Do you know what the day after President’s Day is? It’s Cautionary Blog Day. That’s right, go back to your history books. Look it up. Cautionary Blog Day was established shortly after president Rita Coolidge traded a stone face place on a South Dakota rock for a career in adult contemporary radio. In hindsight, a poor career move: everybody remembers the four mountain foreheads. Nobody remembers a Rita Coolidge song.
“Without you, there’s something special about you…”
Ok. Some of us remember more Rita than we’d care to admit. We remember all kinds of bad things. It’s not by choice; it’s just there in the back of our minds like a Jar-Jar Binks pop-up. I remember lovely Rita, when she was a meter maid, but this blog isn’t about her. It’s about me.
No, it’s not about me either. This is Cautionary Blog Day. This blog is about a writer friend of mine with a cautionary tale. And no. “writer friend” isn’t Rob code for “this blog is about me”—not this time.
This time, this blog is about an unemployed writer friend of mine. No, once again, I’m not the only unemployed writer out there. There are bunches of us. Why? Because the out of work actors have stolen all the good wait jobs. Besides, we’re writers. If we were happily employed, we’d have nothing to write about. We’re happiest in our self-absorbed misery.
“We’re all alone. We’re all alone…”
Preach on sister Rita!
Writers alone are easy targets--especially the unemployed ones. Unemployed writers need to eat. Writers are not starving artists. We’re usually well fed. Either by eating our words, or eating porch kibble left out for neighborhood cats.
“The doggone Meow Mix is mine!”
Rita didn’t write that. I did. It’s part of a cautionary tale told by writers to cold nose cats trying to nibble our kibble. That’s another cautionary tale though. This cautionary tale happened when my writer friend applied for a job.
Writers tend toward work-from-home situations; they adhere to our habitat. Unfortunately, most of these situations are either multi-tiered marketing schemes or multi-fool scams. Finding a work-from-home career is harder than finding a dirty needle in a haystack, but more people are searching for the job, meaning you’ll stick yourself with the dirty needle long before you get a job that lets you work from your house. That’s right, even Rita had to tour.
The work my friend applied for was a data entry job. Supposedly, he downloaded some special super secret database software, and then tallied up all the data they could find. My friend isn’t a fool. He knows his Mount Rushmore from his Six Grandfathers Mountain. He knew to ask questions, and to not hand out any money up-front.
After a few weeks of reciprocal online interviewing, my friend signed up for the data entry program. There only seemed to be one catch: for my friend to do the job asked of him, he would need to pay for extra special software. This isn’t too outrageous. Look at my resume; I’m schooled in several thousand dollars worth of software. Sure, writers use Microsoft Word, but to keep the kibble wolf from the door, we train in a variety of multi-functional programs. I speak to the spirits through Photoshop, Adobe Acrobat, and many other mediums.
“Close the window calm the light…”
Extra software did little more than raise my friend’s eyebrow. Besides, his would-be employer promised to reimburse him for any out of pocket expenditures. Of course the trick was that the out of pocket expenditures went to that employer, because this was magic bean counting software. So my friend worked out a way to wire the software people money after the employer had sent him a cashier’s check.
When my friend received the check, he Western Unioned his payment. I’m not sure how they worked this simultaneous payment plan. This was a murkier part of the story. What became crystal clear in the tale was that shortly after my friend deposited the check, his bank closed his account. When he questioned why, they told him “We don’t do business with people who deposit fraudulent checks.”
Thus the cautionary tale reaches a climax. My friend needed to cover two paths at once. He needed to file a police report, and he needed to talk to Western Union. Luckily, he went to WU first. They told him that nobody had received his money yet, and that they would stop the transaction before somebody did. In his best Rita Coolidge, my friend sang Western Union praises.
“Your love keeps lifting me…”
The other path was less fruitful, but it needed to be handled. The reality is that in 2008 the Internet crime complaint center received over 275,000 reports of online fraud. Most online predators shed their skin so quickly that they don’t get caught. That said, it’s still important to report fraud, because criminals rarely act once and they rarely quit. Someday, if they do get caught, your report will be one more nail in their coffin. Besides patterns are easier to follow when there are more breadcrumbs.
My friend felt pretty crumby. To make matters worse, when the bank closed his account, they froze his funds. There was still real money in my friend’s account. Real money my friend still can’t touch until the bank investigates things to their satisfaction.
So that’s this year’s cautionary tale. It’s not as funny as President Rita’s Facebook faux pas of 1930, but then again, what is? But just like Rita’s mistake, it’s important to investigate facts thoroughly. Just because somebody says something you’d like to believe, doesn’t make it true. Ask Rita. She’ll tell ya.
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