Just wrote my CV - now unemployable

I've just gone through and rewritten my CV and am now unemployable due to the mental state in which the process has left me.

There is nothing more likely to reduce your brain to a gently spreading pool of pink goo than trying to write a CV.

First is the process of remembering everything you've done. I always dread the idea that I will be a witness to a crime one day,  because I struggle to remember what I was doing this time one week ago, let alone what a person said to me two years ago last Tuesday. The detective would say to me:

"Can you describe the offender?"

And I would say something like

"Well, he was a man. Maybe tall. Probably brown hair ..."

And then I would be taken out the back and subjected to a little rougher than usual handling, just for being so bloody useless.

I can't even describe what my kids are wearing on any given day. That's why they have locator beacons surgically implanted; I would be no use providing a description if they got lost.

I'm pretty sure that anything on a CV older than two years is at least 50% made up.

Next is the painful process of customising your CV to the job description. This is fine, provided that you can understand the thing in the first place.

You pull up the position description and you read something like

"To be successful in this role, you will have at least five years experience as a strategic business analytics change specialist in a leading ICT organisation"

Which more or less rules everyone out of contention. No one even knows what a strategic business analytics change specialist is, other than a winning card in Buzzword Bingo. Hunting around on the internet, you can't see any evidence that this type of job even existed six months ago and so the idea that someone out there has been doing it for five years defies belief. In reality, the odds are that someone in HR somewhere, following a few budget cuts, has taken two job descriptions and smelched them together like two bars of soap - which, as we all know, never works (and, yes, smelched is a real word - at least in my house). Having given it a good flerching (another real word, thank you) they've wound up with an amorphous blob of uselessness onto which they've whacked a title and made believe is a real profession.

Which is why it's always best to be at least halfway down a bottle of Cab Sav when you start writing these things. With a little of the Barossa Valley's finest in your veins, you can elevate your mind above these mere words and, in a moment of blissful enlightenment, realise that it's $120K + super for setting up a whole lot of Excel spreadsheets and staying awake during strategic planning meetings.

The final cue for the exit of any remaining sanity is the Sir Humphrey Appleby process. Named for the famous character in Yes Prime Minister who summed up the problem beautifully in this conversation with the Prime Minister, Jim Hacker, looking at the issue of whether having nuclear weapons was a good idea.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lre6gD4lbCw

Sir Humphrey: It's a deterrent.
Jim Hacker: It's a bluff. I probably wouldn't use it.
Sir Humphrey: Yes, but they don't know that you probably wouldn't.
Jim Hacker: They probably do.
Sir Humphrey: Yes, they probably know that you probably wouldn't. But they can't certainly know.
Jim Hacker: They probably certainly know that I probably wouldn't.
Sir Humphrey: Yes, but even though they probably certainly know that you probably wouldn't, they don't certainly know that, although you probably wouldn't, there is no probability that you certainly would.

And there it is. I don't know how I seem to myself, let alone how I seem to anyone else. Notwithstanding this lack of knowledge, I'm forced to consider how a person I've never met with a set of priorities I'm trying to guess will read a document in a style they've never seen about a person they don't know and, if that wasn't enough to take your breath away, on what basis they will then compare that document to other documents and then make a decision about who they'd like to talk to with a view to giving one of these strangers a job.

It's something like blind dating with very little change of a glass or two of wine and a meal of some sort and, unless you're applying for a very special kind of job, almost no chance of getting laid as a result.

So I'm unemployable on the grounds of insanity. Any intellectual prowess of which I boasted in my beautifully presented two pager is now sliding away across the floor, looking for a better life in a world where the laws of physics remain constant from one day to the next and the interactions with other beings of sentience have more basis in reason and logic.

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