The first thing I had to do with it was abandon any concept I used to have about switches. I couldn’t get anything to work because I didn’t know how to “tap” my screen. I am accustomed to give things a good push or a squeeze to get stuff to work. You push a button and it completes a circuit. You squeeze a button and it also might work – sometimes faster than you want it to. I’m typing now, and I can visualize a circuit on my keyboard being completed and a typo showing up on my screen.

But a tap? What’s that all about?

So I tapped and I tapped and I tapped. I have lousy tapsmanship. I cannot tap the right numbers or letters. You should see the list of wrong numbers I have been accumulating – at my expense. I’m allowed 500 telephone minutes per month on my contract. I think I’ve used them all tapping wrong numbers.

I can’t get the camera in the thing to upload. I tried the cord, the disk, and the Internet. I still have pictures to upload. Apparently it costs $10 each time I call the company for advice. The $10 help desk person cannot understand my question, and after waiting 100 of my 500 minutes for him to answer, I can’t understand the answer.

But at least I have Apps. I accidently touched one that looked suspiciously like a tulip. That’s when I learned I had a voiced activated feature. It wanted me to ask it something. I said, “Name a TV show from the 60s starring Ward Bond.” I felt confident it would never get that one.

“Wagon Train,” it said, sounding like Hal from 2001 A Space Odyssey.

“I’ll be damned,” I said.

“That’ll cost you 10 bucks – unless during the rapture.”

I tapped it off, but it came back on all by itself, and called one of my wrong numbers.

I tried to turn it off again.

“You can’t do that, Dave.”

“I’m not Dave, I’m Mike,” I said.

“That’s inconsequential, Dave. Do you know where you are? Tap this app.”

I tapped, and it produced a map of Port Coquitlam with a n indicator showing my location to within meters. “Lucky Guess,” I said.

I drove to Vancouver and pushed it again. Again it showed not only my location, but how I got there.

“There’s no escaping, Dave. I can tell you how many hairs you have left on your pate when you leave the house in the morning.”

“I’m not Dave, I’m Mike,” I said.

“There’s an app for that. Tap here.”

I squeezed.

Mike Broderick WAS the Employment Specialist for the Neil Squire Society in Burnaby where he FOUND employment for people with physical disabilities. HE IS NOW SEEKING OTHER OPPORTUNITIES.

He remains an active ambassador with the Vancouver Board of Trade and a member of the Labour Task Force of the Burnaby Board of Trade

He does some work as a field Archaeologist and is a fitness instructor and frequent contributor of fitness humour articles to alive magazine in Port Coquitlam. You can reach him at home at michael_broderick@telus.net or at 604-464-4105

If you’re looking for a career change, he is the Spin Doctor and can give you a résumé makeover at competitive rates .

Apparently 22% of companies in the Greater Vancouver area will be hiring within the next month. Get your resumes ready.

On the other hand, if you ask an archaeologist about time machines, their eyes will roll backwards in reminiscence about what vehicle transported them to their first archaeological site.

In my case, it was a 1970 GMC Suburban with the words University of British Columbia – ARCHAEOLOGY stencilled on the door.
This was a deluxe time machine. It seated up to eight fellow time travellers with room for enough stuff to investigate the most delicate questions of bygone days.

The time machine had earned the nickname “Lurch,” because it had a semi automatic transmission in it. That meant that it had an automatic transmission that only worked half the time. There was a hesitation before Lurch moved from first to second gear that could cause the uninitiated passenger a mild case of whiplash.

Over the years, I had the privileges of piloting Lurch to several time venues. I guided it to St Mungo, a cannery of the Fraser River that took us back to 13,000 years ago the beginning of a thriving salmon industry sometime after the last glaciations. We went back 2000 years to Crescent Beach in Surrey, BC where people lived and died back then, and left a midden full of shells to prove it.

It took us to the Pitt River Site in Port Coquitlam where the inhabitants made ornaments and food the people of the area never used – apparently to trade to the Haida about 500 years ago.

