Would you please kindly help me?

So I was

and all of a sudden this floats into my inbox:

"Dear Recruiter,

I'm looking for an opportunity to shine in my skillset. If everything is fine means kindly help me by providing the client name."

Dude. 

I don't know what the hell you said but you just totally ruined my awesome and bombdiggity flow.

Yada yada yada

I thought my inbox was going to implode yesterday.

It was overloaded, which means I was overloaded.

326 emails, the majority of them useless, but nonetheless, I have to sit there and sift through them looking for my needle in the haystack.

Perhaps a better way to describe the way I usually feel on days like this is to share an excerpt from 

"How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life" by Peter Robinson:

The Pony In the Dung Heap
When Life Buries You, Dig
Journal Entry, June 2002:

Over lunch today I asked Ed Meese about one of Reagan's favorite jokes. "The pony joke?" Meese replied. "Sure I remember it. If I heard him tell it once, I heard him tell it a thousand times."

The joke concerns twin boys of five or six. Worried that the boys had developed extreme personalities -- one was a total pessimist, the other a total optimist -- their parents took them to a psychiatrist.

First the psychiatrist treated the pessimist. Trying to brighten his outlook, the psychiatrist took him to a room piled to the ceiling with brand-new toys. But instead of yelping with delight, the little boy burst into tears. "What's the matter?" the psychiatrist asked, baffled. "Don't you want to play with any of the toys?" "Yes," the little boy bawled, "but if I did I'd only break them."

Next the psychiatrist treated the optimist. Trying to dampen his out look, the psychiatrist took him to a room piled to the ceiling with horse manure. But instead of wrinkling his nose in disgust, the optimist emitted just the yelp of delight the psychiatrist had been hoping to hear from his brother, the pessimist. Then he clambered to the top of the pile, dropped to his knees, and began gleefully digging out scoop after scoop with his bare hands. "What do you think you're doing?" the psychiatrist asked, just as baffled by the optimist as he had been by the pessimist. "With all this manure," the little boy replied, beaming, "there must be a pony in here somewhere!"

"Reagan told the joke so often," Meese said, chuckling, "that it got to be kind of a joke with the rest of us. Whenever something would go wrong, somebody on the staff would be sure to say, "There must be a pony in here somewhere.'"

I love that story. My dad used to say that catch phrase when we'd be in deep doo-doo at the print shop with some monumental problem and we were trying to dig our way out.

But anyway, nostalgia aside, it very much applies to my current life sifting through all the people that have emailed me their resumes. By the end of the day I get a little tired, so the people that just ramble on and on make it harder to find my pony. But still, it's my job to do so; I feel compelled to try and pay attention and follow along, just in case I'm missing something good.

Here's an example of one such email I opened up around 4:45 pm:

"Work Experience:

I have not worked for 19 months because I have been attendant college courses, but at the same time I have serving in church, in the past three years, the last time I have worked way in September, 2009 for a hotel, but now I am only attendent part time college courses and I have been looking in past two years for part time job that could help me be flexible in growing my experience. I am confidant you will give me chance and my full potential I will show in the workforce, joyful working time in your company."

Uh, nope. 

No pony here.

Next!

I'ze a Slow-Poke

I'll just start this post off with this picture as this is how I feel about the resume I'm going to talk about:

By coincidence it also exemplifies how I feel most of the time. 

Some dude that worked in a fast food joint emailed me yesterday. While I understand that he's trying to better himself by moving up the food chain (pun intended) to different types of establishments, what made me laugh was this:


He put that he's worked at Jack in the Box from 12/97 to present.


He felt it necessary to put underneath Jack in the Box THIS description:

"A fast food dinning concept with a drive thru"

Ummm, you may think I'm a slow poke but I'm pretty sure I know what a Jack in the Box is.


I'm not sure, however, you know how to spell *dining*.


Duh. 

Yikes-a-hooty

Resume from a bartender came in late yesterday afternoon.


Don't know what she thought I was necessarily going to do for her except perhaps have her swing by to mix us up some fine concoctions to help ease the policy processing and resume viewing pain...

But then I scrolled down and saw this listed as one of her bartending responsibilities:

"Mixing and severing members"

Ummm.... I'll pass.

It's Meanie Monday! Installation #4

Gooooooooooood morning my little chickadees!

Happy Frickity Frackety Monday!

Today's Meanie Monday post is a doozy. I'm pretty sure I probably say that on every Meanie Monday now, but forget about the other ones, this one's icky scary.

So icky scary that we called the police.

I've got your attention now, don't I??

Here we go!

