Hey, speaking of resumes...

Unum (insurance)
Data entry clerk.

Hanover Insurance.
Mail room.

I. Zaitlin.
Paper Recycling.

University Of New England.
Landscaping.

Toys R Us.
Night stock clerk.

Shop N' Save
Bagger.

Toys R Us.
Night Stock Clerk.

Wal-Mart.
Night Stock Clerk.

I like it. It's like a great Thelonious Monk jazz solo. The basic points of the theme are implied, so why beat them to death? Your use of space and silence tells the story. It keeps the reader off guard - off balance - and challenges them to dig even deeper.

But I can't really help you much because I got my first job requiring a resume last year at age 44. My resume came straight off my Army annual evaluation reports, since I'm doing the exact same job except now I'm my own boss and not wearing an Army uniform.

Remember this:
"It ain't what you say, it's the way that you say it".

The trick is to build up the importance of what you did with actual provable numbers. This is called "quantifiable".
Any positions of responsibility (even over one person) should be included.
If you don't have a "feel" for writing, get someone who does to tweak it.
I tweaked dozens of evaluation reports and resumes for my buds, and they all totally rocked. They just gave me the facts and I came up with the rest. I put the sizzle in their steak, so to speak. I only had to do a few minor rewrites for capitalization and so forth.

Well, that's a depressing comment on my hopes for being a writer one day.

It's just....I cannot anticipate what other people are going to like, dislike, hell, do period.

No control over it at all.

If there's a probability factor involved at all, I assume I'm fucked.

I'm chock full of things I'm proud of, but none of it is stuff that'd go on a resume.
Likewise, stuff in my work experience, I ain't proud of, so I can't "sizzle", it without feeling like a dirty scumbag liar.

So anyway, what I don't have a "feel", for is telling others what they want to hear.

Here, and in my stories, I can totally be myself, and say whatever I want.
And then, people happen to like hearing it, and that freaks me out.

It's when I have to talk to employers and their flunkies I'm lost.
They're like goddamned aliens.
They don't wanna hear what I want to say, and what they wanna hear, I have no instincts for, since I'm not Neptunian.

Okay, for example, here's the Diacanu honesty-jam version of my "career".

Typing names into form fields with a bunch of other cubicle zombies.

This was mind numbing soul draining tedium I swore I'd never do again, but given the shittiness of the jobs that followed, I'd take it in a heartbeat now.

Sorting envelopes, zipping open envelopes, sorting the mail inside the envelopes, running it through the whole building on a mail cart, putting it in everyone's inboxes.

Oh, and listen to the supervisors spout homophobic and hardcore right wing bullshit ALL. FUCKING. DAY.

All in horribly uncomfortable and unflattering office clothing.

Hellish.
Would never do it again.

Sweatshop work.

Sorting apart paper grades.
Ripping aprt notebooks and binders and sifting their componants apart.
Etc, etc.

Backbreaking, tedious, mind numbing, humilating, terrible co-workers, horrible whip cracking supervisor who sang (horribly) along with the radio.
Shithole.
And not even the satisfaction of knowing you did something worthwhile, since paper recycling is bullshit that doesn't help the planet, isn't good business, and is essentially a mindless make-work job made up via dirty politics.

Every day, I wanted to kill myself, or someone else, and was fully capable and a heartbeat away from doing so.

Eh, not so bad, really.
Except for working with retards.

I'm not equiped for babysitting those people.
I did my best, but that should've never happened.
What if I'd been some sociopathic abusive retarded kid-hater?
Y'know?

Chilling what coulda gone wrong there.

Best job I ever had.
Mostly because I worked with cool people.

Hell.
Second only to Zaitlin in hellishness.

This time, the cool people were gone, and instead it was gun-nut sociopathic bullies who smashed out my car's back window.

The work wasn't so bad, but...damn...y'know?

More hellish than Zaitlin.
Work was back breaking, employees were all as hateful and miserable and criminal as second Toys R Us stint, supervisers were as hateful and awful as Zaitlin, they made you work off the clock or they'd fire you, they ripped me off of my employee discount, and insurance. Evil, hateful, remourseless, criminal cocksuckers all.

