Getting back into the game...

I keep telling myself that now is the time to get past my "Peter Pan" syndrome and actually go out and find a real job (For clarification, something that is a consistent paycheck, benefits and a retirement plan). Of course, I believe that the 90's will return, and once again I will be able to enjoy the high pay rate, low to moderate work load and four month vacations. Of course, that is part of the being an eternal optimist.

So, time to dust off the resume and try and get myself out in the world once again. What always amazes me is the fact that the Pimps (read that as Contract Agencies) never seem to understand exactly what I do. For the unenlightened, I am simply a Senior Unix Administrator... Period! My resume is pretty clear that Unix is all that I do... No, I am not a Oracle DBA! No, I don't do SAN administration... Beyond basic scripting (Perl, Python, Shell), I am not a developer. Although Cisco configuration and networking is par for the course as a SA, that does not make me a Network Administrator.

So please... All of you agencies that have decided to e-mail with a message that says that I am a perfect fit for a client needs for a Windows 2003 Administrator with experience with Exchange and Crystal Reports... I am not the guy you are looking for!

Speaking for resumes... As previously stated, I am a Unix person, and with that said, I probably run Unix on my machines. When I wrote my first resume, I used edit under DOS 5.0, and was quite happy with that. As I added more jobs to the list, EDIT was not going to work. I had a choice between writing my resume under Microsoft Word 2.0 for DOS or try my hand at using nroff and later troff to write under a Unix environment. Doesn't require rocket science to figure out which way I went.

Troff was cool (and great geek point for actually using troff to write a resume), but there had to be something with a little more ummpphh to it. Hello LaTeX!!! And to this days I still use it. So why do the Pimps require that I use MS Word (or even OpenOffice) to meet their needs?