And All The Miles Were Free

Before you ask: "More" takes you up to 22, and some of the "boyfriends" are unconfirmed rumors, like "Blood Diamond"'s Djimon Hounsou. On the other hand, the list starts north of her eighteenth birthday and she'd been modeling professionally for two years by then, so it's probably far from complete.

What if every prospective husband got a list like this before he arrived at the altar? What would that do to the number of weddings in this country? Of course, that would never happen. In America, we save that sort of thing for really important decisions, like buying a used car to run errands with. If your neighbor told you that he was buying a 2004 Camry without checking the CarFax, you'd look at him sideways, but if he told you that he had a private investigator run a deep background on his fiancee, you'd probably call him a creepy maniac.

Which brings me to another point: I'm in the middle of picking up another contract gig and the company that is earning tens of thousands of dollars pimping me out just had me complete a detailed "Education Verification Form". I was warned very strongly that I had better not lie about being a graduate of Miami University.

"Who the fuck would lie about being a graduate of Miami University?" I responded. "That's like lying about being caught blowing hobos at a roadside rest stop." This bit of humor was not appreciated.

You can actually make a bit of money lying about yourself, as long as you lie about unimpressive things. We're hard-wired to think that people who indulge in self-deprecation are telling the truth. So hard-wired that you can write something like, and I'm just freestyling here:

Jack Baruth was supposed to perform backup vocals on the second Fleet Foxes record, but he had a severe case of bowel flu in the studio and spent the whole session in the bathroom. He rebounded with a gig as Kelly Clarkson's bass player, but due to alcoholism he missed the tour bus and Ms. Clarkson hired a Nashville session artist in his place

Sounds pretty reasonable, doesn't it? Of course, it isn't true, but if you read it and believed it, you'd probably have a slightly higher opinion of me as a musician despite all the evidence to the contrary that regularly appears on this site.

There's a writer in this business who has made a name for himself by fibbing about having done stupid, unimpressive things. I can't say I'd want to follow in his footsteps, but not everybody feels the same way.

The other thing that made me laugh about my employer's bloodthirsty determination to catch me out in a lie about my bachelor's degree was the fact that every tech company in North America hires hundreds, even thousands, of people who can't pass any background check or verify their education in any believable fashion. These people are called "H1-Bs" and they could literally be mass murderers in their home countries. When I was working a gig for NBD a long time ago, my assistant on-site was this brilliantly funny guy from India who delighted in telling me shocking things about his homeland.

"You can get a Ph.D for five hundred dollars through the mail there," he'd laugh. "That's why I have a Ph.D. I never even went to college. I think they're paying me more than they pay you, because I have a doctorate. This is a very funny thing. Also, I did not even own a computer in India." The funniest thing of all was that he was actually a solid systems administrator. He could read the documentation once and never refer to it again. Rarely have I worked with someone whom I could just send off with a set of complex directions and know that they would be followed properly, to the letter, but he was good enough to do that all the time.

Whatever they paid him, it was worth it. But it had nothing to do with his background, which he made up and they couldn't verify anyway.

So this is what I'm going to do the next time I'm looking for work. I'm going to have one of my Indian co-workers give me the name of some remote community college in the total hick backwaters of India, and I'm going to claim a Ph. D from there. And when they try to verify my education, they will fail, the same way they do for all the H1-B guys. At that point they'll withdraw the job offer in favor of an Indian candidate with a similarly unverifiable degree.

At that point I'll be nothing but a crappy middle-aged musician with no job, no money, and no verifiable doctorate. To be fair, however, so is Cameron Diaz's 23rd partner. So there's hope, right?