Reporter's Fake Job Irks Real Dot-Com

December 2, 2000 3:23 AM

Reporter's Fake Job Irks Real Dot-Com "New York's Silicon Alley was in a tizzy last week after the New Yorker ran a hilarious piece called 'My Fake Job,' in which former Letterman writer Rodney Rothman recounted his days of masquerading as an employee at an unnamed Manhattan dot-com consultancy." This is the church, this is the steeple, open the door, meet all the people.

With dot-com layoffs abounding, and f*cked company and all, it's amazing that a guy can just walk into an office and assume a position. George Costanza, where are you?

posted by BoyCaught (6 comments total)

I read this in the New Yorker, and at first I thought it was just a fictional story...

It's hilarious! What an elegant bit of social engineering.

This is what is possible when nobody knows what anybody really does at a company.
posted by beth at 6:09 AM on December 2, 2000

Michael J. Fox already did this.
posted by ZachsMind at 6:22 AM on December 2, 2000

Rodney Rothman is my new hero.
posted by rklawler at 6:28 AM on December 2, 2000

If you like this, and I did, you will probably also like this .
posted by chrismc at 9:02 AM on December 2, 2000

Even though Rodney is a college buddy of some of my good friends, and thus I presumably would have heard had he been mounting his efforts in our office, rather than at Luminant, I still worried for a moment that he had been the guy sitting in the usually-empty cubes on the other side of the elevator from me ...

One wrinkle: per the Vault message board his mother was working in the office, so that may have helped facilitate the infiltration.
posted by MattD at 11:02 AM on December 2, 2000

Thanks for that pointer to the Vault, MattD. (Pure digression: the Vault presents their posts in reverse chronological order but numbers them. 1 is the newest, 24 is the oldest. It hurt my brain to read.)
posted by rodii at 1:32 PM on December 2, 2000