When I get into a filing mood, I also rather enjoy doing it … with my own stuff, at least. I can’t stand filing other people’s things, much less inheriting their filing systems. It’s when you take a new job (or more commonly, a temp position) involving filing and have to inherit someone else’s excuse for a filing system that drives me apeshit. I could spend weeks trying to wrap my head around some of the workspaces I’ve inherited, wondering just how the blue fuck anything got done by the person who was there before me. I have to fight the urge to turn the desk drawers upside down into a garbage can within the first week of starting the job. I’ve never been much of a “filer” anyway. I keep everything I need in stacks around my workspace, and anything that’s no longer needed gets tossed or put in a cabinet. It’s the desks full of folders and folder racks all full of two-year old e-mail printouts and expired nonsense that got read once a long long time ago in a galaxy far far away and then shoved into a folder that I just can’t comprehend.
Oh, uh, resumes … I worked for HR once and mostly just went into convulsive shock at the egregious spelling and grammatical errors present on a good half of all the resumes I had to review. You know, the “atention too detial” types. What was really interesting were the calls I had to make to potential candidates to have them come in for interviews. I’d say a good half of them sounded as though they’d either been stirred from a drug-induced coma or I’d interrupted them in the middle of a violent domestic dispute because there was at least one other person vocalizing loudly in the background. How do you take notes on a resume about that? “Couldn’t hear candidate due to people screaming in background …”
An applicant’s cover letter stated that if we did not hire her, then she would report us to the Law Society.
A few years later, this same person reported me to the Law Society for not accepting her telephone calls in an action in which I represented her employer whom she was sueing.
When the Law Society contacted me, I stated that I preferred to communicate with her only in writing, and sent them a copy of her job application. Case closed.
Nothing on par with some of the stories here, but as far as unqualified applicants…
I managed the service center for a computer store and occasionaly had to place ads for tech help and review the resultant applications. The typical ad stated a requirement of two years experience in computer technical support.
Recieved one that I would probably have loved to interview. No listed experience with computers in any fashion, but her most recent position was as an aerobics instructor at XYZ gym (known for it’s hot aerobics instructors). It did take me a while to reluctantly decide not to call her in.
Some years ago I worked for a start-up company that received a resume for a network admin position. It was submitted as Word doc, and contained a pretty nasty virus that proceeded to infect our network. I don’t think that the was the first impression he was trying to create! On the other hand, it did show we needed some technical help.
I liked this particular typo: “I am excited for the potential to become apart of your scientific team.”
Well, that was easy. And apart of my team they shall remain.
With my most recent batch, though, my main source of amusement was how many resumes of “detail oriented” people arrived with no cover letter. When it stated in the ad that a cover letter was required. That’s some attention to detail you got there, kid.
In that section of my resume I put a line in there about the two years I spent writing for a local entertainment rag. After I was hired, my boss told me that he was specifically looking for someone with advance communication skills as well as experience as an end-user for our products and services. He said there were a few other applicants with my work experience, but none of them had any kind of writing experience.
Gaudere please ignore this post. I’m not pointing out someone else’s spelling mistakes
Don’t feel bad–I worked at a coffee shop for about nine months where a sign advertised brownies with “whip cream”. And if it makes you feel any better, consonant cluster reduction (or CCR, not to be confused with Creedence Clearwater Revival) is a phenomenon that has been going on in English for a long time, and so far it’s given us such now-standard phrases as “ice cream” and “skim milk”.
I don’t know if that’s any sadder than me singing the alphabet song in my head after I’ve been alphabetizing.
When I worked in a career services office, students’ resumes for the job database had to be proofed before being posted for employers to see, and they had to be proofed to our satisfaction. Students would be called in, and we would go over their resumes with them. One guy, who was in his late twenties and felt he immediately deserved an international management position with none of that working-your-way-up-crap that 22-year-olds would expect to do, came in absolutely perplexed that his resume had been rejected.
It had been rejected because he included a Photoshopped photo of himself, an absolute no-no for any job where physical appearance wasn’t an occupational qualification. I tried my best to be tactful about it, and asked “Why did you include a photo?”
The goofy-looking dude looked me right in the eye and said “Good-looking people get hired.”
All I could do was stare at him a second, thinking “Don’tlaughdon’tlaughtdon’tlaugh.”
One of my co-workers says her resume gets her “just gotta see this person” interviews all the time, as it lists, in all truthfulness, her experience as Miss Costa Mesa, California… and as a Marine.
Not a resume, but on an application. In the “previous emplyment” section, under “reason for leaving”, one applicant wrote, “got fired for stealing money out of register.”
Well, thanks for being honest about it, but I think we may have to go with a different person to fill the cashier position…
Doesn’t “Old Fashion” involve having one’s pants worn way too high, suspenders, blue rinse hair for the ladies, and a cane, walking stick, or Zimmer frame?