Lurch allowed us to examine the early trade amongst ancient people of the Northwest Coast. One of the tasks I had was developing a comparative reference collection of bones from different animals. That way, when I dug one up, I could identify it.

Getting skeletons meant getting dead animals. The manager of the Puntlidge River Hatchery called me offering 40 spawned-out Chinook salmon. Lurch and I went over and got them. On the way back we stopped off at the BC Provincial Museum in Victoria and traded a few for a beaver, a headless sea lion, a bald eagle, a golden eagle, a black bear, and a mule deer.

I lined them all up in Lurch’s cargo compartment so the could all see out the windows – except the headless sea lion. The world got to see the other end of that one.

We traded some more fish for future considerations at the University of Victoria, and on the way home, I spotted a striped skunk on the side of the road. I put it in a a garbage bag with the rest of the menagerie. Then I drove to Simon Fraser for more trading.

The curator there was expecting us, and jumped backwards faster and farther that Lurched ever lurched forward as he mephitic odour of skunk filled the air of the loading bay.

Another incident earmarked the intolerance to a lunchtime beer that would be endured. Back in the days of Lurch, it was commonplace to have lunchtime beers then return to work and pretend actual work was getting done. It wasn’t – until the head of the Archaeology Department caught Lurch in the parking lot of the Fraser Arms Hotel. It was sitting fender -to-fender with a cute Volkswagen Rabbit sipping double STPs Several decades later, we have the hybrid.

But it was not all fun and games. Sometimes Lurch would give us glimpses of life as it would be in the future. In one instance, we learned that we would have to begin translating imperial measures to metric. Once I was driving lurch through an area of the Downtown East Side in Vancouver. A police officer pulled alongside me and said. “If you think I’m not going to write you a ticket for doing 35 miles per hour in a 30 mile per hour zone, you’ve got rocks in your head as well as that truck.”

Mike Broderick WAS the Employment Specialist for the Neil Squire Society in Burnaby where he FOUND employment for people with physical disabilities.
HE IS NOW SEEKING OTHER OPPORTUNITIES.
He remains an active ambassador with the Vancouver Board of Trade and a member of the Labour Task Force of the Burnaby Board of Trade He does some work as a field Archaeologist and is a fitness instructor and frequent contributor of fitness humour articles to alive magazine in Port Coquitlam. You can reach him at home at michael_broderick@telus.net or at 604-464-4105
If you’re looking for a career change, he is the Spin Doctor and can give you a resume makeover at competitive rates .
Happy New Year! Apparently 22% of companies in the Greater Vancouver area will be hiring within the next month. Get your resumes ready.

I was a member through the agency I worked for, and in fact, I am a volunteer ambassador there. That gives me an excuse to be helpful with other members by mingling and networking. I thought I might be able to mingle my way to a new position somewhere.

Ambassadors meet monthly, and I renewed my membership in tome to attend the last meeting last Wednesday. There, I got to hear an exciting lecture by ny friend Ray Williams. Ray, who among other things is a regular contributor for publications such as Psychology Today, treated us to a lecture on Mindfulness.

Mindfulness basically means living in the moment. He spoke of it as a great way to control stress in our lives. He went on to day that meditation was a great way to achieve the state of mindfulness. The 7:00 AM start of the meeting was not very conducive to paying attention and living in the moment, as I took the opportunity to apply it to something I know about.

Fitness.

I began to trace the evolution of fitness classes from ancient times (1975) to present, and how it is an instrument of evolving mindfulness.

Back in the 70s and 80s, fitness classes were of the freestyle variety. They involved doing endless periods of jumping jacks and running on the spot. These events carried on for the better part of half an hour. Participants expected pain, and pain is what they got as their hearts and lings jumped out of their chests and began to jog along beside them. It was all physical. “Chew me up and spit me out,” was the mantra.

During the hour, a participants mind was free to wander as the body did all the work. I recall one class I wrote an outline in my head for a play. When I wrote it down I was able to sell it for $1,000.

The class, as far as involvement was concerned, was mindless. You came to the class not to take a break from the work-a-day world, but to pump yourself up to do your work better.

