Most of the time when you have a typo on your resume it ends up in the too-bad-so-sad pile of rejects. Nothing could be further from the truth for this Lotus developer who, thanks to a lucky error on his resume, landed his dream job.
I had been working in New York as an Executive Administrative Assistant for a nonprofit company that had been dislodged by the '93 WTC bombings. Around that time we had installed an early version or another of Lotus Organizer, which, strangely enough, deposited itself into a subdirectory called "Notes." So when trolling around in a DOS shell, every time I needed to access the Organizer directory, my mind would think "Lotus Organizer" and my deft fingers would type "notes" on the keyboard.
If we have Simon set the WayBackMachine to late 1993, you can find me
typing out yet another version of my resume and transmitting it to all and sundry. Of some 30 copies sent, I received some six callbacks. And in my first interview, there you can see me sitting across from the interviewer surrounded by mahogany and leather, as he places my resume down on the desktop, leans forward and crosses his hands in a stance of thoughtfulness. He looks me directly in the eye and says, "Let me cut to the chase. What we're really interested in is your Lotus Notes skills."
Notes skills? I glance down at my copy of the resume and there it is, staring me in the face; in listing all the software packages I was familiar with, I had meant to list "Lotus Organizer."
What I had actually typed -- at a confident 80wpm -- was "Lotus Notes."
Whoa!
The interviewer continues, without missing a beat. "How well would you say you know Notes?" he asks me. With my heart suddenly racing at the realization of my mistake, at the knowledge that I was being interviewed for a position I was completely unqualified for, I had but a moment to answer.
"I wouldn't call myself an expert, sir." I stammered.
They hired me that day, and I took the v.3 manuals home that night!
I was admittedly blessed by the fact that the executives who had purchased Notes for the company at that time had no idea of what it could do, and I was privileged in that I was the one who enabled them to "discover" its power as it was leveraged across the enterprise. I've since worked for prominent publishing, software, security and financial companies; I've been a professional NYC Notes Developer since then, and love my work!
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Every story in our bloopers series comes to us directly from a SearchDomino.com administrator, developer or consultant. For obvious reasons, some contributors -- including this tale's author -- choose to remain anonymous.
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