For the past few days, I’ve been out of the political news-blogosphere loop, so I don’t know what’s going on. Let’s do something different: CONFESS!
I suspect that most people, at one time or another, have lied on their resumes. I’ll tell you about one of my resume lies.
When I first arrived in the nation’s capital back in 1998, I was using a resume with a big fat whopper on it. At that point I wasn’t using a computer regularly and didn’t own one. I’d prepared papers in some prehistoric form of MS Word while in school, but that was about it. For reasons I still can’t understand, I decided to exaggerate my computer experience. “Three years of word processing experience” would have been appropriate, but I wanted to puff myself up: Programmer.
Yes, I wrote that I was a computer programmer! I had no idea what programming was, what the latest languages were…it just sounded cool. For a while, nobody asked about my programming skills. When I landed in DC, I visited a few temporary employment agencies. A job placement person at one of the agencies noticed that I’d worked with the agency before.
“Oh, you’ve done programming for us before? What company?”
My first instinct was to lie. She didn’t ask what languages I knew. All she asked was where I did this programming. OK. I can lie my way out of this.
“Uh…that’s sort of a…typo.” I decided to tell a different lie.
She looked at me as though I were the biggest idiot she’d ever seen, frowned and said, “That’s a big typo.”
If I were a bit paler, the embarrassment would have shown. Face burning, feeling like the idiot I was, I croaked, “Yeah.”
She didn’t say anything else about it. I didn’t get a call from the agency, but that was a small price to pay. As soon as I was able, I removed the fiction from the resume.
(What were the chances that I’d lie about work I’d done for an employment agency, and years later I’d be standing in a branch of the same agency and getting called out? I have an unconventional employment history. Maybe I’ll blog about it one day.)
Your turn! Use your real name or an alias if you must. Tell us about your resume fiction.