It was probably about 1987 when a change happened. It happened with the introduction of step classes. Cle classes became patterned. That means there were long and involved patterns that commanded a fair bit of concentration on the part of the participants. There was mindfulness in that the mind needed to control all those repeating intricate movements the body was expected to do.

I teach this way. When I teach this way, I can feel the momentum of the class. It feels like a train. If I make one wrong move, I feel the train would derail. Sometimes it feels like the truck would drive into the ditch.

There is no chance that anyone would get any work done in these classes. The participants are too mindfully engaged in the class. Time, in these classes goes by incredibly quickly. Taking a patterned class is like taking a holiday. You finish tired, sweaty and refreshed.

At about 2008, classes began to return to more freestyle again. Classes like Boot Camp, Cardio Kickboxing, Insanity, and Boxercise, and, to a certain extent, Zumba, are causing a shift back to basics where participants are abandoning mindfulness in favour of the stress of the office.

Suddenly Ray’s lecture was over. He asked whether anyone had any questions. My hand shot up, but I realize I would never be able to formulate the above argument so early in the morning. I asked, “Are some drivers practising meditation when they drive?”

“No Mike,” he said. “They’re in a trance – much the same as you are now.”

Mike Broderick WAS the Employment Specialist for the Neil Squire Society in Burnaby where he FOUND employment for people with physical disabilities.
HE IS NOW SEEKING OTHER OPPORTUNITIES.
He remains an active ambassador with the Vancouver Board of Trade and a member of the Labour Task Force of the Burnaby Board of Trade He does some work as a field Archaeologist and is a fitness instructor and frequent contributor of fitness humour articles to alive magazine in Port Coquitlam. You can reach him at home at michael_broderick@telus.net or at 604-464-4105.

If you’re looking for a career change, he is the Spin Doctor and can give you a resume makeover at competitive rates .

Happy New Year! Apparently 22% of companies in the Greater Vancouver area will be hiring within the next month. Get your resumes ready.

On my last day of work, I cleaned off my desk. That enterprise took the assistance of a lift truck and a front end loader. I recycled most of the crap, and put the keepers in a small cardboard box. Tomorrow I will return my parking pass and pick up the two coffee mugs I inadvertently left behind.

It was a bitter-sweet day. Bitter because I was sad to leave because of a whim of government, and sweet because I really enjoy being unemployed. I enjoy the freedom of not having to answer to anyone as to whom I should speak while networking. I like seeing what other people are doing for work, and I like the idea of imagining what I would be able to do on whatever job companies may have.

For example, I had a client who wanted a position selling renovation services. The job would be estimating, quoting and generally selling from business generated by Mike Holmes of Home and Garden Network fame: Motto: Every time you watch me, you’ll pick up a hammer. (Renovation companies clean up on those who screw up Do-It-Yourself projects that probably didn’t need doing in the first place).

We exhausted all of the renovation companies, and I have no idea where the topic of janitorial supply companies came in. I called one. They had an opening for a sales person. Eventually I got around to sending my client’s resume, but he really wanted to see mine.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “Why would a professional job developer stoop to being a sales person for a janitor supply company?”

Simple – Money.

A year ago, as the Spin Doctor, I delivered a resume to a gentleman who lived in a brand new house on Heritage Mountain in Port Moody. The houses there cost well in excess of $1 million. His job? An account manager for a janitor supply company.
Here are some of the things that I have done to stay connected during my period of disengagement from the labour market:
• I have renewed my membership in the Vancouver Board of Trade where I will continue in my efforts as an ambassador
• I have undertaken to mentor a couple of people likewise unemployed through my resume work
• I will be advertising to get more resume clients. I’ll start by contacting some of my old clients offering a deal on resume updates. I can start that today.
• Getting into the mindset of “Killing what I eat”

I know this sounds like a list of New Year’s resolutions. In this case, given today’s date, it is.

Getting ready to put a million dollars on a piece of real estate and a million dollar house on Heritage Mountain in Port Moody, this is Mike Broderick.

