Resume Red Tag

God I love that movie.

Have you updated your resume lately? I have. It sucks. Well, it’s kind of fun, I guess. When you start, you’re flying. Your whole professional history just pouring out while you nostalgically resist the urge to call your old coworkers.

‘Oh man I wonder what happened to Dave.’

‘I hated that job.’

‘Remember when we took that Ferrari on a joyride around Chicago instead of parking it?’

But add in skills, awards, and references, and pretty soon, you realize the thing is like five pages long and absolutely loaded with high school hijinx and overwritten entry-level slop.

Some are simple to narrow down. You can tell by how hard you have to try to make the jobs sound fancier than they are. I literally called myself each of these at one point.

• News Distribution Coordinator (paperboy)
• Food Safe Quality Control (busboy)
• Clubhouse Inventory Specialist (driving range ballboy - I didn’t even get to drive the little ball picker cart)

Some are a little harder. Other people literally called me these at one point.

• Pizzaiolo (pizza shop manager)
• Assistant Director of Admissions (call center telemarketer)
• Fine Jewelry Management Associate (retail sales)

And some are, frankly, undroppable. These are the first team starters.

• Assistant Head of School for Culture and Advancement and Chief Storyteller (actual title)
• Director of Out-of-School-Time Services
• Classroom Educator

I wonder where I’ve been working for the last 15 years or so…

But I updated this thing at 39 years old with an industry change on the horizon. Do I still go heavy on the education stuff? Do I emphasize my managerial expertise? Do I point out my extensive, genre-bending background? I know it may seem like a simple answer, but when you’re trying to stand out in a crowded job market, maybe leaning into the weird is the way to go. After all, I have a cover letter to overwrite too. I could always explain it there.

Let me also take a minute to say, I’m just joking around about a bunch of my early jobs. I proudly listed these experiences for years, but it’s time to trim some of the fat. I also worked with a bunch of cool people there, some of whom made careers out of these jobs and some who just worked a job and I’m not judging any of them. (Maybe the guy who tried to choke a customer that one time for complaining about bad food. I’ll judge him a little bit.) But I have respect for the fact that I’ve been working since I was 10 and that I’ve worked at so many different places with so many unique experiences on my way to becoming a Digital Marketing and Multimedia Specialist (actual title). I’m not 100% sure why I’m even putting in this caveat, but as I’m writing this, I’m starting to feel like the joke was becoming condescending and I hate condescending people.

Ok, that’s out of the way. Here is my top seven red tag list. Time to send some prospects back down to the minors…

Paperboy

I was 10 years old when I took over my brother's paper route. It was 31 customers deep and every one of them lived on my street save for a single house across National Road in a GRAVEYARD. What a fun, dark winter walk that was. No bike riding and certainly no car riding for a route that small. But I did have one of those sweet canvas delivery bags. I would go through stages where I would roll and throw, but mostly I just laid them on my neighbor’s porches for the wind to spread the funny pages through the yard. They must have hated me. Within two years, I went from 31 subscribers to nine, mostly due to people seeing me playing street hockey instead of doing my job. It did make for unique Christmas mornings, though, and gave me a first glimpse of working while others enjoyed their time off. Seven days a week, ink on my fingers, and a first firing ended my run. 10/10 Gameboy game. Red tag.

Pizza Delivery Guy

God I loved this job. I ended up staying at that shop for like seven years, even as I picked up other gigs in high school and college. It was seriously the most fun and the first time that I worked literally every position in a place, something I would continue doing throughout my career. I’m listing Delivery Guy because I did it the longest, but I was a dough mixer, cashier, baker, and ultimately, manager before an unceremonious fall from grace.

I topped pizzas, worked festivals, scrubbed floors, balanced books and wore the hell out of our famous local T-Shirts that read ‘Have you had a piece lately?’ And of course, I drove that pizza wagon. In fact, before I started using my own car (an extra $1 per delivery bonus), I crashed that pizza wagon. It’s funny now, but when the district attorney got out of his parked Yukon to find my black Honda Civic wagon wedged beneath his rear bumper, I thought my life was over. It wasn’t. My manager, Keith, came out and backslapped the guy until they had a good laugh at my expense.

Anyway, I also had a car impounded at 1:00 am (not my fault), delivered for six months in a car with no reverse (my fault), and racked up countless wild delivery stories. Never delivered ‘extra anchovies’ and never got robbed, but I did deliver pep rolls to a guy who fell backwards while wearing only a towel and got threatened after pulling out about $300 in small bills from my back pocket to make like $1.41 in change. God I loved that job. Red tag.

Fine Jewelry Salesman

‘I like him. He doesn’t know much, but he’s nice.’ Pretty much sums up my time being scared to sell a LeVian ring because you needed to fill out paperwork and I didn’t pay enough attention during my onboarding seminar. First run at retail hours, though. Whew, no thanks. Red tag.

Host and Busboy

I was hired to be a bartender. Instead, I was given a bucket and told to clean up half-chewed food. I had just semi-voluntarily left my pizza shop manager job. Talk about being sent to the minors. On my third day, an oaf of a server who thought he was the star of Waiting slapped my bucket from my hands as a ‘prank’/assertion of dominance. On my fourth day, they sent me home for complaining that the World Cup should be on the TVs instead of a NASCAR race. I don’t think I ever went back. Red tag.

Landscaper

This was my second job one summer to save some money and get outside while I was training for soccer season. The guys would challenge me to run with wheelbarrows full of mulch to prove I was in shape, though now that I’m typing this, I’m realizing they were definitely messing with me. Like when my brothers would ‘time me’ to see if I could do their chores faster than them. It was dirty and exhausting and one time I got a speeding ticket trying to get to the pizza shop for a night shift. The cop literally said ‘boy you’re gonna waste all the money you’re making working two jobs on this speeding ticket.’ Maybe the lamest thing anyone has ever said to me. Red tag.

Personal Trainer

After college, my future wife and I moved to New York City for about a year after she got…an unpaid internship. I landed a job at a ritzy summer camp (‘umm, that’s not my dad, that’s just my driver’) and then ultimately worked at a gym a few blocks from our apartment. After being told I needed to interrupt (mostly women’s) workouts to show them proper pushup form, I abandoned my franchisee dreams and figured out how to use the time clock computer to play Yahoo! Games instead. I kept this on my resume for years after I moved home because I thought it was a clever way to give me a chance to say the words ‘New York City.’ Literally no one cared. Red tag.

Substitute Teacher and Retail Assistant Manager combo job

Both hope for and hope against a robocall at 5:00 am. Smile. Close the door. Tell them ‘if you’re cool and I’ll be cool.’ Hit ‘play’. Then don’t work for weeks during a snowy winter. Then, at night, work retail hours and learn about the cool, hidden mall walker entrance. I hated that job but I did ban a guy from my store, which was a Seinfeld fan’s dream come true. I swear to god it went down just like this. That was a fun year of budgeting. I think I even worked security at a country music festival to make up for the lack of work. Red tag.

More to the Red Tag List

Ok, that’s it for me. Somehow, there are like five more I could list and I didn’t even get into my coaching career! But I think this is a pretty good first cut day and a fun exercise in mapping my weird trail to today.

What are some jobs you would Red Tag? Think I should keep any of these on my bench? Let me know.

I’ll tell you some more stories, and then I’ll help you tell yours.