Dear Mrs. Dean Suzy,
I have leading a delegation of 20 distinguished Chinese scientists. We visiting Dean-Suzy-Town next week and we want you to give talk Monday from 9am - 1pm onWe can pay you $300 and will have translator.
1. Introduction to Squirrel Fur Weaving
2. Importance of Squirrel Fur Weaving for industry
3. Typical Squirrel Fur Weaving patterns in international operating company
4. Application of SFW principles and concepts
5. Development of a sustainable SFW concept on international level
I thnak you for your cooperation.
Sincerely,
Mai Tai
Um. Next Monday? I don't actually teach in the Fur Weaving department. I'm over at Basket Weaving. For $300 I'm not even going to read the Wikipedia entry to you. I'd rather attend a meeting with the president and then have my wisdom teeth pulled. Thank you.
P.S. I just realized that the boilerplate for the talks is quite good - just plug in any garbage, and it looks like an all-day course!
Hey, at least they came to you, and offered you money. The invitations I get want me to fly half way around the world and pay $300 to attend a conference on, say, the biotechnology of Aardvark testicle production.
ReplyDeleteI just get invited to help teach camp at a "competitive salary" to students trying to get into the local sci/tech magnet school. But the linguistic skills of my correspondents are similar.
ReplyDeleteOh, yes, and I also get invitations to expensive vacations disguised as expensive conferences (and to submit to or help edit journals that I'm pretty sure someone envisions as profit-making ventures, though, in that case, I suspect their business plan is bit off).
Or a combination of the above: please fly halfway around the world to attend our Very Distinguished Conference, whose proceedings will be published in real books! For a fee of $400 per article! But this isn't vanity publishing, not at all!
ReplyDeleteI never get these offers! Damn! But I do get people calling on the phone, asking for me to translate witty phrases into the language of the aardvarks (my specialty) for their tattoos. For free, of course. If I didn't hate lawyers so much I would hand out a few choice phrases to these dumb asses.
ReplyDelete@Comrade Presto
ReplyDeleteThis isn't "real goddamned mail"; that's just the sniveling of the bitching set. What you have here is the "REALLY real goddamned mail"; the intra-office boullsheet, full of Helleresqe crapola and Lumbergian* smarm.
______________________________
* The sleazy boss in "Office Space."
@Harpy, I'd love to offer up some tat' ideas. The only calls I get are from armchair geniologists, asking me to decipher their great-great-great-grandpa aardvark's baptismal certificates. I've been tempted to take a look at it and gasp, "It reads... All Hail Satan... and if you look down here, it's signed by Hitler himself!"
ReplyDelete@Frankity, BTDT. I do have some lovely ideas for tats in the language of the aardvarks, but I'm saving them for myself.
ReplyDeleteIf you really want to have some fun, do a talk on some variation of "The Predominance of Hamster Fur in the early church". They'll never make you come back, and perhaps they will think twice before hitting someone up for slave-labor.
ReplyDeleteFor extra points, invite the Guidians to pass out "reading material".
Just thnak him right back.
ReplyDelete