Where's Daniel's Résumé?

It's gone. Bye-bye.

Yeah, well I woke up one morning and spontaneously elected to avoid being prematurely embalmed. Which meant giving up the fastidious, fetishistic, sisyphean habit of updating my obituary every few months.

My résumé has done me not one lick of good in my life. It got me one job – the only job, incidentally, that I ever got by responding to an ad – and that turned out to be a first-class ticket on a sinking ship.

People are not documents. People are irreducible unless they consent to being reduced. What makes me great can't be described; any attempt would fill volumes and still fall short. And what makes me dreadful – plenty, believe me – is never going to make it into a curriculum vitae.

So what's the point? I suppose it's just that, to the sausage-making machine, everything looks like sausage. Any headhunter worth a ruble will tell you: résumés don't mean squat. They're just something job seekers can update so they can feel like they actually did something that day to find a job. They're the index card of the Great Human Resources Database of Indifference.

Résumés, as a document archetype, enshrine a remarkable paradox: that of making their authors feel better about themselves, while giving their recipients a pretext – indeed, a mandate – to ignore them.

I'll continue to get great work the way I always have – by staying in touch with friends, and listening carefully to my customers. Now that I never have to update my résumé again, I'll have more time for both.

You want my résumé? This whole site is my résumé: a living, breathing, digital, combination sandbox and museum of what I've done, am doing, will do. Feed that to the optical scanner.

(There's always my BrainBench transcript, which is both more fun and more compelling)