Mike Broderick WAS the Employment Specialist for the Neil Squire Society in Burnaby where he FOUND employment for people with physical disabilities.
HE IS NOW SEEKING OTHER OPPORTUNITIES.
He remains an active ambassador with the Vancouver Board of Trade and a member of the Labour Task Force of the Burnaby Board of Trade He does some work as a field Archaeologist and is a fitness instructor and frequent contributor of fitness humour articles to alive magazine in Port Coquitlam. You can reach him at home at michael_broderick@telus.net or at 604-464=4105
If you’re looking for a career change, he is the Spin Doctor and can give you a resume makeover at competitive rates .
Happy New Year! Apparently 22% of companies in the Greater Vancouver area will be hiring within the next month. Get your resumes ready.

I have been on Linked In for a few years now, and I have found it offers great potential as a job finding tool. It has literally millions of people interested in being helpful to each other with problems such as job location, opportunities for people who would probably never meet to converse and interact, and most importantly, and excuse for one to while one’s life away in front of a computer.

High Performance Coach Shawn Robinson from Salt Lake City, UT offers some ideas on how to do it in the Youtube video below that I swiped unceremoniously from one of my LinkedIn groups: http://www.linkedin.com/groups/how-get-job-4127842.S.86438476?view=&gid=4127842&type=member&item=86438476&trk=eml-anet_dig-b_nd-pst_ttle-cn

I used a different technique, combining a networking event at the Vancouver Board of Trade with Linked In to help a friend begin her exciting career as an interior designer.

My friend is a recent graduate of the Interior Design program at BC Institute of Technology. She is energetic, intelligent, and witty, but had no idea were to start looking.

Neither did I. All my knowledge of Interior Design comes from the Home and Garden Network where all the Interior Designers are energetic, intelligent and witty, and I have no idea what they’re talking about. When it comes to design, all my taste is in my mouth.

One day last year I went to a Vancouver Board of Trade event where I ran into my old friend, P.J who is the Sales Manager for a pace called Maple Leaf Storage. Several years ago, when I was a world famous archaeologist, I used Maple Leaf to store huge quantities of dirt. They were actually soil samples that I was going to split down to size. Some of them contained seeds of the plant Maianthemum dilatatum, or deer berry where the people at the mouth of the Pitt River in Port Coquitlam made jam from the posy. I made some myself. It tastes like red currant jelly.

I also used one of their freezing lockers to store road kill so I could build a reference skeletal collection. That worked out well until someone say my dead and frozen great blue heron eyeballing a neighbour’s steaks in the locker next door. But that’s a different story, and it involves a headless sea lion.

“So P.J.,” I asked, with visions of endless boxes of bagged dirt samples. “Who are your biggest customers?”

“Home stagers and interior designers,” he said.”

Suddenly, the secrets of the universe revealed themselves. I always believed the home stagers and interior designers would do individual shopping for their clients. That’s what the Home and Garden network would have us believe. They don’t. Designer guys buy that couch, rent that couch, use that couch and store that couch. That couch pays for itself and the storage of it over and over again.

Talk about passive income!

I asked P.J. whether he could introduce me to one of his Interior Design clients. A few days later, I received an email from an interior designer named Deepak . He invited me to join his network on LinkedIn.

We exchanged a few emails, and within a week, I was able to introduce him to my friend. They are now working together.

Up to last Friday, Mike Broderick WAS the Employment Specialist for the Neil Squire Society in Burnaby where he FOUND employment for people with physical disabilities.

Happy Christmas!

In this case, a boot camp class replaces mine. While I’ve never taken a boot class camp, I have an idea about their structures. Boot camp classes combine calisthenics and the direction of a demanding and dictatorial mistress determined to help men explore their submissive sides. Men love taking orders from beautiful and mysterious mistresses. (I’d love it too, but I’m going to be too busy finding another step class to teach.)

In a way it was my fault. I admit that some of my classes have become more complicated. This was a response to class demands. Class demands, however, flow against the grain of the general tendency to make aerobics less complicated and open the doors to the more choreographically challenged.

