An email I sent to my Boss today

For those of you who weren't already aware, I am slightly miffed to report that I am working once again. My employer, with some justification, has elected to employ me as a contractor, hoping I suspect that I will do something vaguely useful, but also aware that as a contractor it will be much simpler to terminate my services in the event that I either i. fail to do something useful or ii. do something so outrageous that they can no longer employ me without damaging their own reputation.



In fairness, I have already done useful things, so the second option is shaping as the more likely. I often do useful things for my employer, sometimes surprisingly useful. On the other hand I often do quite outrageous things too. This email is probably an outrageous thing.

Anyway, my official employer is a temp agency that has the quaint approach of paying their employees weekly. Like most employers, they make my payslip available to me by emailing it.

Now read on...


Email

Subject: Salary Concerns
From: Shane Curran
To: Shane's Boss
Time; 03/03/2017 11:49 AM


Boss

Yesterday, I received my payslip at 5:24pm.

I received another payslip at 5:40pm.

The two payslips were identical in every way, so this naturally led me to assume that I would be receiving a doubling of my salary this week and that I could look forward to my salary doubling each week thereafter.

After a short time I was able to calculate that within 30 weeks, my salary would be roughly equal to global GDP and this would mean that every person in the world would then be obliged to give me all the money that they had earned that week along with any goods they had produced. By the end of a year's service, every person would be giving me every cent that they earned and also be heavily indebted to me. The amount of their debt would be approximately equal to 2,000,000 times global GDP.

Each!

In other words I would be owed 2 million times global GDP by nearly 8 billion people, This would mean that my accounts receivable ledger would have outstandings of roughly $23,076,900,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.00

This is rather a lot of money and I had to give some considerable thought to how I would manage this. I did think that in the circumstances that I might waive your debt to me, but this would be the same as actually giving you around $2,880,000,000,000,000,000.00 which is rather a lot of money for someone in your position and probably a little over generous on my part. Instead I decided that I would not charge you interest, A fair outcome and still remarkably generous on my part. Your daily interest bill would run to $4,740,000,000,000.00. It's not every day that someone agrees to give you $5 Trillion per day!

I also thought about buying some things, but it seems that I will own everything anyway. I would rather like to own Europe, if only so that I could tell them to get back to work. However I would give back Belgium to whomever had it before me because I wouldn't want to be bored. I would think the owner of Belgium would be among the most bored people in the world and might have to purchase the Belgian Congo simply to relieve the boredom.

Unfortunately, buying things like cars and houses would be a bit pointless as I would already own every house and car ever built and would be owed quite a few more. Nonetheless, this was a burden that I was willing to shoulder.

But!

It now seems that I have not been paid double my original salary!

Based on this, I am concerned that there has been some terrible mistake and that my salary will not be doubling weekly as I thought.

Can you look into this immediately and get back to me. If I do not have a satisfactory response I shall have to reconsider my generosity and charge you $4,740,000,000,000.00 per day after all.


regards

Shane


Photo courtesy https://www.flickr.com/photos/pictures-of-money/17123251389