Blog

For a period of about two years, I was responsible for reviewing resumes for security consultants and project managers for the tech company for which I work. The majority of the resumes that came through my desk were lackluster, misguided or downright delusional, but there was the occasional CV that caught my eye. Granted, this was typically not in a “Hire this guy immediately!” way, but more like, “Jesus Christ, how has this person managed to live this long without strangling themselves on their shirtsleeves or choking to death on toothpaste?” Here are some of my favorite quotes from some candidates who are likely still looking for jobs, if you need someone to fill a role supervising paint drying or repeatedly punching themselves in the face.

• “I have a great passion to lean.” (I’m imagining this less as a typo and more like the candidate is the Fonz chillin’ at a jukebox.)

• A glamour shot of the applicant and his smokin’ hot wife (“I think Outlook is part of a pirate ship, but at least my wife’s a babe.”)

• “Name: SKILLS, COMPUTER” (I’ll leave this one here without comment.)

• “I am adept at overlooking project details.” (You don’t say!)

Years ago, after working a series of odd jobs irrelevant to my intended career, I landed a position as the office administrator at a tech company. (You get a fine arts degree in a bad economy and suddenly “future best-selling author with no conceivable chance at failure” turns into “Sir, you are screaming at me because you got overdraft fees for spending money you don’t have,” and “Michael, I am trying to teach you how to swim, please stop spitting water in my face.” An office job after this was more than welcome). Aside from the year and a half stint spent under the reign of a manager with the general temperament of a constipated hornet, I have over the last five and a half years enjoyed my job very much, though, having been promoted twice since I started, I do not miss ordering office supplies and answering inane phone calls from sales representatives trying to pitch expensive software to someone with the kind of patience that leads them to hang a sign reading “Complaints About Lunch” above their garbage can. (Seriously, guys, it’s free lunch. I don’t care if it’s turd and ghost pepper sandwiches, you’ll eat it and you’ll like it.) I would get the occasional wrong number and I once misdialed a vendor’s number and accidentally called a sex hotline (sorry, HR), but generally the phone wasn’t a large facet of my job. It remained an occasional distraction from the work I was actually employed to do.

One afternoon, I was entering invoices into our accounting system when the phone rang. The conversation went as follows:

Despite my sincerest and most heartfelt protestations, I turned thirty last Sunday. My social media accounts decided to commemorate this landmark event by targeting their advertisements toward me under the assumption that I have hit or am nearing typical post-thirty milestones while remaining seemingly unaware of the fact that I am a single woman who made an active decision to create an Instagram account for her cat and owns more decorative teapots than cute bras. Upon logging into Instagram on Sunday, the first ad that popped up was a picture of a positive pregnancy test, which, for many my age, would result in joyous phone calls to friends and relatives but inspired instead in me a furious panic in case one can somehow get knocked up by eating corn chips in bed while watching Fifty Shades of Gray….

One time years ago, shortly after a particularly devastating breakup, I decided to go out on a limb and take a chance. After months of feeling sorry for myself over gas station snacks and marathons of Gossip Girl, in a moment of admitted weakness, I peeled myself off of my futon, picked the Funyun crumbs out of my cleavage, and joined OkCupid.

I had heard the horror stories, but at first, it really wasn’t so bad. The messages trickled in slowly, a Hey sexi! here, an obvious copy-paste there. Then all of a sudden some guy is asserting that he has the biggest boner on the internet and a married guy is trying to get me into a threesome. And this guy wants to know how much I can bench, and that guy is just wearing a towel hanging from his ding-dong (so much hairy side-butt.) It’s confusing and scary and there are a lot of Bro-man Polanski’s wielding dead fish and clenched abs. Those pictures amused me the most, the headless torso shots, like you’d walk into a date with this guy and have to circle the bar lifting up shirts. Now, I recognize the nipple rings, but the chest hair is throwing me off. I was expecting a six pack on a spray-tanned hotdog, but what I’m getting here is more Chewy meets The Thing. Tell me, are you HawtLover69? Do you know where I can find him?…

