every year the society for women in engineering (SWE) at uc davis would host their 'dinner with industry' in which students could sit down and have dinner with the latest pawns to get hired by area engineering firms.
networking.
i would go every year to support SWE. every year i had an internship already lined up in my hometown so i was happy to just listen to the interminable guest speaker and eat a three course meal served by the students in my humanities electives. for those less fortunate than myself, SWE compiled a resume booklet that they would provide the companies with in order to allow the companies to predetermine which students they would schmooze between garden salad and chicken with wild rice.
my friends and i had been attending career fairs, job fairs, and networking events since our engineering balls had dropped and many of us had become extremely jaded. "just fax us your resume and we'll put it in our database for when we're hiring" was second on the list to "i like you as a friend" for us engineers. often we would conjecture that this database didn't exist or if it did, our resumes were never looked at by human beings. at best they were fed into a computer and scanned for certain "keywords".
having a scientific curiosity, i figured i could test this theory. it would require that i submit a resume two weeks before the dinner.
my resume hadn't been updated since i had applied for my internship over two years prior to this. this was irrelevent seeing as i intended to submit a fake resume so preposteruous that if someone indeed read it they would have to contact me.
sitting on the couch at rice lane i began writing a resume with fake qualifications, fake skills and a fake objective.
i claimed to have worked for nasa and been the soul responsible for inventing the countdown. another job i held from "summer '98 to present" was that of a butt pirate. perhaps where my chutzpah got the better of me was the name that i chose to use: my real name. at the top in 36 point font stood my name and real address. the only liberties i took were to claim www.ptak.com as my own (it's owned by a jeweler i've never met) and to give myself the middle name "Dangerman". maybe this was adding one too many red flags.maybe.
but first, a little about SWE: I got along with the ranking girls in the club having spent summer sessions with one and having attended a cheiftans concert or two with another. the club, not for lack of available women in engineering, but instead for lack of men getting their hands on available women in engineering, admitted men.
some of the male officers were smart students albeit slightly odd socially. the club did boast the membership of the dimmest bulb in the engineering department, a tall asian named dave. his membership is significant because he would be the only living organism that i could submit this resume to and have a chance of the 36 point "Dangerman" (in quotation marks no less) not being detected. i still remember SWE's table at the landing of the stairs in bainer hall and being nervous that my little experiment would be curtailed early by dave.
if it turns out, and the odds aren't that bad, that dave was clinically blind or retarded i'm gonna feel bad for picking on him. not as bad as gray davis should feel for signing his diploma though.here.
