From Reddit’s IAmA section:

I am a Bill Collector, ask me anything.

Extracts:

Question:

I’ve had my share of ER bills and more than a few of them have gone unpaid. When the collection agency starts calling, I tried to politely explain that I just couldn’t pay because I didn’t have any money. I have lost my temper on a few occasions, particularly when a debt collector suggested I take out a loan to pay my unpaid medical bills. So my question is this: how much influence do you have over an individual’s credit rating? At what point does the uncollected bill start to effect my credit rating? If I start ranting and raving at you, do you just press a button that says I defaulted or didn’t pay or something like that?

Another entry from Reddit’s Ask Me Anything feature. I’ve been fired from 30 different companies and I’m not yet 25 Question: How do you get hired over and over again? Answer: I used to list only the most recent three and lie about the dates in which I was employed. Now, I site my side [...]

I guess some freelancers had a little too much time on their hands. From Phil Gyford’s website:

A few times over the past couple of years I’ve discussed with freelancing friends how we miss out on some of the aspects of working in a proper company: the Christmas lunch, the after-work drinks, the fire alarm tests. All that bonding. A couple of us thought that maybe we should start an email list to compensate in some way, although we weren’t quite sure what it would be for. Maybe we’d just send round stupid videos and fail to organise a get-together in December, but it might be fun. So I set up the Pretend Office mailing list with no expectations.

And a weird thing happened.

With no planning, we all started acting as if we were people in a real office. Almost immediately we began to adopt characters and send officious announcements. Soon we were referring to characters in the office who didn’t exist in real life. Meeting rooms were booked, couriers arrived, servers went down, timesheets were requested, and embarrassing emails were accidentally sent to everyone in the company.

From the book How to Keep Your Cool if You Lose Your Job, via Recessionwire, a chart designed to help you visualize your current level of job satisfaction, or desired level if you’re unemployed.

The head of a management consulting firm writes on his Harvard Business Review blog that companies sometimes lay off relative underperformers simply because nobody understands exactly what they do. When the wrong person is fired, it hurts everyone involved — the person and his or her company. There’s a better way to solve this problem [...]

Sounds like a piece of can-do advice from a job recruiter, but we mean it literally. Now you can print your resume on your tee-shirt. From damnIneedAjob.com: The shirt costs $25 (plus $3 shipping). Add three bucks if outside the continental United States. Upon submission of this form you will be directed to PayPals secure [...]

From the LearnVest blog: Making the Most of a Thin Resume. When you’re short on experience, play up your strengths. The Problem: Recession or not, you’re job hunting. Trouble is, aside from some internships and a few part-time gigs, the work experience section of your resume is, well, thin. You know that you could nail [...]

If you’re out of work, you might find it hard to conjure up sympathy for someone who has actually landed a job in Hollywood. On the other hand, ever see the movie Swimming With Sharks, about an assistant to a Hollywood bigwig who is also the world’s biggest SOB? But there’s even a lower life [...]

Focus, a business research company, has created a big chart of what it says are the best jobs in America. These were selected based on ratings from 35,000 workers. The top 50 were ranked based on current employment; long-term growth, pay and security; projected openings; and quality of life factors. A preview: Best job overall [...]

Perhaps you didn’t know that the month of February included Personal Brand Week, launched by professional services and auditing firm PricewaterhouseCoopers. Personal Brand Week was created to help students develop their personal brand as a way to find employment. This e-book guides you through the entire week. From the introduction: In today’s competitive environment, students [...]