The Truthful Resume

Jen Dockter
17 Leroy Place • San Francisco, CA
jen.dockter-at-gmail-dot-com

Objective:To make money doing something that doesn't make me hate myself or dread the days where I have to go into work.

Skills: Smart alleckness, surfing the internet at odd hours, drinking too much coffee, being suddenly inspired, starting (but inevitably not finishing) projects (unless collaborative), knowing a lot of things, being able to do a lot of things, surprising various employers with my extreme level of competence despite coming across as an awkward dummy, adobe creative suite, formerly macromedia but now adobe products, corel stuff and things you never thought a person could do in MS Office. Also drawing and writing really well, but not so good with the outloud speaking.

Education: I have a lot of it. I spent 7 years working while in school, much of it doing full time work while attending college part time because that was all I could afford. I went to 4 schools, though of the first 3, only 42 of my 95 credits transferred to the final school I ended up graduating from. I started as a Computer Sciences and Graphic Design double major then dropped the Comp Sci for Computational Mathematics (an applied mathematics that has a lot to do with computational algorithms), then spent 2 years at community college taking C++ classes and most of my lib eds which ended up not transferring at all. I also spent a summer term at UDC where I did surprisingly well in intermediate French (considering I hadn't taken French for almost 4 years at this point, and got a solid B+ in the class) and intro to theatre.
I hold a baccalaureate degree from Art Institute of Pittsburgh in Graphic Design. I hold a master's degree in Art and Aesthetic from the University of LIFE and Work Experience.

Experience:
March 5th, 2007 to Present • Goldman Sachs on behalf of Williams Lea
Presentation Specialist
Yeah, those things you never thought you could do in MS Office. That is basically what is done with this job, only it is extremely restricted to primarily one style or motif as the case may be, and that motif is of corporate ugliness with some navy blue thrown in. Work here is sporadic, and as such many of the employees are now experts at web surfing and doing fun things in photoshop. It is not at all creative, but at least the people I work with are pleasant and witty. I get a lot of reading done here and have expanded my webcomics reading list three fold. I was recently told though that I am surprisingly good at this job. Apparently I have the habit of coming into things where people have low expectations of me.

August 15th, 2005 to October 20th, 2006 • Dominion Enterprises formerly Trader Publications
Key Accounts Designer
I started as a production designer here and because I am amazingly fast and good at what I do (namely what I do in the field of production, publication or otherwise pre-press design), I was eventually promoted through the ranks to that of key account designer. I know it sounds fabulous, but really it meant I was doing about 8 books on my own because my manager knew I could get it done. This meant a whopping $2 pay raise and a desk away from the increasingly obnoxious male workers. This job was extremely stressful or extremely boring or both at once (being my monitor was visible from the ridiculous window into our office that was put in I am sure just to spy on whoever was sitting at my desk at that time). Here I had to put up with a slew of aesthetically challenged, good-design-phobic and just otherwise idiotic sales people and realtors who I am sure spent most of their time peddling their own special brand of bullshit while ignoring press checks and letting us produce what would be an otherwise good-looking product. I left this job under the mistaken assumption that the big city held more better possibilities for a creative talent such as myself especially since I finally got my shiny college diploma after 7 years of study. Boy was I wrong.

July 15th, 2005 to August 25th, 2005 • Back Shack
"Marketing Intern" (really just a Salesperson)
This is a job I got when I was between jobs so I could pay tuition and rent. David's mom was good enough to hire me part time and allow me to log hours for when I wasn't actually there but instead working on her boyfriend's band's website. She also had me design business cards for her and for the other salesperson who worked with her (other than me, I didn't ever hand out any cards). I also made some fliers and other various advertising mailer materials. She said she'd give me copies for my portfolio, but I never got any (partially my fault for not reminding her). Not a bad interim position; $10/hr plus all the internet I can surf between the one or two customers I'd have in a 5 hour shift.

