My favorite joke

An unemployed man applies for a job with Microsoft as a cleaner. The manager there arranges for an aptitude test. After the test, the manager says: "You will be appointed on the scale of $30 per day. Let me have your e-mail address, so that I can send you a form to complete and advise you where to report for work on your first day."

Taken aback, the unemployed man protests that he is neither in possession of a computer nor of an e-mail address. To this the manager replies: "Well then, that really means that you virtually don't exist and can therefore hardly expect to be employed."

Stunned, the man leaves the Microsoft office. Not knowing where to turn and only having about $10 left, he decides to buy a 10kg box of tomatoes at the supermarket. Within less than 2 hours, he sells the tomatoes singly to office workers in the city for their lunch, at 100% profit. Repeating the process several times more that day, he ends up with almost $100 before going to sleep that night. That's 3 times what he was offered as a cleaner, so it dawns on the man that he could quite easily make a living selling tomatoes.

Getting up early and earlier every day and going to bed late and later, he multiplies his hoard of profits in quite a short time. Not too long thereafter, he acquires a cart to transport several dozen boxes of tomatoes, only to have to trade it in again shortly afterwards for a pick-up truck. By the end of the first year, he is the owner of a fleet of pick-up trucks and manages a staff of several hundred former unemployed people, all selling vegetables.

Considering the future of his wife and children, he decides to buy some life assurance. Calling an insurance adviser, he picks an insurance plan to fit his new circumstances. At the end of the telephone conversation, the adviser asks him for his e-mail address in order that he might forward the documentation.

When the man replies that he has no e-mail, the adviser is stunned: "What, you don't even have e-mail? How on earth have you managed to amass such wealth without the Internet, e-mail and e-commerce? Just imagine where you would have been by now, if you had been connected from the very start!" After a moment's silence, the tomato millionaire replied: "Sure! I would have been a cleaner at Microsoft!"

It's a form of a story written by Somerset Maugham. I took a survey course on Maugham my final senior year at A&M. The Verger. Read it if you have a chance here.