Tomato Millionair

An unemployed man goes to apply for a job with Microsoft as a janitor. The manager there arranges for him to take an aptitude test (Section: Floors, sweeping and cleaning).

After the test, the manager says, "You will be employed at minimum wage, $5.15 an hour. Let me have your e-mail address, so that I can send you a form to complete and tell you where to report for work on your first day."

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

Stunned, the man leaves. Not knowing where to turn and having only $10 in his wallet, he decides to buy a 25 LB flat of tomatoes at the supermarket.

Within less than 2 hours, he sells all the tomatoes individually at 100% profit. Repeating the process several times more that day,he ends up with almost $100 before going to sleep that night.

And thus it dawns on him that he could quite easily make a living selling tomatoes. Getting up early every day and going to bed late, he multiplies his profits quickly.

After a short time he acquires a cart to transport several dozen boxes of tomatoes, only to have to trade it in again so that he can buy a pickup truck to support his expanding business. By the end of the second year, he is the owner of a fleet of pickup trucks and manages a staff of a hundred former unemployed people, all selling tomatoes.

Planning for the future of his wife and children, he decides to buy some life insurance. Consulting with 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 to send the final documents electronically.

When the man replies that he has no e-mail, the adviser is stunned, "What! You don't 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 be now, if only you had beenconnected to the Internet from the very start!"

After a moment of thought, the tomato millionaire replied, "Why, of course! I would be a floor cleaner at Microsoft!"

Moral(s) of this story:
  1. The Internet, e-mail and e-commerce do not need to rule your life.
  2. If you don't have e-mail, but work hard, you can still become a millionaire.
  3. Since you received this story via e-mail, you're probably closer to becoming a janitor than you are to becoming a millionaire.
  4. If you do have a computer and e-mail, you have already been taken to the cleaners by Microsoft.
PS. As many of you know, I make a living selling a little pot in Berkeley... thatŐs pottery as in ceramics, not the other kind.. as my extensions conflict with old hardware and this a version of my prior year (4 years ago) taxes only runs on an operating system that is obsolete....I just love this little joke. I run a Mac 9500 with a G3 . The Mac feels the same way to me as I struggle with what Norton to run on 9.1 or just how to import a Pagemaker 3.0 document into Pagemaker 6.5. Or how to retrieve some records for some classes I taught a few years back that are on a 5 inch floppy that was part of an Appleworks data base.... or coming across a site that only runs on Netscape 6 or the lastest IE.... or reading Jobs view of poverty. Well just what is an energy crisis without a little fun....
Russ Andavall
www.firegodarts.com

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