What Resumes Don't Tell You
My resume doesn't tell you the whole story. It doesn't tell you how smart I am, how hard I work, or what path I took in the first place. So I'm giving you some of the details here.
In real life, I have achieved creative and practical success in a variety of projects requiring writing, innovation, organization, and hard work. A plain old job list doesn't suffice.
Case in point: until recently I was a waitress for a major bar and grill frequented mostly by people who order their porterhouse steaks well done and can't pronounce "pico de gallo." This is not where I planned to be at thirty-one, after earning a bachelor's degree and qualifying for Mensa. However, waiting tables pays the rent, while having the #3 chatbot in the world does not.
I'd like to do big things again soon. Not too long ago I produced a newspaper. Not too many people can make that claim! I edited, wrote, drew cartoons, did layout, delivered them all, and even attempted to sell some ads. There were other contributors, of course, but I ended up doing the biggest part of it myself.
I have done other things that require organizational skills. I coordinated a local church angel tree program, years ago. More recently, I created a well developed chatbot (artificial intelligence entity) which placed third in a worldwide contest just months after I began. When I'm not playing with artificial intelligence, I'm busy writing the great American coming-of-age novel (150 pages and growing).
In other words, I'm smart. We all know, however, that even smart people make mistakes. Mine was staying in Asheville after college. Just living here and staying here is an exercise in determination (one from which I intend to rest before too long).
Asheville is where you go when you've already made your fortune and seen the world and you just want a cozy, funky little town where you can settle down and teach kindergarten or something. It's not a good place to get started. The presence of four liberal arts colleges nearby should have made me wonder about the availability of good jobs for new graduates. I hoped against hope and decided to stay anyway. That was back in 1997.
Since then I've worked in factories, grocery stores, and bakeries. I've reported for day labor at 5:30 a.m. to ride in the back of a drunk man's truck to do construction work for $6 an hour (minus transportation fees). As a human services worker, I got hit and felt up for a living, coaching retarded people who had mental illnesses and criminal records. I've even performed the worst job in the world: telemarketing.
Don't get me wrong. I've had some jobs filing medical charts, answering phones, shuffling papers. Those jobs were called "temp to hire." They were temp, all right. I stayed a few months here, a few months there. I shot my job history to hell, but I paid my bills, even in January when the work here mostly dries up. I'm pretty proud of my ability to keep going no matter what.
In everything I do, I give the mathematically impossible 110 percent. I hope you will notice that and make it pay off, for both of us.
