DID you spend 2008-2012 sleeping late and smoking weed? Has it left a gap in your career narrative that’s tough to explain? Use these lies:
‘I was in MI5. That’s all I can tell you’
An impressive organisation to have worked for and, like Boris Johnson after a party, you’re legally not able to divulge any references or provide any proof that you were actually there. If they pry, you can accuse them of being a threat to national security and tell them they’ll get double-tapped.
‘I was training for the Olympics’
In the end it all came to nothing. But for 12 months ending in January of 2016, you were almost definitely going to be on Team GB’s bobsleigh squad. It hurts to talk about it, of course. It should you, damnit, not Lamin Dean.
‘I wrote a bestselling novel under a penname’
Tell them you took that year out in your mid-20s to write a bestselling book – and this is important – under a pseudonym. Imply it might be about a certain boy wizard, or games related to hunger. But you’re bitter about being ripped off and hate to talk about it.
‘I was abducted by aliens’
As long as you’re not interviewing for a job that requires you to have set beliefs, like Catholic priest, they legally can’t discriminate against you for your belief that for a six-month period in 2004, you were taken to Sirius and back. And anally probed, obviously.
‘I was president of a country that no longer exists’
You can’t expect the manager to be completely up-to-date on all geopolitical goings on, so why not make up a country and see how much you can improvise about your election, your downfall, and the dissolution of the state. You might even get a higher salary.
‘I was too busy turning jobs down’
It’s not that people didn’t want you – it’s that you didn’t want them. They were on their knees begging you to come be CEO at Microsoft. But you were saving yourself for this administrative position at a printer supplier. How can they turn you down after that?
