Blurbed
self-promotion
Mindy knew the restaurant was bad before she sat down. Not because of the food, which she hadn’t tried, or the decor, which was fine, but because the front window was wallpapered with pull quotes in thirty-point font. “A REVELATION IN TEXTURE,” raved someone from the Tribune. “I WEPT,” confessed a lifestyle blogger named Taryn. The quotes overlapped and competed for space like bumper stickers on a college town Subaru, and through the gaps between them Mindy could see a mostly empty dining room.
She went in anyway. She needed somewhere to sit and stare at her laptop, and the coffee shop next door had a two-quote minimum at the door: you had to show the barista two positive reviews you’d written for other businesses before they’d serve you. Mindy hadn’t reviewed anything in months; she found the whole system grotesque.
Inside, she opened her email and scrolled through the day’s damage. Three rejections, all form letters. We were impressed by your qualifications but have chosen to move forward with candidates whose materials more fully reflected the enthusiasm of their professional networks. She read the phrase twice. Professional networks. Enthusiasm. She’d passed two sections of the CPA exam in a single sitting, something fewer than ten percent of candidates managed, and done it while carrying a full course load. She’d rebuilt an entire cost allocation model during her Big Four internship after she spotted a rounding error that had been compounding silently for three quarters. Her supervisor had called it the best catch he’d seen from an intern in a decade, though he’d said it to her face, privately, which apparently no longer counted.
She closed the laptop and called Emily.
“Read me your resume,” Emily said.
Mindy read it. Education, honors, certifications, internships, skills.
“Okay,” Emily said. “I see the problem.”
“There’s no problem. It’s a strong resume.”
“Mindy. Where are your quotes?”
Mindy pressed her fingers against her eyelids. “I don’t have quotes.”
“That’s the problem.”
“My credentials speak for themselves.”
“Nothing speaks for itself anymore. That’s like saying your restaurant speaks for itself. You know what happens to restaurants that say that? They close. They become a quote wall for whoever moves in next. Listen, I just did a brand consultation for a guy, a plumber, who now has ‘CHANGED MY LIFE’ from a woman whose toilet he fixed printed on the side of his van. He’s booked through March.”
“That’s disgusting.”
“That’s the economy.”
Mindy stared at the laminated table. A small placard near the salt shaker read: “This table was adequately clean.” — Health Inspector Gerald Motz, Feb 2027.
“I’m not putting quotes on my resume,” she said.
Emily was quiet for a moment. “Do you want a job?”
“Of course I want a job.”
“Then you need to understand something. I love you, but your resume reads like a terms-of-service agreement. Nobody reads it. Nobody feels anything. You need someone else’s voice saying you’re great, because when you say you’re great, it’s just a claim. When Professor Whatever says you’re great, it’s evidence.”
“That’s not what evidence means.”
“It’s what evidence means now.”
They argued for another twenty minutes. Emily was patient, which was worse than if she’d been pushy, because patience implied she’d been expecting this resistance and had already accounted for it. By the end of the call Mindy had agreed, grudgingly, to “try it,” the way a person agrees to try sushi knowing full well they will hate it and resent being made to sit at the counter.
That night she drafted three emails to former professors. She hated every word. Dear Professor Chen, I hope this finds you well. I’m reaching out because I’m applying for positions in public accounting and was wondering if you might provide a brief quote about my work in your Intermediate Accounting II course. She wanted to set her laptop on fire. She sent the emails.
The responses came faster than she expected. Professor Chen wrote back within an hour: “Mindy Huang is the most meticulous and naturally gifted accounting student I have encountered in fourteen years of teaching.” Professor Alderman offered: “A once-in-a-generation mind for regulatory frameworks.” Dr. Rivas, who had supervised her capstone, contributed: “I would trust Mindy Huang with the books of any Fortune 500 company without hesitation.”
They were generous quotes. They were also, Mindy thought, faintly absurd. But she’d spent two semesters in Dr. Rivas’s capstone seminar hand-coding variance analyses that most students ran through software, because she wanted to understand what the numbers were actually doing. That work now sat in the middle of her resume, four unremarkable bullet points, while a single sentence from Dr. Rivas saying he trusted her occupied the entire right margin in elegant serif font with light gray shading.
She positioned Professor Chen’s quote at the top, just below her name, like a subtitle. The new resume looked like a movie poster for a film about accounting.
She sent it to nine firms that evening and went to bed feeling faintly ill.
By noon the next day, she had a callback. Keeler, Brandt & Associates, one of the most respected mid-market firms in the city. The recruiter’s voice was bright and almost startlingly familiar, the warmth of someone greeting a person they felt they already knew. “We just loved your materials,” the woman said. “That quote from Professor Chen, ‘naturally gifted,’ that really jumped off the page. And Dr. Rivas, trusting you with Fortune 500 books? We could just feel the passion your mentors have for you. We’d love to bring you in Thursday.”
Not the CPA sections. Not the cost allocation catch. The quotes.
Mindy thanked her. She confirmed the time. She hung up and sat very still in her apartment, afternoon light coming through the window, her laptop open to the resume that had done what her credentials alone could not.
She should have felt triumphant. She’d cracked the code. She was in. Already she was composing the text to Emily, already reaching for the right words: It worked. They loved it. And she noticed, with a small sinking feeling, that she was thinking about how to describe the win rather than feeling it.
She was drafting her own pull quote.
Outside, a van drove past with five-star reviews stenciled on its side panels. Mindy watched it go, then looked back at her screen, at those lavish borrowed words framing her life’s work like decorations on someone else’s gift.