BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU PUT ON YOUR PROFILE

Shortly after all the revelry on New Year’s Eve, I was stopped on Kingsway by the police.

“Have you been drinking?” the cop asked.

“No.” I said.

“Prove it.” He said.

I was thinking that he had all the equipment at his disposal. He had the breathalyser, and if I failed that he could shoot me or zap me with a tazer.

But he wanted to gather his evidence in another way – one that I never heard before. “Tell me a joke,: he said. “ … And make it a good one too.”

“It was 1973,” I started. “It was back when I was a world-famous archaeologist. I was driving the University of BC Department of Archaeology truck through the streets of Vancouver. I was near the intersection of Main Street and Terminal Avenue with a small crew, and we were off to investigate a party at a Simon Fraser University – a rival university on the other side of Greater Vancouver.

I saw a flashing red light in the mirror so I pulled over. As I rolled down the window, a uniformed cop said, “If tou don’t think I’m going to give you a ticket for driving 35 miles per hour in a 30 mile per hour zone, you’ve got rocks in your head as well as that truck.”

Apparently the joke was good enough to make the New Year’s cop’s day. “Not bad,” he said as he walked back to his cruiser.

I wondered what made him think I would be able pull off a good joke. He didn’t have a copy of my resume, and I don’t think that my resume would have anything about being funny on my resume. That would be a horrible place to put something like that. If I was looking for a job, an interviewer might be tempted to ask for an example of a joke. There is, however, some mention of me being a “Fitness Humourist for Alive Magazine.  That would been that he would have to get my name from my licence plate, Google my name to produce either this blog or my Linked In profile, and deduce that I might offer a moment of rib-tickling  January 1^st entertainment.

It’s a good thing I didn’t have how sexy I am on my profile.

Mike Broderick , a one- time archaeologist, is a Vocational Rehabilitation Counsellor with the Fraser Health Authority in Port Coquitlam where he helps people with mental health disabilities find and keep full or part time employment .

He WAS the Employment Specialist for the Neil Squire Society in Burnaby where he found employment for people with physical disabilities, A Supported Employment Coordinator at THEO BC (now the Open Door Group), and a case manager at Community Fisheries Development Centre where he helped people move from the fishing industry to something else because there, “Aint no fish.” This means he is VERY familiar with how a modern day resume should look.

He is a newly retired ambassador with the Vancouver Board of Trade and a former member of the Labour Task Force of the Burnaby Board of Trade He does some work as a field Archaeologist, is a fitness instructor and frequent contributor of fitness humour articles to Alive Magazine. He is always saying, “If you can’t be fit, you can at least be funny.”

He lives in Port Coquitlam with his spouse Cecelia. 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.