Detecting b.s. in job ads

When I got home from work on Monday night, I saw the local paper sitting on the kitchen table, and decided to check out the Help Wanted ads. By "local paper", I'm referring to Shepherdsville's paper The Pioneer News, and not Louisville's Courier-Journal. The jobs section of the C-J these days is pretty pathetic, so there's usually a good chance that The PN's jobs section will be pretty slim pickin's as well. As I predicted, the only ads for the kinds of jobs of which I have experience were for temp agencies. When I got up the next day, my dad told me that he wanted me to check out The Pioneer News because there were some jobs he wanted me to see. Then I told him that I already checked it out, and that the only jobs in there that were worth a crap were from temp agencies. He then opens up the paper and asks me which ones were temp agencies, and I point to three ads. He asks me where they say "temp", and I'm like, "Trust me, they're temp agencies!" Then he points to some other ad, and asks, "What's that?"  The ad he pointed to said this:

ATTENTION

$20/START

Local company has 15-20

immediate

openings in our

Customer

Service

Dept.

No experience

necessary!

We train!

Must Have Own

Transportation.

Management Available.

No layoffs.

PLEASE CALL FOR

INTERVIEW

(Then it lists the number)

Having actually been unemployed and looking for work at various times in the past 13 years, and having checked out some places or done some further research on the web, I've developed a pretty good Bullshit Detector when it comes to job ads. "Customer Service" isn't a bad thing, but I don't trust seeing those words attached to an ad where no company name is mentioned, and for that matter I don't trust any ad where a company name isn't attached. When my dad asked me what I thought it was, my first thought was that it was probably something shady, but I wasn't sure how to tell my dad that. Instead, I was like, "I don't know, probably answering phones or something." Then he said something to the effect of, "Well for $20, surely you could answer a fucking phone?" I don't know if I've mentioned it here yet, but I have issues with telephones, especially when it comes to using them for work, so I absolutely avoid phone jobs. So, I told him, "I'm not good at working with phones." Then he asked me, "Well what are you good at?" I told him that I was good at what I did at Main ex-Employer, to which he replied, "Well, you must not have been good enough since they never called you back." Then I told him that there were lots of good people who got laid off from there who didn't get called back. We were probably talking about two different eras, since I was referring to the job I did when I got laid off, while he might have been talking about when I worked there on a seasonal basis the past two years. Of course, what I really wanted to tell him was "Well fuck you old man!" I absolutely love starting the day with an argument...not. Needless to say, a Lorazepam tablet was consumed.

Wednesday night, I finally got around to looking up the number that was listed in the ad, and it seems that my suspicion was justified. It seems to be some Sales type of job, and possibly even a pyramid scheme. From the number, I found a company name, so I looked up the company name, and found this. Make sure to hit "next page" when you get to the bottom of the thread, the second page is probably even more revealing about the job aspect of the company.

So, to answer my dad's question, I guess I'm good at detecting bullshit in job ads. If I were a really good blogger, I'd tell you what to look out for.