Jokes aside, I (being probably a good 20-30 years younger than most people here) type very differently outside of this forum. My website has about three capital letters and none of them are at the start of sentences. You could write an entire book (and someone has) about all the Weird Stuff that emerges when text gets disconnected from speech (keymashes, emoticons, etc). Obviously that stuff doesn't turn up in resumes, but I felt like it was worth mentioning.
Here's a funny but true story about how not to get a job. I thought I had posted it here someplace before, but a search isn't finding it.
It was 1985. I had an appointment for an interview with the president or other high-ranking man in a small technical company. I got there on time, but he had forgotten he had scheduled me, and he was out. His secretary called him on the phone and asked what she should do. He apparently told her to try to interview me herself, and gave her some questions to ask me. She appeared quite nervous but was trying to act very professional. She was dressed the part, too. She took me into a conference room and we sat down at the conference table, and she was looking over my resume and her notepad, again trying to act very professional.
There was a spider crawling up her suit jacket, and I didn't know if I ought to say something. It went up over one shoulder, across the back, and came down the other shoulder, and was on her lapel, getting closer to her blouse and skin.
I had been married only a year by then, and had not yet learned the full effect that spiders have on women.
I finally said, slowly, "Um, I don't think you would want me to ignore this any longer, but [pointing timidly] you have a spider..." and I was not able to finish my sentence. Her professional efforts instantly went out the window. She jumped up, knocking the chair back, stiffened up, and screamed, "Get it off me!!" I quickly brushed it off her lapel. It landed on the conference table, and I slapped it, then scooped it up with a piece of paper (I didn't smash it enough to really make a mess), and took it over to the trash can and dropped it in.
That put an abrupt end to the interview. It seems like there must have been someone in the surrounding offices who must have known the boss's secretary was in the conference room alone with a man, and here comes this scream, "Get 'im off me!!" ...but no one came. I don't remember what happened after that, but I didn't get the job. I'm sure she was so embarrassed about her behavior that she never wanted to see me again in her life!
And therein the problem. Take a language which already has one of the lowest redundancies, and remove semantic metadata. What could possibly go wrong?
Neil
(I can't remember which, but I heard mention of a book prize recently given to an author who penned a 500+ page epic as a single sentence. I shan't be bothering.)
(I can't remember which, but I heard mention of a book prize recently given to an author who penned a 500+ page epic as a single sentence. I shan't be bothering.)
Was it in Latin? Or maybe classical Greek?
There's a joke about the speech of Cicero, 106-43 BC. Latin language. Not sure when the joke was first recorded.
A roman senator is running late to an important senate meeting....
He arrives 15 minutes late and enters to see each seat filled, with the exception of his own, and Cicero standing in the middle of the room giving a speech.
He manages to stealthily make his way to his seat without causing too much of a commotion and leans over to the senator next to him, asking in a hushed tone, "hey, what's Cicero talking about?"
The other senator simply shrugs and whispers back, "I don't know, he hasn't gotten to the verb yet"
There's a joke about the speech of Cicero, 106-43 BC. Latin language. Not sure when the joke was first recorded...
Academics are often like that, using a thousand words to project a momentary thought. That makes sense in E.E. Cummings’ case, since his father was a college professor.
We're in danger of Allisonlastname thinking us unkind... can I make it clear that my objections to abuse of conventional grammar, spelling, and white-space syntactical metadata are purely the views of an old pedant, and nothing against the original poster?
A website from which yours truly would immediately click away. Why would you even think that is okay?
One of the frustrations with being the center of the universe is occasionally encountering a poor lost soul who doesn't recognize you as such?
It’s not about me at all. It’s about the quality, or lack thereof, of material seen on line. If someone wants me to look at their website, at least make it readable by using proper grammar, punctuation and spelling, and not using crazy fonts in soft, pastel shades. If someone can’t do that, why should I expend my valuable time looking at that individual’s site? Some people might be accepting of mediocrity. I’m not part of that crowd.
We're in danger of Allisonlastname thinking us unkind... can I make it clear that my objections to abuse of conventional grammar, spelling, and white-space syntactical metadata are purely the views of an old pedant, and nothing against the original poster?
Same here. My gripes about E.E. Cummings-style writings are not targeted against anyone in particular.
I can say I don't really know how to search for a job today anymore since employers want it done online; but a resume is still in order, and at the place I worked from 1985 to 1992, I had to read probably a thousand resumes over those years, to hire a lot of technicians and a few engineers. After that experience, I wrote up a web page on how to do your resume, which is different from what you might have heard in school and other places, as I was the one who had to read them and deal with them. It's at http://wilsonminesco.com/HowWriteResume.html .
The place I've been working for many years has, because of poor economy and sales, had to put me on hourly pay instead of salary, limit my hours to 50 hours a month at $50 an hour (and $100/hr for PCB layout, but I seldom do that), and most months will have a lot less hours than that; so I've had to look for supplemental income. I said that since I'd have to find another job to get enough income, I wouldn't be as accessible to them. They understood completely.
I started looking online for a job, since that's supposedly how we are to do it nowadays, and I signed up with LinkedIn and other services. That proved futile though. I made it clear I was looking for a part-time job locally as an electronics engineer or technician, and that I was not open to relocating or to long commutes, yet they kept emailing things like "We found the perfect job for you! It's in Manitoba / Seattle / New Jersey / West Los Angeles..." and then sometimes they weren't even related, like for a manager position for a Target store. So I went back to what worked in 1982, which was that I just went practically door to door in local industrial parks asking if they needed a technician, and in less than two days of that, I got two offers and had to choose. That's when I started working at TEAC. I don't think I even had a resume at all back then.
Well, I went to a street five miles away where a past employer had been, and slowly drove down the street looking at the signs on the buildings. "Ah, there's one...Uptime Electronics, Inc.. I wonder what they do." I went in and gave the man in the front office my few-sentence introduction, and he went and got the CEO who took me to the conference room and spent quite a bit of time with me. I did my show-and-tell, and he really liked me. Then he gave me a tour of the plant. He said he really liked the way my resume was laid out. Long story short, I got the job. This was the first place I tried totally cold-turkey, not having known two minutes before I went in that it even existed, and I went in without ever seeing a want ad of any kind, and without an appointment.
They handle controllers for CNC machines, large lathes and milling machines, up to six-axis. I'll start by doing repairs, to learn the field, then possibly move into product design & development. I said, "I've been in my industry enough decades that I'm getting bored with it and I'm ready to learn a new one." They know I don't have experience in CNC, but were impressed with what I had done in other electronics fields.
I had put a lot of effort into holding the resume down to two pages, making it as clear, concise, and attractive as I could, but initially thought I'd be emailing it, so there were hypertext links in it. These of course don't work for a paper resume, so then I added a third page that spelled out the URLs and I put QR codes beside them.
Keeping a CV down to two pages, when you've got forty years' of data to put in it, is a major achievement in itself.
Neil
p.s. and what is it with HR departments? I got a CV returned because I hadn't told them about my school 'O' levels (age 16) even though I had included the 'A' level (age 18) and bachelors' and master's and sundry other post-grad qualifications...
Why would you even think that is okay?