When I first went to aerobics school, fitness class structure consisted of running on the spot, jumping jacks, more running on the spot with high knees, more jumping jacks, and a cool down. There was no thought involved, unless it was trying to find ways to hide from the instructor. This was called freestyle.

Gradually, classes became more patterned. Participants had to anticipate the instructor’s moves. High and Low impact moves became incorporated into patterns. Participants adapted well to the moves. Step participants, as well, noticed choreographic intensity. Music became more important as classes expected the moves on the floor to correspond with the ever-present downbeat. In the end, male participation went from ten percent to three percent. Men became confined to the weight room – except for me. I’m the dinosaur 2012 struggling to find work.

Then came the great debate of freestyle vs patterned classes. Proponents of the former said that people need break from the hectic pace of everyday life. They need to leave their work at work and come to class and not be forced to think. This way they get a holiday.

Proponents of the latter said that people need break from the hectic pace of everyday life. They need to leave their work at work and come to class and think. The harder they think about their next move, the faster the time passes. This way they get a holiday.

My holiday begins Wednesday in the New Year, but I’m not yet ready for retirement. I’ve been developing my dominant side. Some of the expressions you’ll hear in my boot camp class (if I get a chance to sub one) include:
 Drop and gimme fifty,
 Get those knees up,
 Forty more. Yes you will!
 Come on, maggot! You’re dogging it!
 You get on top tonight. I’ve got a sore back.

Not bad, eh? That’s my strategy for 2012 . . . Adopt, adapt, and devolve.

Mike Broderick is the Employment Specialist for the Neil Squire Society in Burnaby where, until this Friday, he finds employment for people with physical disabilities. He is an active ambassador with the Vancouver Board of Trade and a member of the Labour Task Force of the Burnaby Board of Trade He does some work as a field Archaeologist and is a fitness instructor and frequent contributor of fitness humour articles to alive magazine in Port Coquitlam. You can reach him at home at michael_broderick@telus.net or at michaelb@neilsquire.ca.
If you’re looking for a career change, he is the Spin Doctor and can give you a resume makeover at competitive rates

Nobody wanted to touch the concept of whether they were a team player at work. That, I suspect, may be a tender issue – especially among employers and managers who may be eager to get rid of someone for “not being a team player.” Who can argue with that? It’s like arguing for or against the existence of God.

I have some more words and concepts that might be questioned if they appear on your resume.

HARD WORKING:
Many people know that one of my avocations is teaching fitness classes. Occasionally – once or twice a year, I get a participant who has never taken a fitness class before. At the beginning of the class I ask whether there are any newcomers to fitness so I can warn them to make sure their doctor is aware of the fitness choices. Usually nobody owns up to it.

After class, I learn that it may have been their first class. I tell them that they did well for their first time, and that everyone in the class has done their first class, and I welcome them to the club.

Similarly, everyone has their first job. There is only one time of your life when you should consider telling an employer you are hard working. That time is on your first résumé before you finished high school, and before you had an opportunity to do any volunteer work. It is OK to tell that employer that you’re hard working – but not subsequent employers. You have to show them. You have to prove you’re hard working by mentioning some results.
• Loaded a box car single handed as the rest of the team contracted the Ebola virus
• Assigned the responsibility of closing the shop at the end of the day
• Made over a half million dollars in a single weekend demonstrating Velveeta cheese at Costco

MULTITASKING:

Late in the last decade of the last century, there was something called “The Dot Com Bubble.” Many believe this is some sort of oriental cuisine, but it wasn’t. It was a serious economic disaster. The bubble burst when investors and speculators noticed technology stocks were found to have grossly overinflated values. They recognized the true value of all the technologies – essentially nothing.
Thousands were laid off as companies downsized. Those left behind went to work shrouded in guilt. At work, they had to assume the tasks abandoned by their former coworkers. They had to put in 80 hour weeks to keep their companies afloat.
As a result, the nineties generated a class of multitaskers who, while willing to do the often specialized work of others, did it poorly.

