He'd been looking for a new job for years now. At his office, he looked at the people who had stayed and gone crazy and people who had gone and stayed sane. He'd stayed -- what did that say?
Then one morning a "career counselor" called him out of the blue, the first time in years that something like that had happened. The more she talked, the more excited he became. The perfect job, half again as much money, a true step up the professional ladder. Sensing his interest, she gave him a url and told him to check out the company. If he was still interested, she could be reached at...
He couldnt type the website address in fast enough. But even before the page had finished loading, he knew this was gonna be a problem.
His new employer was a spammer.
He hated spam. Check that: he loathed spam. He had no need for sexual enhancement, nor for replica Swiss watches, nor for milllions in beneficient funds from a dead government/bank official in Nigeria. He did not want a lovely new wife from the Ukraine. He was not interested in off-shore online gambling sites. They loaded his mailbox on a daily, if not hourly, basis, and he often lay in bed at night plotting ways of getting his revenge on spammers, should he ever get the opportunity.
And now, the Perfect Job meant working for one. He would get more money than he ever dreamed, a three week vacation his first year, complete medical and dental, a full retirement package, all of it wrapped up in one glorious package... in exchange for teaching little spammers how to be great big ones. He would be ordering address lists that toted in the millions. He would be writing code that would be purposely devised to get his employer's product in as many e-mailboxes as possible before the spam detectors could avert it.
On one hand, he could finally take that trip to Scotland.
On the other, it meant working for... he couldnt even bring himself to say it.
He called a friend. "What should I do?"
The friend laughed. "Ah, the moral quandry of our times. Well, what do you want to do?"
He couldnt answer, nor could his friend answer for him. And so, for another hour, he sat staring at the online application, his fingers poised...
