g l o s s i n g s

notes in the margins

by definition a résumé is:

–noun 1. a summing up; summary.  2. a brief written account of personal, educational, and professional qualifications and experience, as that prepared by an applicant for a job.

And summary is the key here, along with brief. Bullet points utilizing trigger words such as “managed,” “coordinated,” “assisted,” “performed,” “created,” “developed” and “implemented.” Good words but somewhat cliché as is the “traditional résumé” these days.

If you’ve answered phones and written emails, you are suddenly a communications manager. Entered data into a database? Welcome to the fine art of information technician. Helped someone fill out an application, for anything? Now you are an applications facilitator.

We have a whole lot of “professional” terms to elevate the work we do, and we find nothing wrong with using them.  This may have well begun with the women who were stay-at-home Mom’s and then wanted to return to the workplace but couldn’t very well put on their “traditional résumé” Mother, Wife, Housekeeper and came up with domestic engineer. But that’s just a guess, not something I researched and can validate.

Still, I know from having my own résumé reviewed that normal, descriptive terms such as “wrote correspondence for president of company” doesn’t fly like “Communications Manager” does. Doing routine things such as filing, isn’t nearly as impressive as Coordinating and maintaining document storage systems.

So, what does today’s résumé really tell you about a potential candidate? If they know how to enhance their sound of their responsibilities regardless of just what it was they actually did. Potential employers should still be as clueless after receiving one of these as they were before they started looking at it. And yet, daring to step out of the traditional résumé format will probably get you a quick toss into trash can.

So, employers, you get what you pay for. The next time you wonder why that impressive candidate you hired because of their stunning résumé can do little more than alphabetize a pile of papers that then go into correspondingly labeled hanging folders, think about what you could have gotten if you paid attention to that résumé that was outside of the norm but was unflinchingly honest and descriptive.

Résumés do not project personality and contemporary résumés are not really reliable as a brief summary of the actual skillset owned by the applicant.  They are nothing more than canned food for the hungry. And make no mistake, it’s not the applicant but you, the employer, who is the chef of this cuisine. In your hurry you encourage and receive Spam. It even comes with its own can opener, how easy is that!

“You get what you give,” is a maxim I’ve believed in for quite a long time. I forget that often, until something happens to remind me. As I was reading some articles about unconditional love, and considering just how effective, not to mention possible, it is to simply give love without expectation, my thoughts ran back to some things that have happened in my own life over the past 6 months.

It’s been a difficult 6 months, in some respects, and in others it’s been an illuminating time for me.  I went through a very rough period with someone I considered a “best friend,” which caused me to feel hurt and angry. And I was both. At least, until I changed my expectations. When I let go of the anger and hurt, and stopped feeling neglected and trying to hold onto something that I felt wasn’t there any longer, I started to feel better.  That was huge for me.  What I didn’t realize, until later, is that it was huge for my friend as well. 

By letting go of the expectations, and accepting the changes in our relationship, I was able to be receptive when the opportunity to heal presented itself. It took some effort on my part to let that healing begin and it wasn’t without moments of negativity or distrust but the healing is taking place and I needed that to happen, for my heart and my spirit.

What I’ve also realized is that what you give is what you get.  But not necessarily the way it appears at first reading.  What I gave was needy and then what I got was my friend giving needy to someone else.  Perhaps it was what I needed to witness in order to see just what I was doing.  I might not have recognized it any other way.  Seeing my friend turn to another person with the same single-minded dedication with which I turned to her not only hurt and angered me, it confused me.  I felt like I was losing something that belonged to me; something I thought I could keep forever.

At first I tried almost frantically to keep her focus on me, and all that did was make her pull away even further.  Then I reacted to my hurt and anger by going into ignore mode.  She did not exist, even when she was in the same room.  She did, but I refused to let her know that.  I have a bad habit of withdrawing when I’m hurt and shutting out the person I feel hurt me.  I’m pretty good at it, too. The hurt and anger had become an insurmountable wall and breaching that wall was impossible for both of us.

It took time but gradually I sorted through the hurt and anger, and slowly I just let it go.  I accepted that she had moved on and our time had passed.  I realized that I have no control over how others feel or what others do.  The only person I have control over is myself.  That icy chill I was exuding started to thaw and while I did not try to resume the friendship, I did not avoid a reconciliation when it appeared. As a result, we are rebuilding our relationship, albeit with differences.