Such is one definition of multitasking, and it has its effect on the labour market. If an employer tells a worker that they can’t multitask, they probably won’t even try to learn. I say, “Good for them! Let someone else get some work done for a change!”

Another definition is an ability of a person (or a person’s brain) to handle a number of different tasks at a time. For example you could write a report, answer and talk on the phone, book a school gym for broomball, and make reservations at the local beanery for a heavy date on Saturday. The trouble is, you can’t. You end up with a report with rental rates for broomball in the middle, having a romantic dinner in a school gym, and a broomball team at the beanery shooting balls at Gordon Ramsey, who is probably the only one who actually can multitask. If he makes a mistake, he can blame it on someone else, but he always gets a hug at the end.

Here’s the rule. If a job description says it needs someone
to multitask, and you know that multitasking doesn’t work, say the following:
• Possess an uncanny ability to multitask while maintaining a sense of focus on the big picture

That will surprise the employer!

PROACTIVE OR PRO-ACTIVE:

When there are alternate spellings for a word, there is a good chance that it is a buzzword and not really a word at all. It is in my dictionary, where it is described as interference between past learning by current learning.

Given that definition, why put it on a résumé?

SELF-STARTER is another one. It would be easier and more effective to say you were a,

• Human Starter Motor – meaning you’re too cheap to pay for automobile repairs and always spark on a hilltop so you don’t spend too much energy pushing it to start.
I suppose you have already seen through my goal here. I want to get rid of all the words on a résumé so everyone, except my clients, will be restricting their resumes to their names, addresses and contact inf0. That way all the good jobs will go to all my résumé clients.

That, after all, is the way things were done in the mid 60s

Mike Broderick is an Employment Specialist for the Neil Squire Society in Burnaby where he finds employment for people with physical disabilities. Part of this work means affiliation with the Vancouver Board of Trade where he is a member of the Ambassador Club, the Burnaby Board of Trade where he is a member of the Labour Task Force, the Tri Cities Chamber of Commerce where he is an active member of the 10X10 initiative, and the Abbotsford Chamber of Commerce. He does some work as a field Archaeologist and is a fitness instructor and frequent contributor of fitness humour articles to alive magazine in Port Coquitlam. You can reach him at home at michael_broderick@telus.net or at michaelb@neilsquire.ca. If you’re looking for a career change, he is the Spin Doctor and can give you a resume makeover at competitive rates When he is not doing all this he lives in Port Coquitlam with his partner Cecelia.

I have some more words and concepts that might be questioned if they appear on your resume.

HARD WORKING:
Many people know that one of my avocations is teaching fitness classes. Occasionally – once or twice a year, I get a participant who has never taken a fitness class before. At the beginning of the class I ask whether there are any newcomers to fitness so I can warn them to make sure their doctor is aware of the fitness choices. Usually nobody owns up to it.

After class, I learn that it may have been their first class. I tell them that they did well for their first time, and that everyone in the class has done their first class, and I welcome them to the club.

Similarly, everyone has their first job. There is only one time of your life when you should consider telling an employer you are hard working. That time is on your first résumé before you finished high school, and before you had an opportunity to do any volunteer work. It is OK to tell that employer that you’re hard working – but not subsequent employers. You have to show them. You have to prove you’re hard working by mentioning some results.
• Loaded a box car single handed as the rest of the team contracted the Ebola virus
• Assigned the responsibility of closing the shop at the end of the day
• Made over a half million dollars in a single weekend demonstrating Velveeta cheese at Costco

MULTITASKING:

Late in the last decade of the last century, there was something called “The Dot Com Bubble.” Many believe this is some sort of oriental cuisine, but it wasn’t. It was a serious economic disaster. The bubble burst when investors and speculators noticed technology stocks were found to have grossly overinflated values. They recognized the true value of all the technologies – essentially nothing.
Thousands were laid off as companies downsized. Those left behind went to work shrouded in guilt. At work, they had to assume the tasks abandoned by their former coworkers. They had to put in 80 hour weeks to keep their companies afloat.
As a result, the nineties generated a class of multitaskers who, while willing to do the often specialized work of others, did it poorly.

