One of the many things I do at work is reading resumes. I read a lot of resumes. Like an average of perhaps 10/day, although there are bursts which greatly exceed that baseline.

For the positions that I have posted, the overall hit rate of folks we’d like to interview is maybe 20%. That figure drops to around 3% if the resume is in Microsoft Word format rather than PDF.

I would probably, at this point, be totally justified in just ignoring anything that comes in Word format – but for some reason I’m still fixated on potentially missing that one worthwhile candidate who somehow hasn’t gotten the memo about PDFs.

Does this mean I’m good at my job, or bad at it?

After work we wound up doing the “oh shit it’s Friday night and we need to eat” dance, which is a perennial antipattern in our lives. We’d made a crucial error by eating at Toast on Thursday night, so that was out.

For the first ~4 years of living downtown, things weren’t so fraught, because for the most part you could wander in to just about anywhere & nab a couple of seats at the bar. That is most emphatically no longer the case.

Which is how we wound up at Taberna Tapas, the other tapas place downtown, which seems to be doing a booming business entirely from (a) overflow from Mateo and/or (b) people who have heard there’s a great tapas place on Main St. & can’t find Mateo because it’s technically not on Main St.

At the bar there was literally some dude sitting there telling the bartender, or perhaps himself, that his meal was every bit as good as Mateo would have been.

It wasn’t.

It’s a funny little place, though. It’s very much set-dressed like a “tapas place” and the staff all wear black and look vaguely unsavory. There’s Restaurant Techno playing at a low volume. The food runner brings your food & recites word for word the menu description of each dish.

It’s as if it were opened as a tax write-off or a cocaine front, and then started getting actual dinner trade, and the staff is sort of evenly split as to whether that’s a good thing or not.

The food wasn’t terrible; it just wasn’t particularly great. Take the asparagus: grilled to a nice degree of doneness, with some char on the outside, and a distinct petroleum aftertaste.

After dinner I dropped M at home and then headed up the street to the Pinhook for their 6th Anniversary show. Mostly to see desark, who were in 2-electric-guitars formation (plus Catherine Edgerton on vocals & saw for a couple of numbers). Great set, although it’s always a little weird to see them at these non-headlining shows where there aren’t a ton of young women right down front.

I tried to stick around to see Speedy Ortiz, whom I had never seen, but I couldn’t hack the sold-out crowd, so I only made it through one song. I’d be into seeing them in a half-full Duke Coffeehouse sometime, I guess. That kind of dissonant guitar-heavy 90s indie-rock needs to be heard in a half-empty room on a Wednesday.

One of the many things I do at work is reading resumes. I read a lot of resumes. Like an average of perhaps 10/day, although there are bursts which greatly...