What Color Is Your Parachute?

them all dearly, dearly, dearly.

In addition, I want to express my gratitude to my dearest friend (besides Marci), Daniel Porot of Geneva, Switzerland—we taught together two weeks every summer, for nineteen years; then there is Dave Swanson, ditto; plus my international friends, Brian McIvor of Ireland; John Webb and Madeleine Leitner of Germany; Yves Lermusi, of Checkster fame, who came from Belgium; Pete Hawkins of Liverpool, England; Debra Angel MacDougall of Scotland; Byung Ju Cho of South Korea; Tom O’Neil of New Zealand; and, in this country, Howard Figler, beloved friend and co-author of our manual for career counselors; Marty Nemko; Joel Garfinkle; Richard Leider; Dick Knowdell; Rich Feller; Dick Gaither; Warren Farrell; and the folks over at Ten Speed Press in Berkeley, California, now an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group of Random House, and Crown’s head, Maya Mavjee, who has been very kind to me.

Last December we buried Phil Wood, founder of Ten Speed Press and my friend for forty years. He was a dear man, and I owe him more than I can say for helping Parachute find its audience, and for letting me have great control over the annual editions. Parachute would never have sold ten million copies, were it not for him.

^{Phil Wood at Bohemian Grove}

I much appreciate my current friends over at Ten Speed: Aaron Wehner, publisher, George Young, Kara Van de Water, Lisa Westmoreland, and Colleen Cain.

My especial thanks to my readers—all ten million of you—for buying my books, trusting my counsel, and following your dream. I have never met so many wonderful souls. I am so thankful for you all.

In closing, I cannot fail to mention my profound thanks to our Great Creator, Who all my life I have known through my Lord Jesus Christ, as real to me as breathing, and the Rock of my life through every trial and tragedy, most especially the assassination of my only brother, Don Bolles, with a car bomb, in downtown Phoenix, Arizona, back in 1976—now memorialized in one of the rooms at the Newseum, in Washington, D.C.

I am very quiet about my faith; it’s just … there. But it is the source of whatever grace, wisdom, or compassion I have ever found, or shared with others. I am grateful beyond measure for such a life, and such a mission as Our Creator has given me: to help people make their lives really count, here on this spaceship Earth.

Dick Bolles

[email protected]

www.jobhuntersbible.com

GRAMMAR AND LANGUAGE NOTE

I want to explain four points of grammar, in this book of mine: pronouns, commas, italics, and spelling. My unorthodox use of them invariably offends unemployed English teachers so much that instead of finishing the exercises, they immediately write to apply for a job as my editor.

To save us unnecessary correspondence, let me explain. Throughout this book, I often use the apparently plural pronouns “they,” “them,” and “their” after singular antecedents—such as, “You must approach someone for a job and tell them what you can do.” This sounds strange and even wrong to those who know English well. To be sure, we all know there is another pronoun—”you”—that may be either singular or plural, but few of us realize that the pronouns “they,” “them,” and “their” were also once treated as both plural and singular in the English language. This changed, at a time in English history when agreement in number became more important than agreement as to sexual gender. Today, however, our priorities have shifted once again. Now, the distinguishing of sexual gender is considered by many to be more important than agreement in number.

The common artifices used for this new priority, such as “s/he,” or “he and she,” are—to my mind—tortured and inelegant. Casey Miller and Kate Swift, in their classic, The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing, agree, and argue that it is time to bring back the earlier usage of “they,” “them,” and “their” as both singular and plural—just as “you” is/are. They further argue that this return to the earlier historical usage has already become quite common out on the street—witness a typical sign by the ocean that reads, “Anyone using this beach after 5 p.m. does so at their own risk.” I have followed Casey and Kate’s wise recommendations in all of this.

As for my commas, they are deliberately used according to my own rules—rather than according to the rules of historic grammar (which I did learn—I hastily add, to reassure my old Harvard professors, who despaired of me weekly, during English class). In spite of those rules, I follow my own, which are: to write conversationally, and put in a comma wherever I would normally stop for a breath, were I speaking the same line.

The same conversational rule applies to my use of italics. I use italics wherever, were I speaking the sentence, I would emphasize that word or phrase. I also use italics where there is a digression of thought, and I want to maintain the main flow of the sentence. All in all, I write as I speak. Hence the dashes (—) to indicate a break in my thought.

Finally, some of my spelling (and capitalization) is weird. (You say “weird”; I say “playful.”) I happen to like writing it “e-mail,” for example, instead of “email.” Most of the time. Fortunately, since this is my own book, I get to play by my own peculiar interpretations; I’m just grateful that ten million readers have gone along. Nothing delights a child (at heart) more, than being allowed to play.

P.S. Speaking of “playful,” over the last forty years a few critics (very few) have claimed that Parachute is not serious enough (they object to the cartoons, here, which poke fun at almost everything). On the other hand, a few have complained that the book is too serious, and too complicated in its vocabulary and grammar for anyone except a college graduate. Two readers, however, have written me with a different view.

The first one, from England, said there is an index that analyzes a book to tell you what grade in school you must have finished, in order to be able to understand it. My book’s index, he said, turned out to be 6.1, which means you need only have finished sixth grade in a U.S. school in order to understand it.

Here in the U.S., a college instructor came up with a similar finding. He phoned me to tell me that my book was rejected by the authorities as a proposed text for the college course he was teaching, because (they said) the book’s language/grammar was not up to college level. “What level was it?” I asked. “Well,” he replied, “when they analyzed it, it turned out to be written on an eighth grade level.”

Sixth or eighth grade—that seems just about right to me. Why make job-hunting complicated, when it can be expressed so simply even a child could understand it?

R.N.B.

INTRODUCTION

It was the best of times,
It was the worst of times,
It was the age of wisdom,
It was the age of foolishness,