The Fake Employment Scam

When you apply for a job at Indeed, you get mail!

You’ve Got Mail! was a hit film from somewhere deep in the 1990s starring Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks in which two people fell in love via email.

Awwwwww.

Those days are long gone.

It’s a predatory universe, according to Carlos Castaneda, who made bank with a series of bestselling books about a fake sorcerer and his fake apprentice in fake Mexico.

Their eloquence was on point, of course — he spun a fabulous yarn we wish were true.

Inspiration doesn’t have to be more than a facade.

John Wayne looks better as a cardboard cutout, and Americans know the Old West is a sales job. That’s why they set Westworld there.

Jesus, like Penthouse models, looks better airbrushed.

But the romance beckons and we want what we want. Like raccoons drawn to shiny things, we all want to touch magic.

Magic’s opposite is toil, but her enemy is a three-headed monster of fraud, lies, and scams.

Honest Work in a Mad Mad Mad Men World

The modern job search has made an inherently annoying activity into a giant spider, like the one that tried to eat Frodo.

It is no longer a tiptoe through a field of horseshit. You have been issued a pogo-stick and horses have been replaced with bots and the field is actually a blanket under which eight clowns are playing mahjong.

When the cloven-hooved Nigerian Prince who can’t spell or use proper grammar shoots me an email with a “100% Remote Opportunity,” even I — old and preliterate in the ways of the web — know something stinks.

Some faceless shapeshifting demon is coming after my data. Again.

Out goes the resume to an apparently legitimate operation, and in comes the scam email because somewhere on Indeed, someone is mining my data, and yours.

They also sell romance, timeshares, and publishing deals.

100% Remote job Opportunity! we Kindly wish you to respond to this opportunity for at Home work.

Those are not typos. That’s how the scammers write: like drunken eight-year-olds.

I just want a job writing in the English language. You would think, given the atrocious level of online content — someone somewhere would legitimately need this skill.

Hold up.

I know exactly who needs my skills!

My Brilliant Scam Artist Career

I never reply to grammatically shoddy emails.

That would be like going on a second date with a guy who shows up with gravy stains on his T-shirt.

When some FB Marketplace gushes about they want my used kayak if they can pay today with a cashier's check and a gift card and they will come right over — well, I see right through their clever ruse.

I do what every sophisticated, smart, and savvy woman does.

I run sobbing to my backyard, where I chain smoke and talk to the raccoons while sipping apricot vodka.

But the day is coming when these scammers finally learn to write grammatically correct, syntactically robust, and contextually appropriate sentences.

What then?

How will I, and the other weaklings, survive?

The clear path is to offer them my services now and scam others with the ultimate weapon: proper grammar.

In a predatory universe, the dog that doesn’t hunt becomes the hunted unless it lies down with other dogs that have fleas.

Non-scammer seeks writing position. Skills include proper use of punctuation, capitalization, and other conventions of the English language. Can also define “adverb” and “irony”.

The Game Is Rigged

Many people are mystified about why Donald Trump got elected but it makes so many licks of sense.

He used bumper sticker slogans and told a profound form of the truth while reinforcing their experience of getting screwed over.

The game is actually rigged. If you didn’t get many opportunities and happen to be living in rural America, you are well aware of just how rigged.

Bumper sticker philosophy rules most of known civilization.

Sorry.

We want simple answers to life’s complex problems and DJT was that simple answer in a suit with a little flag on his lapel.

DJT is proof absurdism exists: Tall white man with good hair and every possible advantage in life feels cheated. He is a lizard trapped in the body of a man who wants to be a god.

It’s heart-wrenchingly unfair, and that’s why he wears makeup, and a wig, and gets driven around in a golf cart by similarly afflicted white men.

But I digress … because I lack a coherent theme aside from my own pitiable state of unemployment.

I’m reduced to using ellipses and soon …. to parenthetical asides that serve no purpose except bolstering my belief in shortcuts and reminding me it’s possible to make a living as a poet because ee cummings did.

(Sorry). and I love you in a rush of run on lovely plums or eggs that would never ever run you fool.

Make Want Ads Again

Do you remember the cornucopia of want ads in the local paper for a job?

Getting a haircut cost $4, too, because it was 1987. They weren’t good jobs, but it was obvious and that was okay.

Fake job postings should be illegal, but our justice department is spending its budget for the next decade prosecuting Donald Trump. They can’t go after bad guys because all of our villains have been condensed and vacuum-sealed into one supervillain.

Just like we’ve consolidated knowledge into bumper stickers.

Gods, guns, Jesus.

Now we must scan, re-scan, and pre-scan the job listings. Because the fire-breathing global hell beasts are hard at work down in Hades trying to sell you a flaming turd wrapped up in a fancy flame-retardant package.

I’m sure Indeed has real jobs but I see the same terrible ones posted over and over again.

Urgently hiring an English tutor to use your own computer, Internet, home office, and materials. Opportunity to learn new skills and endless jobs between 10 pm and 5 am.

Technical writer needed who knows how to game, write, speak Mandarin, code, and has a rockstar Instagram following. Old people need not apply LOL.

Scambivalence

Maybe I’ll start my own job warehouse called Instead, where I employ a gifted staff of reformed scammers who weed out every bullshit ad on the planet.

That would leave 31 high-quality jobs. We could all breathe a sigh of relief we have no chance of getting one and return to napping.

The actual jobs wouldn’t require you to post your resume and then fill out an interminable application describing all your past jobs including wage, job address, hours worked, and the name and phone number of your long-dead supervisor.

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Jean Campbell is based in Hot Springs, Arkansas. She has been writing on Medium for years and recently published her first novel, Down and Out on the Road South, with Wings ePress.