So back in 2013, when the economy was really being stupid, I took a leap of faith that a job from a random recruiter that would move me to Salt Lake City would be a good move for me. Prior to finding that job, I’d been through a bad run in a sluggish economy, and having had a few years  trying to be a PM instead of a tech nerd, which ended up causing me to have a year or so job hopping and doing short contracts.

The job was for a company called TheraDoc, which was an interesting software product that is basically a rules engine that tries to keep medical personnel out of trouble by notifying them when a patient might be in trouble. It reads in HL7 data, runs it through the rules engine and spits out alerts that tell the medical practitioners about conditions that they might need to check.

Anyway, TheraDoc was owned by a large pharmaceutical company named Hospira, so to start that job, I had to go through the normal medical type of pre-screens (drug test, background check, etc.) 

So I filled out the forms, did the drug test, and sat back to wait. I didn’t really think of the background check as anything to worry about: after all I had just gotten my clearance for the VA which is a low level government clearance that included an FBI check replete with them visiting your friends and family.

But, “Surprise!”, my boss came to me one day to let me know there was a problem with my background check. Apparently when I filled it out I had included my high school graduation on the form, and when the company doing the check contacted them, they couldn’t find records of my graduation. 

Now I have been mistake about a lot of things, but I was pretty sure I sat through my graduation with my classmates, and got handed my diploma, so clearly some records got lost somewhere.

There was definitely some panicked moments as I tried all sorts of things to find something that the investigator would take to accept that I actually graduated (copies of my diploma, yearbook pictures, and I even called both my HS and junior college looking for something that would show as proof).

Not sure whatever happened with it, but I ended up working there for two years, so I guess they accepted me without passing the background check. But now that I know my high school doesn’t have records of my graduation I won’t make the mistake of putting that on a background check application again.