Not Our Cup of Tea

Amy H. sends this paragraph from a company picnic invitation:

Tickets are available for purchase between now and Oct. 16 and will not be sold at the picnic. Anyone consuming food or beverages, including children, will need a ticket.

Much as we think tender, young children sound delicious, we are opposed to eating them, and even more opposed to drinking them. Unless, of course, someone has taken the time to strain all the lumps. (Oh, but we kid! We kid!)

From the front lines of human resources

Julie R. sent us these resume gaffes. She's hiring new people for her business--but only one of these candidates made it to the second round. You'll see why:

1) From a two-paragraph Objective: “I am very goal-oriented and I achieve over half of all goals I set for myself.”

Maybe I’m too type A – but “over half” is not my idea of success. I can see it now,
"Gee – I set a goal to take the customer’s order and bus their table, but I just couldn’t get 100% of my goal completed."

2) From a cover letter: “I live right up the road so if you want to give me a call at anytime I can come down there in mins.”

Why abbreviate the word minutes? Is that to show just how quickly this person can get to work? Before the word “minute” is finished--and so fast a period is not required between sentences?

3) Here is an example of the shortened resume-speak taken too far. It still needs to make sense, after all. Peppering one’s resume with fancy phrases like “as to” and “therein” doesn’t improve incoherent phrases: “Practice French service and advise as to wines.”

Since the rest of the resume was written in the standard resume past tense, this person should have said, “Practiced French Service and advised patrons about wine.”

4) “HERE I WORKED IN THE SEAFOOD AND PRODUCE DEPT. PREPARING AND MAINTAINING THE DEPTARTMENTS AS WELL AS OFFERING GREAT CUSTOMER ASSISTANCE WAS DONE DAILY. Though I didn’t appreciate the all caps, this seemed more like a cut and paste error from editing. I gave this person a pass to round two because I liked the rest of the resume.

5) And finally, to the person who misspelled their name at the top of their resume: Come on! That is just lazy.

From SPOGG: the Movie

OK, so there is no SPOGG movie. But if there were, we'd use this scene ripped straight from the life of one of our members:

Recently I noticed a "free kitten" ad on the bulletin board at work. Among the usual cute-kitten descriptions was a line stating "perfect for breading." After doing a double-take to make sure this wasn't simply poor handwriting, I knew I had to answer.

The ad having been posted by an old friend, I felt I could harrass her a bit, so I e-mailed, asking if the rest of the litter had been good, and saying that I'd never heard of breading kittens before.

She didn't seem to understand, so I replied stating that we generally wait until they are large enough for the whole family, but I guessed we could take the creature off her hands and try breaded kitten for dinner that night (it was Mardi Gras, after all).

Apparently this made my meaning clear, as she replied saying "Sick, Sick, Sick" - to which I promptly replied with the correction, "Sic, Sic, Sic" and wished her happy National Grammar Day!

Love a Pie Chart, We Do

From GraphJam.com:

What's Worse Than Swearing in a Job Interview?

Have spelling and grammar errors on your resume is apparently worse than dropping the F-bomb. A human resources Web site in the U.K. reports the following:

Jobseekers are missing out because of blunders such as misspelling, inappropriate email addresses and grammatical errors, according to a new poll.

The poll by online recruitment outfit fish4jobs found that three-quarters of employers admit that badly presented and written CVs are more of a turn-off than a candidate showing up late, wearing inappropriate clothes or swearing in an interview.
Worryingly, the most irritating mistakes for employers were, in many cases, the most easily avoided. These include misspelling key details such as the employer's (and even the candidate's) name or job title (reported by 67 per cent of recruiters), grammatical errors (89 per cent) and including irrelevant information (65 per cent). Read more...

At Least the Word Didn't End in a Z

Mima sends this in from her office:

At work, a new sign went up on the coffee machine saying: "Please use the correct muggs! [Two images of coffee mugs here] Mauve muggs for coffee, grey muggs for hot water." I was extremely tempted to cross out the end of the sentence to make it, "Please use the correct spelling of 'mugs'!"

The world is a sad place when a four-letter word that's largely phonetic -- mugs -- becomes tough to spell. But perhaps the author of the sign is a reader of "Juggs" magazine. Then, it would seem perfectly normal.

In any case, we know which mug we'd take to work...