brewing beer: my career advantage

as some of you may or may not know, i've returned stateside, replaced by new clark. you may also know that i'm a significantly better blogger from outside china.

this move means trying to kick-start a job search in the worst economy we'll see for generations. nice work, old clark. but i'm doing my darnedest to put my best foot forward, which includes tinkering with the old resume.

i've always struggled with the "additional" line at the bottom of the resume (reading, jogging, harry potter, etc.) what is its real purpose? what should you include? what shouldn't you include? what does the decision to include this line, at all, say about you, the job seeker? does your career ever reach a point where you outgrow the "additional" line? does your career ever reach a point where you outgrow the resume? (sec. treas. here i come!)

once in a previous job, a resume came across my desk that listed the job-seeker as a "van morrison enthusiast." this caught my eye, no doubt, and i thankfully had the chance to interview the candidate. the guy got the job and turned out to be really cool -- deserving of his self-ascribed epithet -- but i think it could have gone either way, honestly. i was simply intrigued. i also interpreted this to be a potentially cautionary tale: if you claim to be a "van morrison enthusiast," you better be a van morrison enthusiast. i would not, for example, want to sit across the table from an interviewer who thinks they are, in fact, more van morrison enthusiast than i. so how far can you actually push the "additional" line?

another problem i constantly fear is that i'm hobby-less. i'm a very interesting guy, don't get me wrong -- i just don't lend well to established "hobbies" (e.g. blogging or rooting for professional sports teams.) there's nothing wrong with this, i swear!

so after much deliberation (clearly) i left several of the painfully generic elements in my additional line untouched ("traveling, snowboarding"), but decided to spice it up some with... beer brewing.

it has been an enormous hit. after months of wondering if people actually even made it that far on my resume, i've received comment after comment about my experiences in brewing. and the fact that i did this in china makes it even that much more noteworthy -- which is standard for pretty much any ex-pat activity and/or activities performed by ex-pats.

why is this?

are there more closet brewers out there than i originally assumed? is beer brewing still a form of connoisseurship that you can discuss in broad daylight without pretension? (...tentative use of connoisseur there... which is a pretentious word in itself.)

do i care? not really -- just so long as the positive comments about my resume's "additional" line keep coming. so for all the unemployed out there, i highly recommend making a mash this weekend. you'll thank me.