Nigerian Employment
What little time I've done telemarketing has taught me what a scripted call sounds like. This isn't much of a skill these days, given how telemarketing as a concept is dying out, but it still has its uses, surprisingly enough. Sales calls can come from the most interesting of places, but I never thought I'd be getting one from a Monster.com scammer. You see, before the 419 scheme became the Internet scam du jour, pyramid schemes ran rampant and wild, chain e-mails speaking promises of millions of dollars in your pocket if you put a dollar in five envelopes and mailed it off to five people obviously smarter than you. Any long-time Veteran of the Tubes can smell one from a mile away.
So when I received a call from a charming young lady that not only sounded very scripted, and very much like a call I got not a day before, my bullshit alarms started jangling. But I wasn't doing anything else the day she wanted to meet me, so I humored her, in spite of the fact that I've yet to hear of any formal interview being conducted in a Starbucks. But what my desire to "help and train people" amounted to was me selling life insurance and working as a mortgage broker, with the promise of bonuses upon bonuses if anybody I trained to do the same turned out to be great at schilling the same sort of snake-oil. All I had to do was take some tests and spend $99 to become a state-certified broker, and spend $25/month on special software that would help me perform the intense calculations required of me.
Simply put, it was the unholy love-child of the "work from home data-entry" and pyramid scheme scams.
Mind you, I already knew she was trying to sell me a pantload after thirty minutes of her drooling on about numbers with no clear idea of what my function would be in the company, and her neatly dodging a simple question I'd asked as to how a person could spend less on a life insurance premium and somehow get more than your average coverage. Then again, I didn't expect much out of a supposed subsidiary of Citigroup. I just had no idea things were so bad for them that they'd stoop to age-old tactics of swindling people out of their money, rather than the modern variants of credit cards and overdraft fees.
If there was any satisfaction to be had of this, it's the fact that it was an hour she didn't spend hooking some other poor slob, and the fact that I stood her up for the next day follow-up. I feel no pity or remorse for those who sell false hope to people.