Guan Yue – Sixteen Jobs and No Work

I have a work ethic. I hate it. Really it’s the face that I have ADHD and can’t just sit around doing nothing, so I do work. On a good tear, I can do a month’s worth of work in like three no-sleep days. But even I gotta recognize true genius at the craft: Guan Yue.

A woman in China, the code-named Guan Yue worked sixteen full-time jobs at once. Sixteen. And not little jobs, tech jobs, big sales jobs, the kind with benefits (don’t know how that works in China.)

Her secret? She didn’t do any work for any of them.

See, she would go to interviews with a highly polished (padded) resume, and apparently, she was good at interviewing, because she got job after job. And she would be on the ninety-day probation plan, which meant they wouldn’t fire her unless, after ninety days, she had no results. Which would always be the case, because she did no work.

Now this isn’t Albany, it’s China, billions of people, millions of companies. If she could actually get and keep a roster of sixteen jobs at once, go out and get a new job for everyone that fires you, keep track of the paychecks, than you could keep it up with none the wiser.

A little mark of genius was that she would send pictures of her interviews to her jobs and tell them they were of her meeting clients. Another is if she had too many interviews in a given day, she’d farm them out to others for a commission of their paychecks.

Yes, she got caught. One of her resignation letters showed up online, and it all unraveled. She facing charges, the whole nine.

I said I applaud the work ethic. Fraud at this level requires a lot of careful planning, and yes, work. One thing they say in rehab is that if you spent as much time staying sober as you did using, you’d catch a year coin before you knew it.

Thumbs up to the woman with sixteen jobs!

Story by Liam Sweeny.