It was a little afternoon on Wednesday, October 3, 1985. I drove up to my old college – where I’d graduated about five months earlier – and saw the “career counselor”, Mrs. Gump (the name has been changed, not so much to protect her identity as because I’ve completely forgotten it).

Mrs. Gump was a flinty, late fortyish woman who had a reputation as a businesswoman; she’d worked for several years for a regional clothing chain based in Fargo. She was working at the college part-time, after having moved to Jamestown to…

…well, that part of the story was a little fuzzy.

But I went in feeling very confident; while I didn’t have a lot of work experience (a couple years at three radio stations, three years as a stagehand at the college theater, two years as a computer tutor, two more as a remedial english tutor, and a bunch of odd jobs), I at least knew how to write. If nothing else, I figured I could write a pretty mean resume.

The woman tore my typewritten rough draft to shreds. The red ink on my draft resume looked like the Valentine’s Day Massacre. Worse, I made the mistake – according to Mrs. Gump – of writing in fairly natural English. Her suggested rewrites…

…sounded like something out of a nineteenth century broadsheet. Lots of passive tense, lots of referring to myself in the third person (“Mr. Berg is considered an excellent…”), lots of superlatives that, in her examples, seemed to dangle in sentences for no more reason than, say, Kevin Federline’s existence (“Excellent references available upon request”) – the sort of stuff that made my news-writing head spin.

“The people you’re writing to aren’t news people. They’re business people. They write and read different”, said Mrs. Gump.

“Like what? Like extras in a community theatre melodrama?” I silently wondered.

So I rewrote my resume. She gave it her stamp of approval, and I walked down to the local printer to get them photocopied on heavyweight paper (“Absolutely vital!”, said Mrs. Gump. “If you don’t use 60-pound ivory-laid paper, you’ll never even get an interview!”) at about a hard-earned buck a pop.

And I looked at them, when they came back the next day (!) and thought “I’m a fine candidate for a Horace Greeley review, anyway…“. And I rewrote my resume in regular English, just to be safe…

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Monday, October 3rd, 2005 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Twenty Years Ago Today. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.