Could have been a janitor
An unemployed man is
desperate to support his family. His wife watches TV all day and his three
teenage kids have dropped out of high school to hang around with the local
toughs.
He applies for a janitor's job at a large firm and easily passes an
aptitude test. The human resources manager tells him, "You will be
hired at minimum wage of $5.15 an hour. Let me have your e-mail address so that
we can get you in the loop. Our system will automatically e-mail you all the
forms and advise you when to start and where to report on your first day."
Taken back, the man protests that he is poor and has neither a
computer nor an e-mail address. To this the manager replies, "You must
understand that to a company like ours that means that you virtually do not
exist. Without an e-mail address you can hardly expect to be employed by a
high-tech firm. Good day."
Stunned, the man leaves. Not
knowing where to turn and having $10
in his wallet, he walks past a farmers' market and sees a stand selling
crates of beautiful red tomatoes. He buys a crate, carries it to a busy
corner and displays the tomatoes. In less than 2 hours he sells all the
tomatoes and makes 100% profit. Repeating the process several times more that
day, he ends up with almost $100 and arrives home that night with several bags
of groceries for his family.
During the night he decides to repeat the tomato business the next
day. By the end of the week he is getting up early every day and working
into the night. He multiplies his profits quickly. Early in the second week
he acquires a cart to transport several boxes of tomatoes at a time,
but before a month is up he sells the cart to buy a broken-down pickup
truck.
At the end of a year he owns three old trucks. His two sons have
left their neighbourhood gangs to help him with the tomato business, his wife is
buying the tomatoes, and his daughter is taking night courses at the community
college so she can keep books for him.
By the end of the second
year he has a dozen very nice used trucks and employs fifteen previously
unemployed people, all selling tomatoes. He continues to work hard.
Time passes and at the end of the fifth year he owns a fleet of
nice trucks and a warehouse which his wife supervises, plus two tomato farms
that the boys manage. The tomato company's payroll has put hundreds of homeless
and jobless people to work. His daughter reports that the business grossed a
million dollars.
Planning for the future, he decides to buy some life insurance.
Consulting with an insurance adviser, he picks an insurance plan to fit his
new circumstances. Then the adviser asks him for his e-mail address in
order to send the final documents electronically.
When the man replies that he doesn't have time to mess with a
computer and has no e-mail address, the insurance man is stunned, "What, you
don't have e-mail? No computer? No Internet? Just think where you would be today
if you'd had all of that five years ago!"
"Ha!" snorts the man. "If I'd had e-mail five years ago I would be
sweeping floors at Microsoft and making $5.15 an hour."
Which brings us to the moral:
Since you got this story by e-mail, you're probably closer to being
a janitor than a millionaire.
Sadly, I received it also
5064