First a little bit of back story.
As you all know from reading my previous posts, I get a lot of offensive, obscene, and repulsive emails. Usually they fall into a few different categories-
a) they don't want anything to do with insurance (for whatever reason)
b) they don't want anything to do with selling anything, ever (even though their resumes has "sales" stuff all over it)
c) they don't want anything to do with the corporate world (even though that's where they've spent the majority of their career time)
d) they hate the particular company that I work for (because obviously, there must have been some kind of a bad experience that left a bad taste in their mouth).

This post is about d). This guy apparently had a bad experience a while back with my company.

Now, as I've said before, no company is perfect. As much as a company may try to have stellar customer service and pro-active management, EVERY company on the planet is going to have people that hate it. It's just a fact of life. There's really no getting around it.

This lovely (ahem) gentleman had an impressive background career-wise, but what he unleashed upon me because of the company I was affiliated with was enough to cause great concern for our safety.

Here's his reply email to me/us:

"Thanks for your inquiry. Thank you for reviewing my online resume. As you no doubt know, ____________ Insurance is a con artist scam operation whereby "nice guys" sell the policies and hard case criminals handle the claims. You collect policy premiums and break your contracted promises. I myself was a former insured and saw for myself the fear in the eyes of the claims reps when I tracked down their rat hole offices seeking some discussion on my denied coverage claims. The cowards actually thought I had come armed to attain some true justice, Clint Eastwood style. The punks were lucky that day because all I wanted from  __________ was fairness, a commodity utterly lacking in the corporate mission statement. I know, naive. Their only question was, "How did you find this office?" Obviously, they needed to do a better job of hiding because someone not as nice as me was inevitably going to visit.

Please come to your senses and find some other form of employment. Perhaps you could join the Catholic Church and tutor pre-teen boys or enlist in an Islamic terrorist organization? Anything would be more ethical and decent than employment in the insurance industry (and do less damage to our wonderful country). If not, may you die an early death and rot in the fires of hell forever. You and your teams do not deserve to live.

FORMER ____________ INSURED"

Ummm, excuse me?
While some of you may have just easily blown the email off and not worried about it in the slightest bit, I'm admittedly not that laid back as from my perspective, the arrival of this email into my inbox created a great cause of concern for our office.

At the nudging of my sweet husband (who about had a heart attack when he read it and immediately went out on his lunch break to buy me another brand new, high powered pepper spray which I now keep in my closest work drawer) the police were called. I knew it was a shot in the dark that anything could necessarily be DONE or SOLVED regarding this email, but we felt it was necessary anyway. I did some background checking on this person, printed down as much info as I could on him and presented it all in a nice pile to the poor officer that was dispatched to our office. He stood there for a long time sifting through the information and as we all predicted, there wasn't much that could be done as the threat was too "general". He did oddly enough suggest that I contact his current employer and show them the email.
Uh...really?
That's what you're suggesting?
Not wanting to further provoke the asshole and possibly unleash yet more wrath from this vile human being, I chose NOT to go this route. I just proceeded to block him via every Do Not Contact route our company has in place, crossed my fingers and hoped against hope that he wouldn't decide to pay us a visit as well, just like he did those poor claims reps.

I've been at this particular job for 3.5 years now and let me tell you, the evolution of anger from the job seekers I encounter has gone from slightly irritated to full blown foaming-at-the-mouth rage. I understand that times are tough and for many, getting tougher by the day. Unfortunately circumstances like these tend to bring out the worst in those who were already teetering on the brink of sanity and rationale. I will of course continue to soldier on like a good employee, sifting through my inbox looking for my decent and deserving job candidates. I'm sure you'll all agree it's okay though that I've adopted the mantra of this little guy as for now, I feel it's all I can really do:

Tee Emm EYE

There's this little acronym a lot of us throw around as of late- 

good ol' TMI.

(It stands for Too Much Information for those of you that have been living under a rock...)

While there are all kinds of different categories of TMI (including gross bodily function reports, activity in the bedroom reports and strange OCD habits that one should keep to themselves to name just a few) the category I'm going to talk about today falls under what I would simply call "Oversharing". 

One example of Oversharing would be when you're checking out at CVS and the lady behind the register thinks she absolutely HAS to tell you about every inch of her life as fast as she can while scanning all 7 of your items at glacial speed. This exact scenario happened to me a few months back. Poised for action at the only available register open in the entire store, this woman took her sweet damn time scanning my items and pausing between each to blab so much info at me that by the time I was allowed to escape with my said 7 items, I knew the following:

1. She had 3 boys, all of which were finally grown and out of the house.

2. They never cleaned their rooms up. Like ever. Their favorite thing to do was to leave food and dishes underneath their beds where they sat rotting and getting moldy and stinky until she realized half the dishes in the kitchen were permanently missing and she finally went looking.

