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Intergalactic Bounty Hunters Wanted
myukew wrote in to let us know about a viral marketing campaign by Nintendo that went awry. A while back Nintendo posted an opening on the jobs board Monster.com for an "Intergalactic Bounty Hunter". The response they received was unnerving. From the article: "Within the first day of posting the job, we had several replies from real applicants who seriously wanted to be an intergalactic bounty hunter for a living. The skills and experience these people listed went beyond surprising into the realm of frightening. We never expected such a wide array of replies from so many people who were actually pursuing interviews for gainful employment as a space warrior."
But then outsourcing reared its ugly head and Lur, the leader of Persius omicron V started having his people do it for half the cost...
Ahh yes, Mr. Fett, your resume is quite impressive. However, I did notice a slight gap in your work history. Oh, you say you've been in a Sarlac pit being slowly digested for the past 75 years? That's reasonable I suppose. But I also tried contacting your last employer, a Mr. Hutt, and he appears to be dead. You might want to update your references. Well, thanks for stopping by Mr. Fett, we'll call you. And please don't kill anyone on your way out.
Posted anonymously, because I don't want to be linked with these people. In the interests of their privacy, some details have been changed.
... very, very subtle. They're also very underhanded and not bound by law." I asked if we were talking organized crime, and my employers demurred. After about another fifteen minutes of careful "I can't effectively help you if I don't know who you're up against", they confided in me their group's purpose.
:)
I'm an information-security consultant. During the big tech downturn a few years ago, a group in Chicago asked about my services. They didn't trust email or phones, though, so I had to make the trip into Chicago to meet them directly. I told them that it would cost them money to have me head out to Chicago, but they assured me there wouldn't be a problem there.
In the meeting, they presented me with a cashier's check to cover my initial consultation fee and traveling expenses. Given it was the tech downturn, my initial fee wasn't huge, but between it and travel expenses the check was a nontrivial amount of money. A few hours went by as I did a quick evaluation of their systems. Finally, the preliminary assessment complete, I presented possibilities to my employers.
They thanked me, but warned: "The people we're concerned about are
They were a support group for people on the run from the Illuminati.
("The Bavarian Illuminati?" I asked, wondering if I'd heard it right. I got a fifteen-minute spiel about how the Illuminati isn't Bavarian, and how the Bavarian Illuminati was a disinformation campaign from the real Illuminati, which wasn't even really called the Illuminati but this group hadn't been able to find its real name yet.)
After fifteen minutes of listening to these people tell me, quite calmly and quite lucidly, the most wacko paranoiac conspiracy theories I've ever heard, I realized I had to get out of there in a big-ass hurry. So I politely told them "I'm sorry, but I'm not comfortable going up against the Bavar... err, the Illuminati. I think you need someone else."
They said they understood completely. I left the cashier's check on the table, explaining to them that I didn't feel comfortable taking their money if I wasn't willing to help them in their struggle against the, err, Illuminati. I got out of there and headed back home.
The real reason I didn't take their money was I was afraid word would get out in the information-security community of just who I'd worked for. I wanted to be able to outright deny ever knowing these people, ever meeting these people, ever being party to their insanity.
There is no Illuminati. There are no runners from the Illuminati. I was never approached by people who wanted to create a secure network for people who were on the run from the Illuminati to communicate with each other over.
No, I was approached by a bunch of dangerously delusional people.
But whenever information-security geeks get together and share stories about the weirdest clients we've ever had--at least, the clients we can talk about--well. I've had fellow geeks buying me beers for the last couple of years just on the strength of these wackos.