I think my résumé needs rebranding.

I’ve been taking the wrong approach, hawking my degrees and experience, my accomplishments and competencies, all the glories that are my professional self. They’ve resulted in zilch.

I haven’t even made it to an interview. Which is probably good because it would have gone something like this:

“So, Mr. Cheney, we notice a little gap in your employment between 1985 and … the present?”

“Yes, I took a little time off to find myself.”

“Does that explain this banana farm in Brazil?”

“It seemed like a good idea at the time…”

All too recently I’ve discovered the professional niche I should be wiggling into. I see a huge need out there, and no one is applying for the many jobs. I think I’m going to become a professional idiot.

It’s technology that has opened this new field. By definition, high tech is dominated by highly competent people. They are competent beyond the reach of my imagination.

The unrecognized corollary is that I am incompetent beyond their imagination.

And I’m not alone. There are millions of us: people who have mastered the operation of on-off switches but can’t find much meaning in instructions stripped down to an absolute minimum of information.

I’m looking at you, Error 404. And your shady accomplice over there, Error 500. And wipe that smirk off your face, little mister Syntax Error.

Information technology engineers can deal with that. English majors can’t. Old English majors are even worse off. And their grandmothers might was well stick to their knitting.

IT engineers are too competent to understand the transcendental mystery of a “Printer Not Connected” message when any idiot can see that a printer is indeed connected.

That’s where the Professional Idiot comes in. The PI knows how to not understand. Dizzying confusion is the PI’s primary skill. A good PI can be an endless resource to engineers — and not just IT types — who remember what it’s like to be an entity of flesh, blood, bone and a scant dollop of brains.

It’s time the technical professions recognized the importance of including incompetents on their team. We are here to help. Our incapacity is fathomless. We know how to do it wrong. We can misunderstand, misapply, mishandle, mishear, misread, misconstrue, misconceive, miscalculate and, God knows, mistake. Our product is incompetence, the gift that keeps on giving.

A good PI’s incompetence goes beyond computers. We can also point out the inadequacies of assembly instructions that involve little pictures rather than words. We’ve got the words, verbal redundancies to the tune of “Don’t be stupid. There are big screws and little screws. The big screws go in the big holes. The little screws go in the little holes. Turn the screws clockwise with a screwdriver (fig. 1). The little holes should be on your left. If they’re on your right, you’re holding it upside down. Don’t lose the screws.”

We PIs need to form a trade association and get ourselves certified. Trouble is, none of us know how to do such a thing. And anybody who knows how is too smart to understand the fundamentals of idiocy. Their brilliance is an incompetence.

I’m not going to wait for some clown to invent a Certified Professional Idiot exam. I’m going to gut my résumé of skills, most of which were lies anyway. I’m going to replace them with a list of every dumb thing I’ve ever done, from buying a banana farm to opening a store in downtown New London.

And the time I ran for public office. Fortunately, the electorate recognized the incipient threat of idiocracy, and they mostly voted for the other guy. Political leaders who want to better understand what it takes to lose can hire me as consultant.

If my new consultancy works as well as I expect, I may be able to retire someday. Maybe I’ll go back to that banana farm and try again.

Glenn Alan Cheney is a writer, translator, and managing editor of New London Librarium. He can be reached at glenn@nllibrarium.com.