3. She loves Disneyland. Has to go there at least 6 times a year. Tinkerbell is her favorite.

4. She has a new grandbaby named Eileen. That's from the eldest errant son that left his food under the bed.

5. Her favorite color is purple.

6. She refuses to wear nail polish. Doesn't care how ugly her toes look when she's out in public wearing sandals.

According to my grade school level ability in math, that's almost a story PER item. When all I wanted to do was politely buy my cotton balls, suncreen, bandaids, cat litter, Diet Pepsi, gum and nail polish and GET THE HELL OUT. 

But NO, I had to be subjected to hearing all that.

Now I know, that some of you are sitting there reading this and thinking "Man! What a bitch! She can't even have a polite conversation with some poor woman that's obviously lonely and needs companionship."

And to that I say PFFT and Hooey!

(Gasp!)

Hold on there judgey pants, let me explain why:

It would be one thing if I was the one that started the conversation with her and egged her on and kept adding fuel to the fire, but I didn't. And not only that, there were 5 people in line behind me that were standing there tapping their feet and checking their watches that were just as annoyed as I was. 

And just for the record, I was nice and sweet to her, I answered her back but did not "encourage" her to continue by the way I was answering. It totally didn't matter though.

She had an Overshare Agenda and that was that. 

So- keeping that everyday example in mind...some of these same Oversharing People email me their resumes. And I pinky swear, I sit there with my jaw open when I see the messages come through. They are almost always in the cover note/email to me to go along with the resume, although some of the TMI is on the actual resume itself. Here are some examples that make my mouth gape:

1. "I have a ticket right now and on top of that, I totaled my car."

2. "I am in a wheel chair, I use the bus."

3. "I would love to have an oppertunity with your job but i do have a bankruptcy because my ex was an ass and I had to go over a little rocky road. I curently work as a stat tracker but seeking something that can give well benefits and pay me better. Oh and he kicked me out of the house too, I'm living on a freinds sofa."

4. "I have a car. It's a Honda Civic. License no. F2888 ____"

5. "My social security # is 542- 98- ____"

6. "Jello, I got no lisence driver"

7. "I just got back to L.A. from a family crisis. Because of my unfortunate cirecumstances, I cannot fly out of the state any more so if the job requires me to travel, I will have to turn it down."

8. "Sorry I haven't payed my cell phone bill yet and I have the wrong number on my resume so if you could white it out and fix it, that would be gret, you can reach me at 818-358- ____"

9. "I would love to appli but I'm working on cleaning up all lil problems right now."

and on and on it goes... you get the idea.

So people? I didn't need to know any of that.

But here's what I WANTED to say back to them, item by item:

1. Sorry to hear that. 

2. Dude, we don't discriminate. If you can get yourself around and have skills, no prob.

3. Ex's can be asses. That's a given. But do I need to know you're in the middle of a mess and living on somebody's sofa? Uh, no.

4. I'm happy you have a car. And a Honda Civic at that. Those are nice. But why the HELL would you give me your license number?? OMG

5. And speaking of OMG- 

OMG OMG OMG!!

WHY would you put your social security number on your resume? This has happened a few times and the last guy was a Marine, and I IMMEDIATELY  emailed him and told him to take his resume off the job boards and fix it. (And then I thanked him for his service after I lectured him.)

6. First of all, Jello is a dessert. And unless you're Bill Cosby and you're pushing Puddin' Pops, you shouldn't be starting off your salutation to anybody like that. And same thing I said to wheel chair guy applies to you Jello boy, can you get a ride or get yourself around? Okay then.

7. You can't fly out of the state anymore? I don't wanna know what you did. I just, don't, wanna, know. Next!

8. Fix your own damn resume, lazy butt! Don't ask a recruiter/HR type to WHITE OUT something on your resume and fix it... don't email it until it's fixed, because now? You totally tipped your hand as to what kind of an employee you'd be. A HALF ASSED one.

And I also don't need to know that you haven't paid your cell phone bill, dip.

9. Okay, sorry to hear about your Series of Unfortunate Events, Lemony Snicket. But again, TMI. 

It's just too much for a little recruiting person like me to have to absorb. And none of the above examples are ever going to get somebody hired. 

So even if all that shit is going on in your life? 

Don't be an Oversharer. 

Don't be a TMI Offender. 

Keep your circumstances and your stories and your drama to yourself and your mama. 

Peace out.

Dude, I could really use a massage right about now...

These resumes... they're stressin'  me out man.

If I could only find some way to U-N-C-L-E-N-C-H. 


Oh !


I know!


Perhaps some yoga?

Ooo or maybe a massage is what I could use...

Maybe I should ask this guy who put this as the lead sentence in a personal email to me:


"I need to make as much money as I can this year so I can attend massage school next year."




Moron.