand.
We all make mistakes. The point is to correct them willingly and honestly when you realize them, not to sneer, or lie, or blame someone else. Like I said, I wouldn’t not hire someone for mistakes, but I would not hire them if they blew off correction.