Posted 5:35 PM by Angie Schultz

Resume Padding

Yesterday my old grad school sent me mail, which they never do unless they're begging for money. But this was a computer printout with my student information on it, and printed at the top of the form was a little line to the effect, "This is the information in our records. Could you correct anything that might be wrong, and return it to us?" Just a standard form, you understand, nothing special.

Well, I don't think they've ever done this before. What the...Ay, chihuahua! Looks like there was a little computer glitch down at the old diploma mill.

The important stuff -- name, D.O.B, degrees earned and dates -- was all OK. They even had my undergrad institution and degree correct. But the rest! For starters, they had me down as every ethnic group and marital status. I am a White American Indian Black Asian Pacific Foreign Hispanic (and "Other"), and also simultaneously single, married, divorced, separated, and widowed.

That may explain why I also have four children (three boys and a what-kind-of-name-is-that?), who have between them three surnames of varying ethnicities. The youngest of these was born when I was six years old. Two of them also attended my alma mater (which ain't cheap), and two attended other regional universities, leaving me to wonder how I afforded all this education. Perhaps it was due to the wealth of my current, nameless, spouse -- whose listed D.O.B. makes him three years older than my parents. I got me a sugar daddy! (His birthday's coming up here in a few days. I'd send the old geezer a card, if I knew who he was.)

Furthermore, the form says I was a Chi Omega (uh, no), that I lettered in cross-country (I couldn't have lettered in cross-the-room), that I belonged to Psi Chi, which is the honorary society in psychology, and that I received an engineering scholarship.

I'm tempted to leave those in. Fear me!

Finally, my permanent home is a four digit number in Germany. No street or town or anything, just a number. They're so advanced over there.

So I gotta correct this. Let's see:

Athletics:

Relativistic Hall Pong
(a sport we invented late one night in the hallway, played with a tennis racket and a very bouncy ball)

Honorary Societies:

Phi Beta Kappa (snicker)

Student Activities:

Nobel Prize in Physics (1988)

Think they'll notice?