eredien | Question

A question for those of you with memory problems, and/or for those of you who need to keep track of this stuff in general:

When you go to fill out one of those job applications that asks for the past decade of your employment and residence history, with no gaps, how do you remember all the stuff like "the street number of the house you stayed in for three months that one summer?" How do you remember "the month I moved into apartment y, four years ago?"

The regular answer, "look it up on your previous leases/computers/resumes," doesn't really apply here. One of my computer is missing, one of them is onnother OS which I can't get at, one of them is a fried backup disk, and all my paper records of leases and old addresses are sitting in storage boxes in a storage unit in Cambridge--except for the ones I threw out before the move as unnecessary (for instance, any records of the address of the apartment I stayed in for three months that one summer is gone, because I didn't file taxes from there and didn't get any mail there either).

It strikes me that this situation is usually not that bad, because they usually ask for 5 years at the most, but this time I've been asked for the past 7 years, back through '04. I will probably be asked for it again, and it strikes me as prudent to set up some kind of system that isn't reliant solely on my backup hard disk and laptop.

How do you keep track of this information, going forward? What do all of you do?

In other news, I have officially moved 13 times in the past 7 years, with about half of those moves occurring within the last year. That's...a lot of change.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I keep a work history document (with tables for individual employers) to take with me when filling out applications. Each table contains the following fields:

Employer name/address
Position title
Number of hours worked per week
Dates of employment
Name/title of supervisor
Supervisor telephone
Major duties/responsibilities
Salary upon leaving
Reason(s) for leaving

I also keep track of my gaps in employment there, with notes on what I was doing at the time.

I keep an almost-identical file for applying for state health care and such. Each table there also contains a "problems encountered due to mental illness" field, and the gaps in employment explanations have health stuff in them, whereas they don't on the job-search one.

When I fill it out once I just xerox the application and save it.

Derp, you weren't asking about what I just commented on, were you? But keeping a similar file of your old addresses in hard copy would solve the problem.

If you're talking about the Putnam Ave. address, I think I have that somewhere? I could look, anyway.

Well, have you tried doing an internet search?

Also, since you've used an online e-mail source for a while could some of them be in there? When you send out "Hey I've moved!" messages? Search for those.

For future use, you might use your online e-mail notepad type things to store notes that might be needed.

If you need it, I know I have one apartment address from you in '07.

You can get a free copy of your own credit report once a year, which will list all your previous addresses.

I usually don't have a problem remembering the month of things, it's the exact day I frequently get wrong. Often, I remember things relative to other things (for example, I know I moved to DC to start graduate school, and I know school started in August). The thing I have a hard time with is supervisors at summer jobs I had in college, or remembering exactly how much money I was paid for them.

You could email it to yourself, google docs file, or keep a hard copy (or all three), to have it for the future.

To get it now, if you had roommates there, you can always ask them (I had to e-mail my study abroad program director to get my address in Germany).

Seven years is unusual.

I also hate applications that ask for all that. I've usually encountered them in applying for retail/minimum wage jobs. The gov't usually waits until they're sure you're worth the trouble to ask.

If I didn't pay taxes there, I don't count it as a residence.

And as some one else said, I keep a copy of the last resume that I had to figure all of it out for. As for figuring it out the first time - check your memory for things that go together. IE: "I must have moved in there in July because I remember going to that festival while I was unpacking". Or "It was snowing, so it had to be in winter". Usually close is good enough for employment applications.

I had to do ten years for clearance stuff. I only managed because of gmail archives and linkedin.

Probably people are all supposed to keep that detailed document with all of that info but I never have.

i have had many employers/admissions offers assure me that approximate is fine.

the details on my longer-ago job info has gotten looser and looser as the years has gone by. no one seems to care.

Keep in mind that most of this stuff, they can't check anyway. As long as you put something plausible ("Hm, was that the year I spent as a wandering poet in Iberia? Or the time I was on that arctic fishing ship?"), it will probably be fine.

Yeah, this. I mean, I can't imagine that, unless you're working for the C.I.A., an employer would actually care enough to go back and check on every single detail-- they just want to be able to look it over and get a sense of you as a person. I think.

I'm in application Hades at the moment. . . I've taken to keeping some amount of information on Palm Desktop in my Contacts list entry on myself, like the addresses to Bryn Mawr and my med school and the dates I took certain exams. I started keeping a Contacts entry on myself because I never can remember my cell phone number. . . What I am going to do if the computer fries the data, I have no idea. Last fall I needed to know the exact date I started BMC and med school, and had to contact both schools. Sometimes I put things like "Summer, 1997," My mother tends to have my old addresses written down from writing to me at them, in a pinch.

And then I scream, which is not a constructive answer but it is the truth. I'm currently filling out an application in one state which asks for my current congressional district (which is in another state.) At least that answer is googleable.

This is the reason I'm not a U.S. citizen! I decided I couldn't list the exact dates of all travel outside the country for the past 10 years (which included, y'know, a time period in which I was living half an hour from the Ambassador Bridge), and told them to fuck off. It would probably be easier to do now, though.

FWIW, I keep a single text file that contains all information relevant to job applications, and try to update it every couple of months. Mine lives on my Windows desktop, but if you encrypted it to avoid identity theft, you could make a similar file available more widely by storing it in a webmail folder or thumb drive instead.

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