Re: Software Courses below




The course I attended had just such a bullshitter - Sean. Only, in his case he was barely out of school yet claimed to have been at the forefront of every major step forward in computing over the previous ten years.

He claimed to be currently running the bar in a golf club every night as a mitigating circumstance as to why his coursework was so poor. One of our fellow attendees' uncle was a member at said club - Sean was a weekend pot boy there and a piss-poor one at that.

He claimed he was living in a swanky new apartment complex - the reality was a halfway house cum dole hostel cum no questions asked B&B where you paid for your room by the day and had to remove all your possessions every morning. So his clapped out Toyota Starlet was his real home as that's where all his stuff mostly stayed.

While we were at lunch every day we had to do everything short of encasing our PCs in concrete to stop Sean interfering with them. Of course he thought he was doing us a favour by "Making them perform better". Although I doubt, erasing system files, downloading viruses and covering the keyboards in spilled lemonade and fragments of crisps counted as 'better'.

Then there was the day he claimed to have downloaded the latest Star War movie, before it had even been released in Europe, from a warez site. He gathered us all round his desk to show off his proud acquisition - it turned out to be the official trailer clip - the eejit had got it from some other site thinking it was the entire film. He figured it only being a small size file meant there was 'super, super compression' involved.

Eventually, at the end of the course we did a series of interviews with several interested companies. Every one of us got a job out of it except, well no prizes for guessing - Sean. In fact, one of the interviewers took our instructor aside and asked him "That fellow Sean. You just put him in as a joke didn't you?" Apparently, whatever isometrics were used to evaluate our abilities - Sean came dead last in the "What would happen if you sat your 89 year old granny in front of a computer and she'd never seen one before in her life" grade.

The course ended and we went our separate ways. We stayed in touch via email and planned to meet up at Christmas. I never heard from Sean but heard that he was bombarding the two most attractive women in the course with a flood of emails claiming to be running an international software company.

We all met up in a pub at Christmas and had a great old time. Sean appeared later and, despite looking (and smelling) like he'd been living in a ditch, claimed he was well on his way to his first million. Surprisingly, for him, he was very cagey about what exactly he was up to and wouldn't give anything away. He said he didn't want his business plan to be too widely known by his competitors so he wasn't saying anything.

A few months later and one of the girls mailed the rest of us. Sean had been arrested as part of a fraud operation. He was involved with some scam artist who fleeced companies out of money that they'd given him to install a computer system. Sean was the 'technical expert' - we could well believe that as he could spout technical jargon all day without tiring. Sean was let go as it was quite clear that he was duped by the fraudster just as much as the fleeced companies were.

I met him briefly a few years after that. You'd think that being arrested would have knocked some sense into his bullshitting head but no. Still looking (and smelling) like he slept in a ditch, he claimed he was running a call centre instead of (as I assumed) merely working there.
(Fanta Menace Is tall enough to see over the fence, Mon 3 Dec 2007, 9:24, Reply)