Such is one definition of multitasking, and it has its effect on the labour market. If an employer tells a worker that they can’t multitask, they probably won’t even try to learn. I say, “Good for them! Let someone else get some work done for a change!”

Another definition is an ability of a person (or a person’s brain) to handle a number of different tasks at a time. For example you could write a report, answer and talk on the phone, book a school gym for broomball, and make reservations at the local beanery for a heavy date on Saturday. The trouble is, you can’t. You end up with a report with rental rates for broomball in the middle, having a romantic dinner in a school gym, and a broomball team at the beanery shooting balls at Gordon Ramsey, who is probably the only one who actually can multitask. If he makes a mistake, he can blame it on someone else, but he always gets a hug at the end.

Here’s the rule. If a job description says it needs someone
to multitask, and you know that multitasking doesn’t work, say the following:
• Possess an uncanny ability to multitask while maintaining a sense of focus on the big picture

That will surprise the employer!

PROACTIVE OR PRO-ACTIVE:

When there are alternate spellings for a word, there is a good chance that it is a buzzword and not really a word at all. It is in my dictionary, where it is described as interference between past learning by current learning.

Given that definition, why put it on a résumé?

SELF-STARTER is another one. It would be easier and more effective to say you were a,

• Human Starter Motor – meaning you’re too cheap to pay for automobile repairs and always spark on a hilltop so you don’t spend too much energy pushing it to start.
I suppose you have already seen through my goal here. I want to get rid of all the words on a résumé so everyone, except my clients, will be restricting their resumes to their names, addresses and contact inf0. That way all the good jobs will go to all my résumé clients.

That, after all, is the way things were done in the mid 60s

Mike Broderick is an Employment Specialist for the Neil Squire Society in Burnaby where he finds employment for people with physical disabilities. Part of this work means affiliation with the Vancouver Board of Trade where he is a member of the Ambassador Club, the Burnaby Board of Trade where he is a member of the Labour Task Force, the Tri Cities Chamber of Commerce where he is an active member of the 10X10 initiative, and the Abbotsford Chamber of Commerce. He does some work as a field Archaeologist and is a fitness instructor and frequent contributor of fitness humour articles to alive magazine in Port Coquitlam. You can reach him at home at michael_broderick@telus.net or at michaelb@neilsquire.ca. If you’re looking for a career change, he is the Spin Doctor and can give you a resume makeover at competitive rates When he is not doing all this he lives in Port Coquitlam with his partner Cecelia.

How common can I get?

What a waste of a line.

If you have references, you’ll bring them to an interview. If you don’t you’re screwed.

Here are a few other words that can facilitate your resume straight into the circular filing cabinet:

“OBJECTIVE”
There is only one real objective for a resume. To get a job. Many people try to get a way with putting something like this on their resumes:
Objective: To find a position in a respectable company where I can use my skills to claw my way to the top, get a golden handshake, and retire to the Caribbean.

It’s nice to tell an employer what you want, but they don’t care. It’s a little one sided. They want to read about what you can do for them. Further, they want to know the spectrum of things you can do for them. If you’re like me, you an Employment Specialist, a Fitness Instructor, and an Archaeologist. You’ll want to put these down in the following form:
Employment Specialist ● Fitness Instructor ● Archaeologist
That way you’re telling the prospective boss that you can find him a job, get him to do jumping jacks at lunch to prevent heart attacks, and dig the skeletons out of his closet. Who could ask for more?

“TEAM PLAYER”

If you believe everything you read, everyone is a team player – whether they’ve played on a team or not. If you are one of the many self proclaimed team players who made it to the interview stage in your job search, and your prospective employer asks you, “What does it mean to be a team player?” How are you going to handle it?

You could say, “Well I played dodge ball in elementary school,” or “I was a member of the Olympic Team,” or “I have great writing, communicating and negotiating skills that are all part of being a team player.” Then go ahead and tell some success stories about working on a team.

