Dave Barry's Money Secrets Read Online Free PDF Page B

doing so hot either. So the combined managements of both companies gather together—they need a
really
big conference table for this—and decide that what they need to do, as executives making huge salaries, is fire some workers.
    This strikes everybody at the conference table as a fine idea, because (a) workers cost money, and (b) none of them are sitting at the conference table. So they fire some workers and outsource their jobs to Asia. They keep doing this until eventually all the actual work is being done by people in some Third World village who are so happy not to be shoveling yak dung that they will work for an entire month in exchange for a roll of Certs.
    Am I exaggerating? Of course I am. Many overseas workers receive only
half
a roll of Certs. But my essential point is true: If you want to make money in a modern corporation, you do
not
want to be a worker. You do not want to know
anything
useful or practical, such as how to make an actual brassiere. You want to be an
executive,
so you can sit around the conference table and make important, high-level, far-reaching strategic decisions with the other morons. In the next chapter, we’ll talk about how you can achieve that goal.

5
    HOW TO GET A JOB
    The Amazing Power of Oral Sex
    A S WE LEARNED IN THE LAST CHAPTER, your goal is to get a high-paying executive job in a big corporation. Unfortunately, this is not easy: For every good job opening you find, chances are there will be hundreds—even thousands—of people competing against you for it. There is simply no practical way you can kill them all.
    But that is no reason to give up hope. Oh, sure, you and I both know, deep down inside, that the other job candidates are smarter and more competent than you. But competence and intelligence aren’t everything. Look at the past ten or eleven presidents of the United States.
    No, you
can
get the job, if you take certain steps. Step one is to:
    1. Research Your Prospective Employer
    When you apply for a job at a corporation, it’s good to have some idea of what the corporation does. Sometimes you can tell by the corporation’s name. For example, General Foods makes foods, General Motors makes motors, General Mills makes mills, General Electric makes electricity, General Dynamics makes dynamics, and so on.
    Note:
If the corporation has a mutant name like “Amerisource” or “Accenture,” chances are nobody knows what it does, including the people who work there.
    There are other important things you should find out about a corporation you are thinking of working for, such as:

    •                  Where, exactly, will you, as an executive, park?
    •                  Will you get to use the corporation’s skybox seats? For which games?
    •                  What about the play-offs?
    •                  Will you have Internet access? This is
very
important: You’ll be spending a lot of time at work, and you will need something to do.
    •                  When you call in sick because you need to do something else that day, can you just
say
you’re sick, or do you have to really
sound
sick and provide explicit details of your pretend illness, such as, “I have never seen diarrhea spurt that far.”
    •                  How is the corporate cafeteria? Does it have a variety of entrées and a well-maintained salad bar, with the ingredients carefully separated? Or are there always some rogue chickpeas in the low-fat ranch dressing?
    •                  What about eating out? Is the corporation located near decent restaurants? Or is it in some rural hellhole where the only off-site cuisine option is a Big Boy?
    •                  Are there chickpeas in the Big Boy’s low-fat ranch?
    •                  What the hell
are
chickpeas, anyway?

    Once you have gathered this information, it’s time to