The Scandinavian Bookshelf and the Spectrophotometer

The cursor is blinking at me with a rhythmic, judgmental pulse that feels exactly like the headache I developed while trying to assemble a Scandinavian bookshelf this morning. I’m currently sitting on the floor because that bookshelf is missing 19 of the primary structural pins required to keep it from collapsing under the weight of my own pretension. It’s a fitting metaphor, really. Here I am, Eva A.J., a woman who spends 49 hours a week matching industrial pigments for automotive plastics-literally ensuring that ‘Metallic Slate’ doesn’t look like ‘Depressed Puddle’-and I cannot for the life of me explain what I do for a living on a single sheet of A4 paper.

I’m staring at a Word document, trying to decide if I ‘spearheaded’ a project or if I ‘orchestrated’ it. In reality, I mostly just yelled at a spectrophotometer until it stopped lying to me.

The Linguistic Masquerade

Why have we collectively agreed to write resumes as if we were minor characters in a Victorian novel? There is this performative, stiff-collared formality to the whole endeavor that feels increasingly detached from the actual work being done. We are forced to strip away the grit, the sweat, and the 239 failed attempts at a color match, replacing them with sterile, context-free ‘achievements.’ It’s a ritualized lie that we all participate in, a linguistic masquerade where the goal isn’t to be understood, but to be indexed. We aren’t writing for humans anymore; we are writing for the ghost of a mid-level manager from 1899 who has been uploaded into a cloud-based sorting algorithm.

Take the ‘Action Verb.’ We are told that every bullet point must begin with a word that implies we are the protagonist of an epic poem. I didn’t just ‘work’ on a team; I ‘leveraged cross-functional synergies to optimize output.’ It sounds like something a character in a Dickens novel would say while trying to swindle an orphan out of an inheritance.

It’s a language of distance. It creates a barrier between the worker and the work. When I look at my own resume, I don’t see the woman who stayed until 9:59 PM on a Tuesday because the red pigment was leaning too far toward magenta. I see a series of data points that could belong to anyone. I see a list of ‘Impact Statements’ that have had all the humanity scrubbed out of them with a digital wire brush.

The Missing Pins of Professional Life

I’m reminded of those missing furniture pins. When you try to build something based on a set of instructions that ignores the physical reality of the materials, you end up with something that looks right but can’t hold any weight. The modern resume is a structural failure. It ignores the ‘missing pieces’ of professional life: the resilience it takes to fail for three weeks straight, the quiet mentorship that happens over a lukewarm coffee, the intuition that tells you a machine is about to break before the sensors even catch it. These things don’t have action verbs. There is no ‘Synergistic Resilience’ category on a standard template. We are asked to provide a quantifiable narrative, but life-especially work life-is notoriously unquantifiable.

I think about the 1009 resumes I’ve seen in my time, or the 59 different ways people try to describe ‘managing a budget.’ It’s all so Victorian in its obsession with provenance and status. We treat our job titles like titles of nobility. ‘Senior Associate of Pigment Optimization’ is just a fancy way of saying I’m the person they blame when the car bumpers don’t match the doors.

This process devalues the very skills that make us good at what we do. Creativity isn’t a bullet point. You can’t ‘orchestrate’ a breakthrough; you stumble into it through a thicket of mistakes and late nights. By forcing us to translate our complex, messy careers into these ritualized documents, we are being asked to apologize for being human.

The Territory vs. The Map

There’s a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from trying to fit a round life into a square text box. It’s the same exhaustion I felt when I realized that bookshelf wasn’t going to stand up without those pins. I tried to find a workaround, of course. I used some old nails and a bit of industrial adhesive I ‘borrowed’ from the lab, but the result is a bit slanted. My resume is the same. It’s a slanted, slightly dishonest representation of a woman who is actually quite good at her job but terrible at pretending her job is a series of strategic triumphs.

If you want to see the truth of a person’s work, you don’t look at their resume. You look at the things they’ve left behind. You look at the color of the plastic on a car that has been sitting in the sun for 9 years and see that it hasn’t faded. You look at the way a team continues to function long after a leader has moved on. You look at the physical reality of the world they’ve touched. This is why I find the contrast between digital credentials and physical labor so fascinating. There is no ‘ATS’ for a well-laid floor.

When you see a project completed by Done Your Way Services, you aren’t looking at a list of keywords. You are looking at a narrative of craft, a story told in wood and finish that doesn’t need a single action verb to justify its existence.

The Honest Submission

I find myself wanting to submit a resume that is just a series of photos: a photo of the 159 color swatches it took to get one ‘perfect’ blue; a photo of my cluttered desk; a photo of the bookshelf that is currently leaning at a 19-degree angle in the corner of my living room. That would be a more honest accounting of my ‘professional experience’ than any bulleted list could ever hope to be.

Apologizing for Being Human

I’m probably being too cynical. Or perhaps I’m just frustrated because I’ve spent the last 39 minutes trying to find a synonym for ‘fixed’ that doesn’t make me sound like a repairman. (The Internet suggests ‘rectified,’ which sounds like I’m performing a medical procedure on a spreadsheet). This is the trap. We start thinking in the language of the machine. We start to believe our own ‘Impact Statements.’ We forget that the most valuable thing we bring to a job isn’t our ability to ‘leverage’ anything, but our ability to care about the outcome. You can’t quantify care. You can’t put a percentage on the feeling of relief when a difficult project finally clicks into place.

We are selling a caricature because we are afraid the truth is too messy for the recruiter’s eye.

– The Unquantifiable Self

This obsession with the ‘Victorian’ resume also creates a massive barrier for anyone whose career doesn’t follow a linear, upward trajectory. If your life has had gaps, or pivots, or moments where you had to prioritize family over ‘output,’ the resume treats you like a broken cog. It doesn’t have a category for ‘Life Wisdom Gained During a Period of Grief’ or ‘Creative Renewal Following a Burnout.’ It only has space for the next title, the next promotion, the next quantifiable victory. It’s a document designed for the 99th percentile of corporate climbers, leaving the rest of us to scramble for ways to make our lived experiences sound like strategic assets.

Rectifying the Narrative

I’ve decided I’m going to stop. I’m going to write my summary in plain English. I’m going to say that I’m an industrial color matcher who cares deeply about the physics of light and the chemistry of polymers. I’m going to admit that I sometimes fail, but that I always find a way to fix the mess (or ‘rectify’ it, if the algorithm is listening). I’m going to acknowledge that I’m currently sitting on a broken bookshelf and that it’s okay.

Maybe the recruiter will see the missing pieces. Maybe they’ll realize that a person who can build a life out of slanted shelves and mismatched pigments is exactly the kind of person they need.

Valuing the Engine

Ultimately, the resume is just paper. It’s a thin, fragile layer between us and the world. It’s the ‘Metallic Slate’ paint on a car-it looks great under the showroom lights, but it doesn’t tell you how the engine runs or how the chassis holds up in a storm. We need to start valuing the engine again. We need to start looking at the work itself, the tangible, physical results of a life spent doing, not just ‘orchestrating.’ If we don’t, we’ll just keep building a world of beautiful resumes and leaning bookshelves, wondering why nothing seems to hold its own weight anymore. I have 19 pins to find, or 19 ways to forget they were ever there.