If you read this post that I wrote in September as penance for my negligent attention to this blog, you may have expected that I would actually stay true to my word and once again begin updating with relative frequency. You would, however, have been sorely mistaken. Because I wrote that post in an attempt to spur myself into writing more and then instead I more or less abandoned the blog in favor of such activities as entering into an infinite loop of hanging up my curtains and then knocking them down in my sleep/drunk and changing all of the contact photos in my phone to pictures of my cat. (This has, though, made me more receptive of text messaging, since I have been pretending my kitty has her very own cell phone and is keeping me updated on her whereabouts and goings-on through various aliases, because I’m fairly certain that she’s an Animagus, and probably some kind of international spy, and no one will ever be able to convince me otherwise. Which I suppose makes it sort of uncomfortable for her on the rare occasion in which I have a gentleman caller over, as she hates my sister-roommate’s dog with a passion akin to Donald Trump’s aversion to the gym and seldom if ever leaves my room. Oh, the things she’s seen.)…

Football and I have always had a complicated relationship, in that I find it more boring than watching C-SPAN on mute and people always try to make me enjoy it. Given that I don’t understand the intricacies of the game, my experience watching football is essentially, “Manbeasts run each other over for a quarter of a second and then we watch beer commercials for forty minutes. Rinse and repeat. Oh, and occasionally someone throws the ball.” I mean this in the most respectful way possible, as I certainly couldn’t go out there and do it, given my body composition could best be described as “small but squishy, with a propensity toward tripping over the cat and bruising if someone looks at me too hard.” I just don’t find it interesting, despite a slew of ex-boyfriends trying their damnedest to get me to develop even the slightest interest in the sport they expended so much energy following and discussing. I like you. I get that you like it. But I would rather chew off my own foot and then beat myself silly with it than watch more than one football game in a weekend. If there is a hell, my version (and I am never hyperbolic) is an endless stream of football viewed Clockwork Orange-style from a dentist chair that smells like cat piss to the sounds of Donald Trump discussing feminism. And they only have Caffeine-Free Diet Pepsi…

• Your cleavage is starting to look like an order of crepes.

• Your under-eye wrinkles are taking the shape of the Mississippi Delta. Your glasses seem to magnify these wrinkles, circling them like Highlights Hidden Pictures.

• You have glasses now.

• You know what Highlights Hidden Pictures are, and they conjure up memories of your cranky old dentist whom you may have bitten on accident one time because he uses that plaque scraper like he’s trying to etch Shakespeare into diamonds.

• As a child, I thought the phrase was “hard to make ends-meat,” as in an expensive, complicated-to-make delicacy that one simply could not afford.

• I once repelled a man because I had a chunk of deodorant in my armpit.

• I woke up late and didn’t have time to wash my hair before work so I was going to just take a quick body shower and then put my hair up but I stepped on the shower curtain and fell down and got my hair wet so I had to wash it anyway.

• I cried the other day because I realized the probability of outliving my cat. I then spent several minutes internally debating if cats could make horcruxes and if this would bother me.

• I have no idea where my car is parked right now.

My first full-time job after obtaining a perhaps ill-advised Bachelor’s in Creative Writing during the worst economic downturn my country has experienced in recent memory (it seems “I have successfully written a sestina” is a less marketable skill than Photoshop or programming) was an administrative assistant role at a small local college. It was not a job I particularly cared for as I was still laboring under the delusion that I was destined for literary greatness (as you can see here, I am basically Tolstoy) and answering phones fielding questions from disgruntled college students did not exactly provide me with the artistic stimulation I had become accustomed to in school. For the most part, I very much enjoyed my relationships with the students whom I would see on a daily basis, and answering their questions over the phone allowed me to exercise my compulsive, totally healthy need to please people, although having to explain to someone at great length for the third time that yes, they still had to pay for classes they failed was draining and a bit irksome. I’m sorry, Miss, but messing something up doesn’t mean it’s free. This isn’t Burger King University…

If you have paid any attention to this blog since its inception in March, you will have realized that it has laid dormant this summer for an inexcusable amount of time. Perhaps you were worried about my safety. (After reading this post, I’m sure you are amazed that I have sustained life as long as I have. This is surprising to me as well, as just last weekend, I had to panic-walk half a mile across a frisbee golf course to poop in a pitch-dark Port-A-Potty and then gingerly remove two spiders from my pants, and I have, in recent memory, pinched a nerve in my back by standing up too quickly and pulled a muscle in my shoulder bowling. Darwin, I’m sure, is watching me somewhere, thinking, “Soon, you will be mine.”)…