So I turn in an application at the gas station up the street from me. I could use some more cash from a part-time job, I always kinda wanted to work in a gas station and it’s a block from my house.
I come home today and there’s a message on my machine. It’s the store manager letting me know he’s reviewed my application. “I see you went to high school in Michigan and you went to college in Illinois. I’ll need your addresses where you lived there before I can process your application. I’ll set it aside until I hear from you.”
I’ve lived in my current apartment for six years. I graduated college in 1992 and moved to Madison six months later. i graduated high school in 1986 and my family moved out of town two months after that. This guy seriously wants to check my background thirty years. For a part-time job in a gas station.
I’m tempted to call him back and have a two-sentence conversation with him. “Are you serious?” being the first one and if the answer’s yes, the second one being “tear up my application.” I mean seriously, what the hell does this guy expect to find off of a 14 year old or a 20 year old address? I don’t even remember any of the addresses where I lived in Illinois. I was in college, I moved like eight times, just like every other college student. I already don’t like the idea of surrendering the personal information to pull a credit report for a job application; I really don’t like the idea of this guy reviewing 75% of my life for, again, a part-time job at a gas station.
Is this usual now? I’ve been getting jobs through placement agencies the last few years and none of them cared where I lived as a teenager or a college student.
For my permanent residence application, the government of Canada wants to know every organization I’ve been a member of since age 18. I haven’t started filling that part out yet because I hate and fear it. I’m petrified that I’m going to leave out some stupid minor thing I added my name to and they’ll find out about it and KICK ME OUT AAUUUUGH! And I’m only 21… I have less than four years to remember, and it’s still going to be hard.
[size=1]Umm… Hopkins Science Fiction Association… American Civil Liberties Union… Straight Dope Message Board?.. Slashdot?[/size=1]
We immigrated to the United States from Canada in January of 1968. My mother would have been maybe 26 or so. Now she has decided she wants to be a citizen. They want her to list every trip she has made out of the country. She is supposed to remember every time she went back home in almost 40 years. Not only that, my sister, who would have been about 4 when we came needs the same list.
Your Mom’s address book might be more useful, assuming she still uses the paper
kind. (You know, the sort that doesn’t have a delete key, and overwriting information means crossing it off, and writing the new data below.)
Thats a lot coming from a gas station! While I was recruiting aplicants had to give information like that also, and for my clearances I had to fill out that information. I had the same problem you are having when I renenwed my clearance. you want to know what my supervisors name was how many years ago!!! Like I was going to remember that. I just made up a name and address.
You graduated college and you want a job in a gas station?
Sure, all you bleeding hearts are whining and griping about the Big Bad Background Checks, but I’d like to see the looks on your faces when you wake up one morning and realize that the terrorists have taken control of our precious automotive fluids!
When I applied for my security clearance they wanted all my addresses from more than 10 years ago. I don’t keep those kinds of things. I did have tax records for most of them, but for one I was nearly stumped. I started calling all my friends to see if they had it in an old address book. (I figured there had to be someone who just crossed it out of an old address book and put the new one in.) In the end, I found one who had all her emails from apparently forever.
Yeah, my security clearance asked for addresses going back 20 years. I was, I think, 24 at the time. I had to ask my mom for some of them. And as for giving contact info for people who knew me there? Oofah!
My security clearence check only went back seven years and I had trouble with that. It took me several days of searching to find all of my (only four) addresses along with people who knew me. I get the feeling that it may be a good idea to start keeping track of these things as I go so that I don’t have to worry about tracking all this info down again when I go up a clearence level.
Uh…2006 is twenty years after 1986, not thirty. Is there something I missed in your post? Or maybe this is why he wonders about your high school education?
I applied for a job last year that wanted complete addresses and phone numbers for employers going back 10 years, and wouldn’t let me either take the application home to finish filling it out, or throw away the incomplete app and let me return with the info to do another one. Whatever info I had, that was going to be submitted no matter what. Would have been nice for them to let me know ahead of time that I’d need to bring all that info with me.