February 12th, 2005 to July 1st, 2005 • Webcommon formerly iHouse
IDXPro Customer Service
I will make no claims other than this was the worst job I'd ever had working for the
worst people who could ever own a company (and I've worked detasseling corn for Nothrup King before). This was basically the most retarded form of tech support for what I would discover to be the lowest form of sales person in existence: the realtor. Webcommon had a product called IDXPro, which is very confusing to realtors because there is an entire real estate web system that is simply referred to as IDX, so a good 50% of calls I fielded were realtors asking about other companies' IDX products because they thought IDXPro was some sort of general helpline for ALL of these products. They were not nice about it either. I put up with a lot of swearing at me and being called stupid and much worse things (also a stalker who really wanted to meet me in real life---creepy). I tried really hard to get into the IT department here because it was better than being spied upon all day and having people scream at me on the phone for something I had nothing to do with breaking (there were two programmers, then one programmer, who worked on our product, and they were constantly bogged down by this buggy, buggy web product). I was eventually fired for changing my computer's password to something that was actually secure. I did this because the default passwords are first initial, last name, 123 on all the computers, and I did not want someone else getting on my machine with my name and password and getting me fired for looking at porn or something stupid like that.

January 15th, 2003 to January 15th, 2005 • Kinko's Document Creation Center (DCC)
Senior Designer, Assistant Manager
I cannot stress enough that this was a design position and not a monkey-in-the-branch
making copies position. Looking back over my past 5 years of employment, this was probably my best job with the best pay-to-living expenses ratio, but I left it and Maryland due to personal reasons I will not go into here. I came into this job as the lowest rung person who can work in a DCC: QA. I started at $9.50 an hour, which is about equivalent, living expenses wise, to what I am making now. I did not have a degree at the time, and as such the hiring manager didn't feel I was capable of creating business cards for Joe Blow who came walking in off the street to have his order taken by a guy who's probably done more coke than my mom has wrinkles. Despite these complaints, it was a fairly open and creative job. It was stressful sometimes, and a lot of the people I worked with were catty bitches, but all in all they appreciated the work I did and paid me decently for it. Working my way up, I ended up leaving at $16/hr with a 4-day (10 hour shifts) work week, great medical and dental and a decent 401k (which was better when it was with Fidelity than with Vanguard). Unfortunately if I want to work in a DCC again, I'd have to move to either LA or back to Maryland, and I just really don't hate myself enough to subject myself to that weather. Plus I really would rather work on bigger, more important projects. I thought California would be good for this, but again, I was wrong.

October 5th, 2002 to December 20th, 2002 • Harvest Moon
Volunteer Graphic Designer
Ahh, volunteer work I had to do for speech class. The speech class that Ai decided didn't count as speech credit so I had to take speech class again. This was a set of business cards and brochures I did for their Hands Across the Ocean campaign. All in photoshop because this was back when I was a complete newb and U of MN Duluth really didn't teach me the proper tools to use in the case of doing real design work. As is the common complaint among design studios, too many students who are taught "theory" and not actually how to design. However, it wasn't terrible work, though as I think about it, I really should have told her to give me a thinned out text version since her brochure ended up with quarter inch margins and 7pt text---too, too much text.

June 4th, 2002 to November 24th, 2002 • Sears
In-Store Marketing Associate
This was the last retail position I held, and hopefully it will be the last I ever hold in an actual store (I am not above doing retail design or corporate work for retail companies). I really should have taken the job working in a Kinko's branch in Woodbury over this job, it would have been a shorter commute, more money, and I would have probably started at Kinko's in Maryland making more than $9.50 an hour, but stupid me I wanted to work with my friends. For this job, I worked possibly the worst hours a person can work in Minnesota who owns a crappy car that doesn't get garaged. Namely, I had to be up at 4am in 10 below weather to try to get my car to start otherwise get "points" deducted for being tardy. I set up displays here and also had to navigate back stock rooms with Katie in incredible heat while wearing too much clothing (everyone has to dress up to work at Sears; I think it is so people don't know that we were horrendously underpaid) and oftentimes heels to take down 50 to 75lb televisions and other things on unsturdy ladders and just generally be treated like crap for a really crappy job. Oh and if any of us happened to work even 5 minutes of OT, that was a write-up. In the end, I got fired because I cracked. I came in one morning to set ad for a super Saturday (so we had to be there BY 4am) to find someone had opened the locker where I kept my work things, strewn all of my stuff all over the locker room and put their own lock on the locker. I left them a nasty note and showed no remorse for doing so.

