This story was a lot more interesting when I thought he was trying to get them to change Rehberg's GPA. As it is, it's just run-of-the-mill or garden-variety idiocy with no newsworthy implications.
They got him to take photos of squirrels. That is awesome.
That's pretty classic attrition.org, though. I used to be friends with one of the attrition folks and they get some pretty stunningly idiotic requests. Stringing such people along must surely never get old.
This is almost exactly the equivalent for me of what the basketball or lawyerin' posts must be for others.
they have everything in logs including the rot-26 stuff that finally got me access all goes back to your login sorry i really fucked up BAD
Shit, even the rot-26 stuff!
If there's one thing that geeks never get tired of, it's rot-13 jokes (I include myself, of course)
First time I've ever seen TPM, slashdot, and unfogged all link to the same thing. The end times are near, I tell ya.
it's just run-of-the-mill or garden-variety idiocy with no newsworthy implications
Were it not for the pigeon/squirrel bit, you'd be right. But that was priceless.
Were it not for the pigeon/squirrel bit, you'd be right. But that was priceless.
Haven't people gotten the nigerian scammers to take pictures of themselves holding up fish?
also, please tell me that attrition was not posting the email correspondence on their website in real time, as appears to be the case.
5: Heh, I missed that in my first read-through. rot-26, indeed.
I don't get the rot-26 stuff, of course, but the squirrel pictures are hilarious. How could anyone truly be that dumb?
Splains why he needed his GPA raised, anyway.
From the news article: "I did something that's greatly out of character for me and it's a mistake that I regret."
Bull-fucking-shit. He regrets it, I'm quite sure, but an premeditated request put forth in an email exchange spanning several weeks? That's not "out of character", jackass, you're just a cheating sack of shit. That's who you are. Admit it to yourself.
Take it easy, Brock. Have some ice cream.
13: Aha. And so rot-26 would be actually just spelling things out normally. Ok, that's pretty stupid. Ha ha!
I'll 'take it easy' as soon as I find this guy and punch him in the face, standpipe. And not a moment sooner!
I hate the fact that someone is using my real name as a pseudonym, which makes me do a double-take at comments like 14.
Sorry 'bout that, zadfrack. I'd change it but LB would yell at me.
It's time to crowd you out of your niche.
"That brings me to my next point: I need to urgently make contact with a hacker that would be interested in doing a one-time job for me. The pay would be good. I'm not sure what exactly the job would entail with respect to computer jargon, but I can go into rough detail upon making contact with a candidate."
This reads like it's written by someone who's played one too many games of Shadowrun. "I'm looking to hire some discreet individuals for a very important mission," laff.
"As it is, it's just run-of-the-mill or garden-variety idiocy with no newsworthy implications."
I bow down to the correctness of this statement. But for those of us that don't run in to this type of insanity regularly, it's a real friggin eye-popper. What a fool.
I feel sorry for him. How sad to be out of school, working, and still thinking about your grades. Dude, move on already.
(Seriously, aside from a couple of bizarre, un-representative jobs, does anybody ever look at test scores or grades once you are two years out of college? Not in any field I've ever worked in.)
After, actually I wrote 23, I started thinking, "wait, maybe the phrase 'bizarre, un-representative' was a sly dig at graduate school, and I'm just pointing out the obvious joke."
No, I was thinking of some article I read on finance jobs where the big investment banks (? -- you can see how well I retained it) were looking at the SAT scores of people who were years out of college, not to mention high school.
Apparently, despite the time I spend here, I don't actually know any grad students.
one last e-mail should be okay
I bet they debated including that line. They'd pwned this guy into wetting his pants, but couldn't resist dropping the charade for just a sec in hopes of keeping it going.
Google is probably unrepresentative, but they will ask for your undergraduate transcript, even for people who graduated college ten years ago. But I think this is widely acknowledged as screwy.
28: Huh, interesting. Of course, your transcript shows which classes you took, not just your grades. Somehow that seems marginally more relevant.
I don't know. Having recently seen a 90-question personality test and a lengthy math test for a hotel housekeeping position, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised what HR thinks will help them weed out job candidates.
9 - There are lots of cases of people stringing the Nigerian (and other countries) bank scammers along. In one of sites, after many weeks of email exchange, the guy got the scammer to go to an airport, stand in front of a crowd, and be photographed with a sign that says "David Lee Roth". It's really funny.
26 -- a friend of mine works in HR at a hedge fund and he says the primary thing they look at on applications, regardless of the applicant's previous experience, is GPA and standardized test scores. I put the question back to him in a variety of formats cause his answers sounded so weird to me, but he kept on confirming that that was how they did it.
(I don't necessarily think that is a common feature of hedge fund HR departments or the financial sector in general, though.)
James Kramer is on record as saying he once hired a kid who walked into his office Charlie Sheen-style, with a box of hot donuts. He has also written that a Harvard guy he hired one time turned out to be completely useless.
Another guy I know got hired by offering to work for free for a year. At the end of the year, he had done so well, they paid him anyway, equal to what he would have earned over the year plus a bonus. He now runs his own fund and is worth hundreds of millions.
Every fund manager is different, of course, but most of them respect initiative and ability more than just a GPA. They care about results, not pedigree.
It's not exactly GPA, but the teaching job I got ten years after I completed my PhD (and some time after the publication of various books and articles) was apparently due in some part to the fact that my second BA, earned 19 years previously, was a British degree with "First Class Honours" ["u" compulsory in that last word!], which proved to the Commonwealth-oriented hirers that my American credentials might really be worth something.
So, if one were leaving the academy and applying for corporate jobs, should one list one's GPA on one's CV?
Can't hurt, if it was an impressive one.
Yes, it could. Many (most?) managers would consider that obnoxious, and ill-advised. If your GPA was indeed "an impressive one", it probably came attached to some honor such as cum laude, or magna or summa. (Or even "Dean's list" or whatever.) Include that instead.
Brock is probably right. I think some editions of my resume have included "GPA x.y" next to my college degree; but those have not been recent ones.
I was just thinking I should post something about the xification of the yish z but nothing more specific was coming to mind.
(the two lines of 38 are unrelated.)
GB, are you in the hedge fund world? I bet there are some crazy-ass office stories to go with that.
This is my all-time favorite game someone played with a Nigerian spammer, in which Randolph Carter of good ol' Miskatonic University (Ex Ignorantia Ad Sapientiam; E Luce Ad Tenebras) finds himself in need of funds.
Snarkout, I'd seen that one earlier, I think when someone else (or perhaps you) linked it in comments here, but it really is without peer. The sort of thing one shouldn't read if they're going to get weird looks for laughing out loud, I venture to say.
This is the best game played with a Nigerian spammer, in which the spammer was persuaded to carve cartoon characters and a replica of a computer keyboard out of wood.