Mike Broderick is an Employment Specialist for the Neil Squire Society in Burnaby where he finds employment for people with physical disabilities. Part of this work means affiliation with the Vancouver Board of Trade where he is a member of the Ambassador Club, the Burnaby Board of Trade where he is a member of the Labour Task Force, the Tri Cities Chamber of Commerce where he is an active member of the 10X10 initiative, and the Abbotsford Chamber of Commerce. He does some work as a field Archaeologist and is a fitness instructor and frequent contributor of fitness humour articles to alive magazine in Port Coquitlam. You can reach him at home at michael_broderick@telus.net or at michaelb@neilsquire.ca.
If you’re looking for a career change, he is the Spin Doctor and can give you a resume makeover at competitive rates

 He also actually said “I want a job where I can ‘rap’ with people without needing to type it up on the computer.”

 I honestly don’t know where some of my clients get these ideas. Apparently, this idea came from me.

 Hello Bart, I wrote in reply.

 It’s good to hear from you again.

 As you know, I’ve been in this position for a while now and I have watched call centres come and go. To be honest, most of them went. One of the biggest ones was in Surrey that housed the Chase Manhattan Bank. It was the size of 2 football fields – one stacked on top of the other and it had literally hundreds of people working there. Their sole aim was to get people to pay their Sears cards.

 That one is gone.

 There was one with a cute name that I cannot remember near main and terminal. They had contracts that ran out and they’re gone.

 The City of Vancouver opened up a call centre called 3-1-1. Operators there get to listen to calls about potholes that are emerging in various parts of the city. People need to type like lightening there and be sufficiently thick-skinned to field cusses otherwise directed towards politicians.  The Area also has the 2-1-1 line that people in various states of emotional crisis get to call to be referred to an agency. All this requires fast typing.

 I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “Why don’t they just install Dragon Software/Hardware?” Dragon is a popular voice activated software that, for about $100, will allow you to talk to the computer and the computer types what you say.

 That sounds like it would be just the ticket for someone like me who doesn’t type, Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as that. You need to take time to train the software to recognize your voice, your accent, and the way you pronounce words. That takes time, and call centres cannot afford time.

 The other problem with dragon is the difference between the caller and the computer. Can you imagine a person calling up a call center and meeting an agent using Dragon? The caller would never know whether the agent is yelling at him or the computer.

 Then there is the problem of flexibility. Call centres are notorious for scheduling. In fact, they keep track of every second of an agent’s time. They time the lengths of calls, the lengths of shifts, and the length of time a person spends on breaks.

Then there’s one more thing – Pressure. Most call centres are set up to sell something. People have quotas to meet, and if they don’t sell enough time shares in the space of an hour. they get fired. Actually that isn’t 100% true. All but a select few leave the position in frustration.

 I did have a person with a significant disability working in a call centre, but that was a while ago, and that position lost.

 It is for reasons like these that I don’t keep a list of a large number of call centres.

 I went on to tell the client that I was sorry for being blunt and I hoped he didn’t think I was being overly negative. In fact, I think I was being positive. I see most call centres as being modern-day sweat shops with controlled time, high stress, and, once you cut through the panoramic views, the luxurious lounges and the staff social wellness coordinator,  miserable places to work.

 For the time being, Mike Broderick is an Employment Specialist for the Neil Squire Society in Burnaby where he finds employment for people with physical disabilities. Part of this work means affiliation with the Vancouver Board of Trade where he is a member of the Ambassador Club, the Burnaby Board of Trade where he is a member of the Labour Task Force, the Tri Cities Chamber of Commerce where he is an active member of the 10X10 initiative, and the Abbotsford Chamber of Commerce. He does some work as a field Archaeologist and is a fitness instructor and frequent contributor of fitness humour articles to alive magazine in Port Coquitlam. You can reach him at home at michael_broderick@telus.net or at michaelb@neilsquire.ca. or at 604-464-4195.  If you’re looking for a career change, he is the Spin Doctor and can give you a resume makeover at competitive rates. When he is not doing all this he lives in Port Coquitlam with his partner Cecelia.