Had my final breakdown after that place.
Straw that broke the camel's back.
Been reassembling my marbles ever since.

Well, this is a start. No, no one wants to get up at 3am every day to go enter truck routes into a computer. No one wants to spend every night emptying the tampon recepticles in women's restrooms. And no one wants to wait tables or be a garbage man. Hell, I want to lay on a bed of pillows with a half-dozen nekkid women working full time on coming up with ways to be nice to me. But I don't see a lot of postings for that in the Sunday paper. So you might as well learn to act cheerful while working. Projecting a positive attitude is how you get yourself promoted out of the shitty little jobs. That and "paying your dues".

OK. Rant over. Details. When was your last job? When was your first job? How long did you stay on each job?

I thought you had some kind of computer training. Was that at high school or did you take any kind of course?

Last thing is--and this might be hard--what do you want to do? And why are you good at doing it? Actually, forget that one for now. One step at a time.

Last job, 1997.

First job 1993.

Longest held job, Unum, almost a year.

....like I said, not current...

Seriously, I really think you should give Goodwill some consideration. Check out their website. This is what they do--"Goodwill helps people build self-confidence and gain personal and financial independence through work." You've done plenty of stocking work, so you could start right up working in one of the stores. Yeah it'd be crap work and the pay would be lousy, but it would be money. And it would get you current and give you some time to develop and grow and work with them toward finding a REAL job.

So what, basically a job every 6 months after that? It's not terrible. Yeah the way things are done has likely changed a bit in the past ten years, but you know something about insurance and you know something about retail. It's a start.

I think your biggest challenge, surprisingly, is going to be your attitude. You need to be able to interact with people who may have different views and opinions than you. And you can't have such a negative attitude on things. Your recycling work? It taught you how to work hard, it taught you how to pay attention to detail, and how to work with people.

Actually, I skipped over your synopsises the first time because they were so relentlessly negative and pessimistic--no one wants to read snarky crap about how much you hate working--certainly not someone who is considering hiring you. But I found the landscaping one interesting:

You know what? Every day people do stuff they have no training to do. They do it by stepping out of their comfort zone and taking their best shot at applying what they DO know to what they DON'T know. Every day, life is about going into the lion's den and facing the lion. For a shield you have who you are and your past experiences and you have to go in, hold up your shield and face that lion.

What if you'd been some kind of abusive retarded kid-hater? That's irrelevant because you're not. OK. I've got stuff I need to do. I'll come back here again when I get a chance.

Another basic rule: write for a particular audience.
In other words, spin it for the intended audience - get inside their heads and use the words they expect to hear. Keep them in their comfort zone.

You can still "be yourself". Try this exercise:

Make up a paragraph about anything - like getting a kitten out of a tree.
Now imagine you're conveying the same basic event to several totally different audience levels, like

1. A group of 5 year olds
2. A group of middle-aged educated college types
3. A group of blue-collar "hanging out in the bar" types

You see what I mean? Your word choices, tone, and focus on particular details would be just a little different for each group.

I still put my HS on my resume.

Have you considered attending a local community college? Most of the time the tuition rates are fairly reasonable. You wouldnt' even have to go full time. Depending on what kind of job you can get, your employer might even help pay for school. My wife's going to school part-time (and working full-time) and her employer reimburses her for every class that she passes. Not getting an "A"--just passing the class (though she does the former most of the time). And she started going back to school when she was older than you are now...

Even places like Hooters and a local fast-food barbecue chain offer tuition reimbursement.

Only thing I ever figured out to do was keep my head down and my mouth shut.
And half the time, even that didn't work.

Hmm.....I suppose.

I know.
This is what I'm saying.
That's where my mind goes.
It's that, or silence.

....I.....guess.

Don't know what to say to all that.

Alrighty.

Yup. Here's the dilemma: if you don't want to lead other people and you don't want to do scut work, you need to have some kind of marketable skill. And it doesn't hurt to have a piece of paper that validates that skill--and shows that you can apply yourself, seek self-improvement, and work towards a goal.

