FWD: A Plan of Action

Hello,

My name is Ped Xing and I'm the CEO of the People's Flag Company here in Beijing, China. I am writing to extend my hearty thanks to all of my American friends for ordering so many flags for your upcoming display of patriotism in September.

Your response to my "action plan" email campaign has been overwhelming and our factories are now buzzing like beehives! I am happy to inform you that your national pride has created hundreds of jobs for our nation's unemployed orphans and that I am looking at a bonus check that would give The Chairman grave-spins, most of which I plan on investing in American Real Estate.

Your friend in Capitalism,
Ped Xing

P.S. Forward this to 600 million of your closest friends!

Don't Count Your Puppies Until They Hatch

I got offered a job today. I even started it, but I don't know if I'll keep it. The manager wasn't sure what my pay rate was- eventually we reached the owner on the phone and he informed me that my hourly wage was $8, which, multiplied by 40 and zapped by taxes is roughly 1/3 less than I need to survive- rent , bills food etc, much less live.

I was speechless.

I haven't worked for under $10 an hour since...I dunno. High School?
Yeah, if I sell a $2500 amplifier, I'd have a decent check- that week- but that doesn't happen every week. I'm leery of the idea of commission sales. I love to bullshit in person and on-line, but somehow it just never lends itself to making money. I'm just not a good salesman, I am afraid.

Today I sold a pair of drumsticks. That's about 35 cents commission, think.
I need to have a talk with my new boss.

All I'm really interested in selling is my time. I'm think of revising my resume to read:

Objective: To sell my time to the highest bidder. My time is available in 40-hour weekly blocks on a self-renewing basis. During these purchased block of time, I will do anything reasonable that is asked of me and I will do it well. In return for doing that, I would like to receive at least $500 per 40-hour block and, oh yeah, some health insurance.

Is that too much to ask?

---------------------------------

Geez, the e-search continues to haul in a bounty of spamourus come-ons...this most recent one even admits to being illegal (comments mine):

... On August 4th of 2003 I returned from vacation to discover the company I had started 9 years EARLIER would be 100% out of business on August 25th!

My company was in the business of faxing a daily comic relief news fax to about 8,000 offices in the Virginia Beach area. Offices loved to read it with the morning coffee (they did? we used to hate spam faxes), and we made good money selling advertising on it. But the Federal Communications Commission's new regulation made it "unlawful" after August 25th, 2003.
.

Coincidentally, the FCC passed regulations banning unsolicited 'junk' faxes from being sent to unwilling recipients on Aug 25th, 2003. If the offices were enjoying the morning fax so much, they could have signed up for it- the fact that they didn't leads me to conclude his ' comic relief' faxes were unwanted, ad-based spam.

Fax spam was "unlawful", i.e, illegal- this guy's business was sending 8,000 spam faxes a day and selling ad space on the spams -probably counting every fax # as several 'readers' when quoting circulation figures to client/dupes.

The FCC made the practice illegal because it was tying up business fax lines; wasting gobs of paper, time, productivity and resources etc...eventually enough businesses complained and the FCC was forced to act.

The spam lobby tried and failed to defeat this regulation, and they did get an extension until 2005, by which time the rise of email had rendered fax spam largely irrelevant...anyway, I , like most folks, detest spammers- and this guy is asking me to 'work' for him!
By paying him to send spam for me!
What a great deal.

See, deep down, he's a soft-hearted , sensitive guy who cares about his people:

About one week into shutting down the company, my office manager was crying at her desk, I tried to encourage her, but all she could mumble was, "there aren't enough jobs out there, I can't afford to work for $8 an hour (I know), those are the only jobs I'm finding"

I felt responsible, so I came up with an idea, "Suzy, give me your resume and cover letter and I'll fax it to all the offices that get our comic relief fax" We faxed it to all the offices (that was over 8,000 offices) and we were blown away by the response!

He spammed all the offices that it had become illegal to send ads to, but he didn't send ads- he sent his employee's personal info instead.
I need a job really, really badly, but I'm not sure I want to spam 8,000 offices with unsolicited copies of my resume.

According to Fax Man, you can expect 1 phone call for every 100 faxes you pay him to send out. He suggests sending at least 5,000.
He gives discounts for quantity.

5,ooo fax spams, with a cover sheet on each, wastes at least 10,000 sheets of paper on the receiving end. That's two cases of paper. I'm no Ed Begley, but I am uneasy with such a cavalier waste of paper in my name- my name printed on each sheet!

Is this what 21st century job-searching is all about? Paying spammers to put your resume on their mailing lists? I'd bet that your own info gets placed on a 'for-sale' mailing list as soon as you sign up.

Yep, he will send your resume to one of his many mailing lists. For a nominal service charge.

I'm not even sure if this is legal, I guess it is, but it seems phishy to me... according to his site, the fax will appear to have come from YOU...I wonder if that makes you complicit should it actually be a crime?

I'm sick of all this. I want to work, not send my phone number to 50,000 strangers.

Hmmm...I wonder how much it would cost to fax a Xerox of my ass to 100,000 office drones? That almost might be worth it.

Your Comment Is The Most Fucked-Up Thing Ever

Yesterday I got a phone call from a friend of mine who happens to be a blogger. They were a little agitated. What's up?

"Do you wanna see the most fucked-up thing, ever?"

"Um, I'm already watching that. It's on TV right now."

We were thinking of two completely different Most Fucked-Up Things Ever. That's part of the diabolic nature of MFUTEs- they should be singular but in reality they are infinite. I'll post about my MFUTE later, but my buddy's MFUTE took the form of a comment left on their blog.
Could I take a look at it?

If you took an infinite number of monkeys , gave them an infinite amount of bathtub-grade LSD
and made them fight each other for the right to randomly type on a single keyboard, you'd get a more coherent text than the nigh-infinite comment that was my friend's MFUTE.
It consisted of dozens of paragraphs of Unibomberesque rantings - it made my eyeball hurt to look at it, but I did note that it had absolutely nothing to do with my friend's blog. In fact, it looked exactly like the kind of lunatic spam that my old pal Jerky used to get on his sorely-missed website, the Daily Dirt. He'd get dozens of letters like this every week, but his site was extremely political and in the wave of post-9/11 nationlistic hysteria, the simple act of criticizing Dubya was 100% guaranteed to garner at least a few ALL CAPS DEATH THREATS, not to mention dozens of schizophrenic manifestos such as the one my friend received. There's no shortage of avoidable lunacy on the web, but it's never fun when it seeks you out.

"I have never seen anything this insane...why would they put this on my blog? "

"This is some crackpot's personal agenda- I'm sure it makes sense to him , but I'm glad it doesn't make sense to you. It's probably on his clipboard and he's hopping blogs and pasting it everywhere he can. I bet if you spent sometime trolling other blog's comments, you'll see this rant posted over and over again."

Sure enough, a cursory morning skim of some of my fave blogs revealed that some of them had been gifted with the mystery jeremiad. It's probably grabbing URLs from our blogrolls and spreading itself, so there's a good chance you have already received it.

I got mine at 2:13 am. The weird thing is, the 'hit' didn't show up on my traffic counter at all. The Unispammer is using some sort of proxy or software to mask his tracks...anyone got any info on this? It puzzles me.

I hadn't planned on posting about this- my drafts are piling up-but after seeing traces of the Unicomment on other blogs, I'd thought I'd toss it out there- please note that the title of this post does not refer to your comments.

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