Online job boards are an essential evil of looking for a job today. You also need to run the gauntlet of badly designed HR software (Taleo, my finger is pointing squarely at you) that does not let you submit your beautifully formatted Guerrilla resume. Good thing the internet also lets you track down the name of a real person and figure out an email address with a human behind it. However, the lack of precision in the search engines behind the job sites can also provide some much needed comic relief in the hard slog required to find someone to pay you to do stuff. Here are some job postings that a computer thinks line up with my experience that unfortunately I do not think I qualify for.
National Protein Buyer. I meet some of the requirements for this job as I do know how to buy things, and I buy protein almost every week. I am not sure, though, that I could perform this service on behalf of the entire country and I have many outstanding questions about this role. Could I buy only one type of protein for everyone or would each person get to submit their own shopping list? Is this a new federal government initiative to legislate conformity to the Canada Food Guide? How does this mandate intersect with the National Dairy Buyer, as both would seem to involve protein? And most importantly, is this a new role or if not, why did the previous incumbent leave (and is he or she still under a psychiatrist’s care)?
Account Manager, Industrial Cheese. I think this one is definitely out of my league. I am quite a fan of cheese but I only have experience with the domestic varieties. I have no clue whether industrial cheese is defined by its strength, dimensions, or weight (or maybe all of those). Those huge rounds of Parmesan look kind of industrial but I don’t think that’s what they have in mind. Maybe the major client is Kraft since Kraft Dinner certainly has many industrial virtues, including an indestructible shelf life and colour of orange not found in nature. On second thought, maybe this is part of an attempt to resurrect the glory days of dubious cheese products. I think I will just say no.
Noodle Technologist. I suspect that this job involves a different type of technology than I have ever been exposed to but I’m not sure what. I thought that, since it was invented a bazillon years ago by the Chinese and then subjected to many dozens of permutations by the Italians since the 1100’s, the design and production of the noodle was pretty much a done deal. But maybe that’s not the case. Perhaps this opportunity is at the bleeding edge of the noodle frontier, creating noodles that could travel to Mars or designing mechanisms to create on-demand personalized noodles for special occasions. Alas, I will never know.
Oops, gotta go now – a new list of high impact jobs just landed in my email.