June 1st, 2001 to June 2nd, 2002 • Target
Food Ave. Team Member
Do you want to know the secrets of Taco Bell or how it is they make those perfectly
round crusts for personal pan pizzas for Pizza Hut? Well, I know. I worked in such a place inside a Target. I ate a lot of free food and did more or less all the work that was necessary to be done while on my shift unless I was lucky enough to be working with one of three other competent people. I got yelled at once for going home on time after working a hellish Friday dinner rush with no help because everyone else had called in sick, and I did not get to take a lunch. I got written up for basically telling the manager who was trying to stop me from leaving to go shove it because I was already clocked out and not going back there (the head cashier no less--the one who refused to send me backup during the dinner rush). As per usual with my experience working at Target, I was the only one responsible enough to actually show up on Friday closing shifts, so I was the one who got scheduled for them every week. Usually there were two to three people scheduled for these shifts, but I was often the only one who came in. On the off chance that I got a Friday off, I usually got called to come in anyway when all the other people called in "sick". Despite this responsible behaviour, I still only scored a "grade" of C+ on my annual review which resulted in a dismal 3.4% raise (barely cost of living). That combined with the manager constantly cutting my hours because he didn't like my "attitude" lead to me quitting this job (though the assistant manager immediately above me absolutely loved me and would often change the schedule so she could work with me). Him not liking me either was a result of or lead to me often mocking him by pretending I was a giant ape (this man was quite gorilla-ish).

September 25th, 2000 to May 5th, 2001 • JC Penney
Menswear Associate
Minimum wage job in Duluth. I only took it because they said I'd still get hours after winter break (which I had to leave campus for because they do not let students stay on campus during winter break). That was a big fat lie. Though I logged no hours after January 1st, I still put it as May 5th because that was when I put in my official resignation from the position and picked up my $5 deposit for my locker key. Another place that required us to dress nicely though didn't pay us enough to buy nice clothes, and I was really fat at this point so none of my nice clothes from high school fit me anymore.

June 10th, 2000 to September 1st, 2000 • Some Company Whose Name I cannot Remember
Intern
This is a job Mari's dad got me at his company. I forget what the company is called. I basically did things with databases for pre-press printing stuff that I never really understood, but I was capable enough of going through the motions with enough accuracy to do the job adequately. I used FoxPro for this. They basically did direct mailers. I only flubbed once and sent the wrong dated material to print; luckily the pressman was good enough to catch it in the test-run so I didn't get fired for it. I also got to use a bulk eraser on computer tapes. Here I made the most money I'd ever made before: $10/hr. I worked 15 hour weeks. It was in Eagan though, so a good chunk of that money was spent on gas.

May 12th,1997 to September 5th, 1999 • Target
Softlines Team Member
This would have been a much more fun job if I hadn't taken it so seriously and been
like other teenagers in their crappy retail jobs. However, I have a hard time not taking work seriously, so when I am told I am not doing a good enough job even though I'm busting my ass for $1/hr less than people who started 4 months after me and just slack off all shift, and also when I'm the only person who comes in on Friday to close what amounts to half of the store, this does not make me happy. I left partially because I was going to school. I think this Target has me on record as being terminated (rather than quitting) because I was told the dumb HR lady who also does a lot of the scheduling kept scheduling me after I left because I tried to take leave of absence so I could have a job to work at during breaks. Again, most of the assistant managers loved me because I did a great job at what I did, even the softlines manager had no real beef with me, but the person who ultimately decides my fate did not like me at all and as such I got the short end of the stick.

September 20th, 1998 to November 5th, 1998 • Washington County Library
Shelver
Yes, I worked two jobs for an almost 2 month period in high school. I would have worked there longer had the head librarian not called me a complete idiot in so many words. Even the other librarians openly called her the queen of all bitches. This was mostly pretty dull, unstressful work, and it paid better than Target though with slightly fewer hours. I got a decent amount of reading done on breaks, too. Usually my back would kill me by the end of my shifts from carrying heavy loads of books around for 4 to 5 hours.

Portfolio: In sore need of updating, can be found here.

References: Just ask, and I can give them to you, especially if you really want to hire me or even interview me after reading this.