Just ONE, eensy weensy little letter...

Not many of you may know this about me, but from birth on, I grew up a print shop brat.

My early years were spent kicking my ball and playing with Barbies next to a Heidelberg 6 color offset press (as big and as long as an entire industrial unit and pictured below for reference) while waiting for my dad to finish a large job for the studios in Hollywood. This gradually morphed into an existence as a super busy, print shop apprentice-type teenager.

Eventually all my years of paper cuts, ink on my hands, sore back and late nights dedicated to meeting atrocious deadlines paid off, as once I became an adult, I also became the co-partner of a print shop.

While my many varied and rare talents included running 7 different kinds of printing presses, a Polar cutter and doing typesetting (both with old school hand held block type for letterpress as well as on the Mac), one of the most coveted skills I had was proofreading. Graphic designers would bring us jobs that had supposedly already passed the scrutinization of an entire panel of proofreading eyeballs in said corporation's marketing department.

But then I would get my hands on it.

And not to toot my own horn here, but toot toot!
Boy did I save the day.
And like a lot.
Nine times out of ten I would find a boo-boo before we went to press. So I'd literally save the graphic designer the following:
a) a lot of money (sometimes tens of thousands of dollars)
and

b) a shitload of shame and embarrassment with their client and possibly some pretty big ass chewings.

If the job had been completed and THEN the typo discovered? Not pretty.

Within no time the graphic designers were dropping jobs off at our front counter specifying at the end of the instructional conversation "Oh, and can you please have Steph look this over before it goes to press?"
Sure. My pleasure.

What does all of this have to do with resumes? I'm getting there... I'm getting there.

Cross over to my current reality, (which unfortunately- due to the economy- no longer includes the printing world) and we come face to face with me, the proofreader, reading resumes all day long. So many resumes, so many chances for error and to drive Steph bat shit crazy.

Sometimes a resume is literally OOZING with typographical errors, other times it's just one small eensy weensy little letter that can literally ruin EVERYTHING.

I present the following examples that landed in my inbox yesterday:

"I will be unavailable for about tree more weeks."

"I worked in the insurance filed."

But today's was a DOOZY.
An absolute DOOZY of a typo. Because of the very nature of the word, it's by far the worst I've ever seen.

Warning, warning! If you are squeamish or a prude- please stop reading this blog post HERE.




A lovely young lady put that she used to work at some sort of trauma center. But instead of putting "Trauma Cnt" (which I'm assuming and hoping to GAWD she meant to put to shorten up the word "center") she put this:

"Trauma Cunt"
What makes it even worse (if that were even possible) is the fact that right below it she put:
 "Provide emotional support for rape victims"

And no, I'm not putting up a clip art picture for that.