At 02:08 PM 07-12-2001 +1000, Pilcher, Fred wrote:
>
>An unemployed man applied for a job with Microsoft as a janitor. [...]
Very good!!! And you didn't even need Flash.... :-)
The template for this story and others like it was one by Somerset Maugham, if my memory serves me properly. It concerned the Verger of St. Marks (let's say) in London who had served the parish faithfully for many years. Recently the Parish Priest had died, and the parish was taken over by a go-getting young man who had decided to spruce up the establishment; a new broom, so to speak. It was, after all, a fashionable church, with a lot of society weddings.
One Sunday the new Priest called the Verger aside and asked him to sign a document agreeing to various new conditions of employment. The Verger had to admit he couldn't read or write, and so couldn't sign the document. "That will never do" said the Priest, "not in a parish like this with such respectable and important parishioners."
So the Verger was dismissed.
There were not many times when the Verger felt like a smoke, but this was one of them. So he set slowly off down the street in the evening drizzle keeping an eye out for a shop selling cigarettes. But there were none. He walked further... still none. "A little tobacco shop would go very nicely around here" he thought to himself.
You can guess the rest. One shop led to another, and soon he had a whole chain of tobacco kiosks. One day the bank manager called him aside (this was back in the days when people had personal relations with their bank managers) and informed him he had quite a lot of money sitting in an ordinary bank account. "We can invest it for you at a much better rate" he said. "All you have to do is to sign these papers authorising us to do so".
"I'm afraid I can't do that" said the Verger, "I never learned to read and write".
"Goodness me" said the bank manager, "what would you have done if you knew how to read and write?"
"I can tell you that" said the Verger, (all together now) "I'd be Verger at St. Marks!!"
David
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David Lochrin
Networked Systems Consultancy Pty. Limited ABN 20 074 899 853
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subject: GET David Lochrin
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