Incidentally D, did you see that movie, "American Splendor" a few years back? It was a biography about comic book writer Harvey Pekar [starring Paul Giamacetti]. Pekar was a tragic misanthrope with a dead-end job as a records clerk. And he managed to befriend R. Crumb, who helped him get into the comics industry. Pekar continued to work as a clerk for the rest of his life, but also wrote "American Splendor", a series of autobiographical comic books. Now, granted, the autobiographical comics thing is very 1993, and it is probably harder to get into the industry now than it was 10 or 20 years ago, but look at whatsisname--Vlad? With the "Space Pirates" thing. If anyone told me he'd get as far as he did by crashing the Cartoon Network offices with a notebook full of sketches, I'd-a said they were crazy.

Probably.

Well, I guess I shouldn't go on what a bitter HS english teacher said 14 years ago.

Um...not really, never was good at school, so I figured I was sub-moronic, and that was that.

But lately...I dunno.

This is what I'm saying, I can't get into the heads of others that are alien to me.

The only way I can play off characters who don't think like me in stories is to send them up as characatures.

You have seen me post here, haven't you?

ARRGHH!! This is what I'm talking about!!

I'd tell the story with myself as the ideal audience, and alienate the 5 year olds, feel like a retard in front of the college types, and be tensening my legs to get ready to run away from the blue collar types.

Well a Resume could easily be written for Diacanu.

Problem is the resume in itself may be harmful without a certain detail.

They're gonna see last job 1997 (i.e. March 1997-June 1997).

It's 2007 now. My first question will be as an employer, what have you been doing since then?

My first thought will jump to incarcerated.

Any ideas how to deal with this guys?

Dicky, I'm gonna do the same that I did for ted.....I'll PM you my resume.....so you can look it over....or, you can send me all of your info and I'll make the damned thing for you....and have you ever considered careerbuilder.com or monster? I'm working with them right now to find a clerical job, something not denny's......it's turning out pretty good....

Hey...YEAH!

I get so stuck trying to think of what the other person is thinking, and never getting a lasso around it, I never considered fine tuning what I already do.

And hell, I already do that.
Like, I talk a little different to Garamet than I do Mrs. Albert, and so on.
But that's instinctive, I don't think about it too much.
And they already like me for who I am.

Winning over people who are ambivilent to me, and who want chirpy optimism drawn from a life philosophy I don't embrace...I dunno.

EDIT- But maybe even that is overthinking what I think they want to hear.

Yeah, I haven't been able to solve this one either.

Flopped a Target interview over it.

Hmm, I'll think about it.

The issue Face brought up is a huge roadblock though.

well, why exactly did you take a ten year break for working?? If I know that I can make up some excuse that sounds purty.

Had a breakdown, fell into a blackhole of depression, gave up on life and tried to will my body into dying, that went on for the first 6 months or so, didn't really get better or deal with anything, but applied for new jobs for the first couple years, but from there on, the longer it got, the harder it got, and the less I applied, and then finally threw in the towel, and sunk into the quicksand of the internet.

Then, from '01 to present, it's been a deliberate marbles reassembling project, and I finally have my mind back, and some extra smarts besides.

So tell them you took the time off due to mental health issues that made it not possible to work. Make sure you tell them that you have worked through them and feel ready to try again.

Ssss, I dunno....
Almost better to tell 'em I did a stretch at rikers....

no, it's not. Everyone has mental health issues at some point or another. Just make sure you let them know that you're better...even if you aren't.

I wouldn't say I had mental health probs. I'd say something like I had an opportunity to take an extended period from employment, which I took and utilised by developing various writing projects. However, I felt it was time to go back into traditional employment. Or summink

why not? They can't discriminate against you because of past health issues...as long as it doesn't affect his work it shouldn't be an issue.

I know legally they can't but the interviewer will nevertheless associate 'mental health problems' with unreliability and being a bit of a liability for the business, especially if there is no previous work experience in the field = Too much of a gamble for the business.

Besides, I don't think D has been medically certified with having had a mental health problem (?) -- complete pandora's box.

Nope.
S'why I fixed myself.
Medical certification nails down the stigma.
Might as well wear a scarlet letter.