The friendship is, I think, actually stronger, and more evenly balanced.  What we went through took us from an unbalanced need-driven relationship to a balanced friendship between peers and adults who enjoy and support each other in all aspects.  It may take time to re-build the trust I had in her but I’m trying, although this time doing so with the knowledge that the only person I can really trust is myself. Removing expectations removes the possibility of failure to meet those expectations.   

As I look at the other relationships in my life I realize that I have been just as needy and fearful with them as I was with my friend.  I’ve tried too hard to force an outcome that may, or may not, happen.  And I have too many expectations for a “return on my investment,” so to speak. There are resentments and expectations that I need to remove. Resentment that s/he doesn’t appreciate what I have given them and an expectation that I should get back what I’ve given. 

If I let go of that fear that I won’t be the recipient of their love and affection, then what happens, happens and I’ll still be okay, inside.  Others cannot fail me if I don’t have an attachment to specifics; I just need to let be what will be and appreciate what I get without feeling it wasn’t enough.

Again, I cannot control how others feel or what they choose to do or not do.  I can only control myself.  I have to do what works for me and at the end of the day look in my own mirror and know that I was being who I am at my best.

I feel best when I give anything freely-love, gifts, time, laughter, attention, etc.  And yes, I’d love to have all of those things in return but it might not happen, and that has to be okay, too.  If it’s not then I haven’t “given” anything but rather I’ve simply loaned or put a down-payment on something that I expect a return from, without a guarantee. 

Love, affection, caring and concern just don’t come with guarantees. More importantly, if those things aren’t coming from the heart of someone then it is simply obligatory.  I don’t want to be an obligation.  What I want, what I need, is to be loved, cared for, and wanted because they do, not because they feel they have to. 

None of this is easy, by a long shot, and I have to work on it constantly, but it’s worth pursuing, because quite bluntly, it takes more effort being hurt and angry than it does to do things that make me feel good inside. Hurt and anger are exhausting.  It’s difficult to sleep and you feel drained constantly.  Who wants to be around someone who is miserable all the time?

I know I don’t.

This is going to be a rant.  No two ways about it. This is one of my pet peeves with websites containing valuable content.

I am old-school enough that I usually want to read away from my monitor.  I enjoy the feeling of paper in hand, being nestled in the crook of my couch next to a soft light. I read there.  I make notes in the margins.  I absorb the content you worked so hard to provide. But I’m not able to engage your content this way because . . .

I cannot print your page because it’s not styled for print.

What happens when I try to print your page is this: I often lose a portion of your content because it’s fallen off the printer page.  To overcome this I have a few options (all of them extra work that will, depending on my mood and schedule, mean I’ll blow off the effort):

1. I can attempt to PDF the page (providing you don’t have anything funky embedded into your page that prohibits Acrobat from working its magic) where I can then scale it for print;
2. I can copy/paste into Word, where I then will have to clean up the text (which can be a heroic effort if your page is graphics heavy or table rich); or
3. I can try to reduce the print size so that it fits, which can mean almost microscopic type which is ridiculously small and nearly unreadable anyway.

So, what’s the solution? Add a print.css stylesheet to your page and let me print to my heart’s content.  It won’t take long to do this and once you have a stylesheet developed, you can use it again and again.

This is a ultra-simple and basic example of a print stylesheet from A List Apart:

body {
   background: white;
   font-size: 12pt;
   }
#menu {
   display: none;
   }
#wrapper, #content {
   width: auto;
   margin: 0 5%;
   padding: 0;
   border: 0;
   float: none !important;
   color: black;
   background: transparent none;
   }
div#content {
   margin-left: 10%;
   padding-top: 1em;
   border-top: 1px solid #930;
   }
div#mast {
   margin-bottom: -8px;
   }
div#mast img {
   vertical-align: bottom;
   }
a:link, a:visited {
   color: #520;
   background: transparent;
   font-weight: bold;
   text-decoration: underline;
   }
#content a:link:after, #content a:visited:after {
   content: " (" attr(href) ") ";
   font-size: 90%;
   }
#content a[href^="/"]:after {
   content: " (http://www.alistapart.com" attr(href) ") ";
   }

Try it, you might like it; I know I will!