Sixteen Kick-Ass Resumes You Have to See to Believe

Dear Followers, Fellow Bloggers, and Drop-Ins   —  If you haven’t heard from me over the past couple of days, it’s because I’ve descended into the deep, dark hole of preparing month-end, quarter-end, and year-end employment tax reports, not to mention W-2’s and W-3’s.  Once this tax season is over with,  I’m going to need some serious WD-40 to lubricate my brain and get me going again. Either that or a few days on a beach beyond the reach of the polar vortex, the IRS, and those damn robo-callers who consume more of my monthly airtime than all other callers combined. I had this great idea to save their numbers under the contact name ‘x’ and assign every last one of them the no-ring ringtone. This was working quite well until about three months ago, when I tried to save the latest robo-caller’s number only to have my phone flash “Memory Full.”

That said, since I don’t presently  have the time to write a halfway decent, much less  indecent, post, I’m going to give you a treat to hold your appetite: a link to Business Insider‘s article “The 16 Most Creative Resumes We’ve Seen.”

You will love it, once you get over the shame of how absolutely boring and archaic your own resume is.

Maybe after I get through with all these tax documents and w-hatevers, I’ll take a whack at my own resume.  Maybe I’ll engrave an edible resume on a slab of chocolate to submit to Cadbury, See’s, Lindt, Dove, and Ferrero-Rocher. Surely they need experienced tasters.  Or a  [delete delete delete]. I can’t tell you the second one because I’m going to use it for real and I don’t want anyone stealing my idea, much less the position I’m after. But I promise to let you know if I get the job.

If you come up with a really fresh c.v. (creative vitae) of your own, send me a snapshot and I’ll post it on my blog.

Bloggers Anonymous

Blogger’s Confession

Hi.  My name is Terry Portillo and I’m a blogger.

My blog, Generation HR, was originally intended to be a forum for fellow Human Resources professionals. Sadly, most of the HR conferences  I attend are so boring they should be billed as Humanoid Discourses. So I decided to devote my blog to cutting edge, controversial issues rather than creating yet another digital drug for insomniacs. Consequently,  my merry band of followers now  includes a bear hunter in Alaska, a stoner in Colorado, a pastry chef in Texas, and  a street photographer on the island of Patmos.  Gotta love Social Media. It doesn’t get any more diverse than this!

 Blogger’s Nine-Step Program

1. We admit that we are powerless over Blogging and that it has taken over our lives.

2. We’ve come to believe that a power greater than The Internet can restore us to sanity.

3. We choose to become Followers of God as we understand Him.

4. We Google and take a fearless moral inventory of our online presence.

5. We admit to ourselves and our Followers the exact nature of our wrongs.

6. We’re entirely ready for God to delete all these defects.

7. We humbly ask Him to remove our shortcomings and to  increase our Search Engine Optimization.

8. We make a list of all the people we’ve abused on Twitter and #makeamends.

9. Having had a social media awakening as the result of these steps, we share this message with fellow Gravatars.

 Blogger’s Prayer

God grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change,
the courage to blog about the things we can, and wisdom to know the difference.

Post-Script

I burned my family’s dinner while I was blogging this.

Writing Most Fowl – How Writers Differ From Ordinary Mortals

Two characteristics which distinguish writers from ordinary, pen-wielding mortals are vision and style. A dozen people standing on a street corner may witness the same event: let us say a chicken crossing a road. The eleven non-writers will view the chicken’s crossing as a meaningless, mundane act. However the twelfth, the writer in the crowd, will see it as a rite of passage or as a window to some universal truth. To illustrate how an author’s vision and style characterize his writing, below are some fowl adaptations of a dozen famous literary works, with my sincerest apologies to the original writers.

When Mr. Bilbo Chicken of Fowl End announced that he would shortly celebrate his eleventy-first birthday by crossing the road, there was much talk and excitement in Henton. – J. R. Tolkien

Billy Chicken had become unstuck in time. – Kurt Vonnegurt

Last night I dreamt I crossed the road to Manderlay again. – Daphne DuMaurier

Cluck did not read the newspapers, or he would have known that trouble was brewing, not alone for himself, but for every chicken fromPuget Sound to San Diego. – Jack London

The chicken with black feathers fled across the road, and the Gunslinger followed. – Stephen King

Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird! No hungry vehicles tread thee down. – John Keats

You see a chicken who crosses the road and you ask, “Why?” I see a chicken who never crosses the road and I ask, “Why not?” – George Bernard Shaw

‘Twas a far far better road I crossed than I had ever crossed before. – Charles Dickens

And the chicken, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting, on the shoulder of that road. – Edgar Allen Poe

His was not to reason why. His was but to do or die. Across the road raced the chicken. – Lord Alfred Tennyson

The houses are haunted by white chickens. None of them made it across the road. – Wallace Stevens

To cross or not to cross, that was the question. – William Shakespeare

Why DID the chicken cross the road?  So he could blog about it.

Declaration of Interdependence

It’s common knowledge that the original Declaration of Independence was, for all practical purposes, written by, for, and about white male property owners. What would happen if we gave that declaration a twenty-first century makeover? The heart of the revised text might read something like this.

We hold these truths — following years of eye-opening civil rights marches, presidential proclamations,  and federal legislation — to have finally been made evident, that all men and all women, of all ages, races, religions, ethnicities, national origins, sexual orientations,  abilities, disabilities, and perceived disabilities, are endowed by their Creator — or by One Big Bang Randomly Scattering Sub-Atomic Particles — with certain Litigable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Equal Pay for Equal Work.  To secure these rights, the EEOC, along with local, district, and supreme courts, are instituted among Men and Women and Transgenders, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed — that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to hold Tea Parties and to Occupy Wall Street and to pose questions via Facebook to Candidates Competing in Endless Televised Debates to institute a new Government as most likely to Lower Unemployment, to  Raise the Stock Market, to Protect Property Values, and to keep Terrorists, Tax Collectors, and  Drug Lords at bay.