Tell Me About Yourself

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

In my particular function at my company, there is a rotation program. That means that every few years, you find yourself job hunting. By extension, that means that every few years you find yourself updating your resume. I've been in my current group for about that long, so pretty soon I'll be firmly in the middle of that process. Since bragging and exaggeration don't come naturally to me (well, ok, bragging doesn't come naturally), I figure I'd better start dusting off those skills.

A few years ago there was a commercial in which someone reached the "end" of the internet. While that's fairly impossible (and highly creepy), the other day I accomplished something similarly impressive. I spend a good portion of my day with Microsoft Excel (most kids daydream about spending their working life someday in a cubicle figuring out how to create pivot tables and avoid circular references; I get to live the dream). Anyway, the other day I reached the "end" of Excel.

I have been working on a project for about a year, and my spreadsheet on that product has become pretty complicated. A few days ago, I tried to put a border around some cells, and I got this:



According to Microsoft, "This problem occurs when the workbook contains more than approximately 4,000 different combinations of cell formats." Since Microsoft has an article on this, I suppose I'm not the first, but I think for someone in my profession, this is sort of the equivalent getting 3,000 hits in baseball. I'm not sure if I have anywhere to go but down.

Amazingly, that's not my only big achievement of late. I also figured out a "Japanese" IQ Test" that a friend sent me the other day. Admittedly, it took me an hour or so, which according to the guy that put the link on his site means that I'd probably be unemployed in Japan (although the whole thing is in Chinese, so I'm skeptical that he knows what he's talking about). That said, I think I proved that I can successfully move a highly disfunctional, violent Asian family across a river, something that fills a few gaps in my resume. I had seen this episode of The Office, so that probably helped a bit:



Of course, it's important as part of the job search to be prepared to talk about your "areas for improvement." The other day I sprayed some crabgrass killer on my lawn, and it seems to be killing everything but the crabgrass - maybe I'll use that one.