The other day I heard a very funny story about a man who wanted to do something special with his resume and the application he filled out. He sat in the lobby of a well-known Silicon Valley company. He filled out the application with perfectly scripted block letters of an expert engineer. He then took his resume which was printed on a special woven parchment paper. He carefully laid the application over his resume, allow for one and a half inches of the parchment paper to protrude out from underneath the application. Then he carefully made them into a paper airplane How To Make The Best Paper Airplane For Distance.
This wasn’t any paper airplane, it was an exact replica of the same paper airplane that recently won NASA’s challenge which took place in an aircraft hangar where the world record was broken – the longest flying time for a paper airplane. He used the same folds, and exact same design. He then walked to the back of the lobby, and it must’ve been about 40 yards. He carefully waited till the ventilation was just right after someone else had just walked in and the airflow was just perfect. He launched the paper airplane. It flew flawlessly across the lobby and to everyone’s amazement it landed perfectly on the desk right behind the counter of the receptionist.
The gentleman thought to himself, “I’m in, that was perfect.” He waved and smiled with a debonair grin. His wave was something you’d expect from England’s royal family in a parade, he walked out the door, into the parking lot and got into a black BMW that was perfectly detailed. As he did he noticed that he was being watched from the second floor of building, and he gave them a smile and another perfect royal wave. He carefully drove out of the parking lot, stopping at all the stop signs on the way to the street, and drove out.
Then something very interesting happened. No one called him back. He couldn’t understand why he didn’t get a call because his computer scientists credentials were impeccable. He spent three years at MIT, three at Carnegie Mellon where he got his masters, and got his PhD from Stanford in computer science. He had two patents, was involved in a start-up that he partnered, which got bought by a defense aerospace company, where he stayed on board for four more years, and he could write code better than anyone, but he knew so much more.
Still, they never called; “why,” he thought, “the company must be discriminated against me,” and then he figured out what happened; “the company discriminates against aerospace engineers.”
He then decided to go back in and complain to the human resource department for discrimination, and let them know that he wasn’t an aerospace engineer, he was indeed a computer scientist. The human resource department told him that they never got his resume, even though he had sent it by airmail.
Apparently the girl at the front counter in the lobby thought it was a joke. She threw away his perfectly designed paper airplane, along with the application and resume which was built into it superstructure.
