The Wild West is an ever shifting frontier. It was once a physical space, but then it had to move. In the 90’s, when I was a wee lad, the Wild West was the internet.

And let me tell you, it was fucking Wild. And god damn scary.

But now that everyone is on the internet, it no longer feels like a meet up for goons and losers. Still, there is a Wild West aspect to, but it has moved to certain corners of the internet. One such corner, is the job market.

Historians will one day talk about how capitalism killed the internet. I think there was maybe a week where people actually spoke to each other, while now it is just a place for people to sell each other things. I have no idea why scammers would use the job market to try to scam job hunters. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. If someone is looking for a job, money is likely to be tight.

The surprisingly common job hunt scam is that you apply to a job in a specific field, and then you get a reply saying “we aren’t moving forward with your application, but seeing as how you are into this field, how about taking our training course?” I am very tempted to email them a Robin Sage resume just to see how they would react. Y’know, for science.

That’s the intelligent way of running this scam: someone sends you a resume and you try to sell them a training course. By sheer luck, I was shown the incompetent route to this scam, and it was so god damned hilarious that I thought I would share it with you all.

For context, this was a job at one of those online coding bootcamps. Bear that in mind.

I applied for a job that I was about 65% qualified for, and I was pretty happy to have gotten an interview. I was, however, greatly annoyed at the company from the start for making me do a video cover letter. But they got extra points for being unique.

During the interview, my interviewer asked me just a handful of questions before deeming me unfit for the position they were hiring for. This was the “negging” phase. Right after that, in order to build up my confidence, they told me that it was obvious to them that I would make a great teacher.

It had the opposite effect.

I have worked as an educator for a decade, and having done it this long sentences like “I can tell you would make a great teacher” are as much of a compliment as “I can tell you would make a great toilet cleaner”. Thanks, but fuck you. I say this because I know what teacher salaries look like, and also because I have done hiring for teachers, and nothing you have asked me would have proven whether or not I would make a good teacher. People only say this right before they tell me that they are desperately in need of teachers.

Wouldn’t you know it, they were desperately in need of qualified teachers. Wouldn’t I consider working for them as an instructor?

Now, while this tactic wasn’t new to me, it was a bit strange coming from a coding school. I have no coding experience whatsoever. How in the world would they think I am qualified to do this? I pointed this out to my interviewer and he informed me that all I would have to do is take one of their courses.

I insisted that I was a slow learner, and that I doubt I could get the skills needed to teach his course over the 6 weeks it takes to get the certificate and he insisted that their course was really that good.

So I could pay them to take a course that in six weeks would make me excellent teacher for their course.

Somehow, I wasn’t convinced.

Well, into every job hunt a significant amount of failures will occur. Some of those will be pathetic scams. But this one was one of the funniest.