True Story #4: Five months of work equals two years of paid vacation

When living internationally, one of the best places to meet foreigners is at the local pub.  In 2005 I met a young 25-year-old Swedish man, whom we'll call Joseph, a recent art graduate, in a bar in Paris France during happy hour.  I sat down next to him just as he was bragging to the bartender that he had just quit his job and was about to take a two-year paid vacation in England to launch his career in the film industry.  After 5 pints of beer, Joseph gladly told me his secret.

Shortly after graduating in late 2004 with a degree in cinematography, he moved to France in search of work.  Six unsuccessful months of unemployment later and his savings nearly depleted, Joseph decided to try a different, slightly more unethical technique.  He threw away his old resume and created an entirely bogus resume, complete with fake qualifications, working experience, and credentials.

Even though France and Sweden are both members of the European Union, and only a few hours away from each other by train, there is still a language barrier between them because most businesspeople speak English or Spanish as a second language, not Swedish, and he knew he could use that to his advantage.  All of Joseph's new references and contact information from "previous employers" were actually his friends back home in Sweden that had been instructed with what to say in the unlikely event a potential employer actually tried to follow up on the truthfulness of his claims.  Suddenly job interviews started piling up, and within a month he managed to obtain a managerial position at Dupont Bank levels above his qualification.  Even though Joseph had majored in cinema, he did remember a little bit from the introductory courses he took in micro- and macroeconomics, and since his job involved supervising a team of three, any difficult tasks he couldn't handle, he could simply delegate them to his subordinates.  That is what managers do anyway, right?

From day one of employment Joseph, knowing that France was a socialist country and having studied up on how their legal system worked, knew that there were legal employment-related consulting associations where he could call up and get counseling for free, and he began surreptitiously setting the company up for an eventual lawsuit.  Three months into his new job at Dupont Bank, and shortly after barely passing his 90-day trial period, Joseph approached the company with a lawyer and over 40 pages of legal violations along with accusations of discrimination charges, and he walked away from the company with nearly 20,000€ in out-of-court settlement fees, plus government assistance for up to two years while he was unemployed and "looking for work".

At that time unemployed could keep in touch with the unemployment agency via filling out a monthly online form, and as long as Joseph gave his friend a cut of the unemployment check to fill the forms out for him, Joseph could focus his time in England doing a paid internship for a film director he had found while he was surfing the internet during the few months he was working at Dupont Bank.

True Story.