WHEN did you last read your curriculum vitae? Naturally you added this year’s
publications and chopped the rest about a bit to freshen it up, but did you
actually read it?
If, like me, you’ve had one rumbling away for a couple of decades, you’ll
probably find that on closer inspection it resembles a spare room in need of a
good clear-out.
I also have one of those. It’s stacked with scientific ephemera that all
seemed pretty important at the time. On a high shelf is a box file that despite
the deepest of deep guilt, hasn’t been opened since the early 1980s. Inside is
gently scrambled research material that might once have been the basis for a
radical new interpretation of . . . Oh well, too late now.
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I root glumly though the pages of my CV. When had it grown to 13 pages? It
seems only weeks since I first started typing it, picking out the letters
painfully on a borrowed teletype. Since then, it must have been through six
operating systems and heaven alone knows how many computers, so I guess only the
name and date of birth are still the original keystrokes.
Something had to be done, so one evening I attacked it—Hollywood
style—with a blue pencil and a large drink.
Soon I was really worried. There was stuff here even I could barely remember
doing. Why did I make such a fuss about my rudimentary Fortran experience? Was I
really so enthusiastic about podsols and gleys? What about my alleged prowess in
earthworm taxonomy? Memory dragged up a sinister mixture of formaldehyde fumes,
strange acts of pedology on lonely windswept moorlands and inscrutable syntax
errors.
If I’d forgotten all this, why should anyone else be interested? What are
people looking for these days? Certainly not the arcane and mysterious chemical
skills I tried to learn from that patient, but quietly despairing, lab manager.
Anyway, I doubt if there is a Kjeldahl apparatus surviving anywhere outside a
film set.
Deeply troubled, I phoned my friend in the recruitment trade. He sighed a
sympathetic consultant’s sigh. “John,” he said, “how long do you think you have
to make an impact? Thirty seconds—a minute tops. One, maybe two, pages. If
you haven’t hooked them by then, you’re history. Don’t worry about the
understated subtle nuances of page 7, they’ll never read it. Trust me.”
I began to go cool on the whole project. Surely, I reasoned, with the
confidence of a man halfway down the bottle, print is dead anyway? Bring on the
active Web page, the sound-bite CV, the streamed video presentation, the CD
business card . . .
I lurched to a halt. Was this really me? I wasn’t convinced.
I reached for the fountain pen and reassuring black ink. If people want to
know who I am, they are going to have to read my writing. If they want it
digital, they can scan it, JPEG it and OCR it sideways or backwards for all I
care, I’m going back to analogue.
Midlife crisis, anyone?