Chapter 1, Aware
It was Friday the 23rd of June, today's date in fact, that I became aware. Not aware in the standard sense, such as my awareness that I had developed a growing disdain for my drollish office job, or that realization that my current relationship was probably an ever-increasing waste of time. No, this awareness stemmed from a much less tangible and much more conscious perception that I was, in fact, losing my goddamn mind.
I am certainly not what anyone would consider professionally qualified to diagnose the state of mental health in any individual, much less so in myself, so I haven't presumed to attempt to identify any of the lovely afflictions of the mind available in a variety of medical websites as matching my current state. Nor have I ever at some point sought the counsel of an actual professional, considering it was just this morning when I was given my new discernment. Though, I am completely confident that a fancy diploma in a walnut frame isn't required to conclude that something has shifted in my head.
There is no great dramatic moment that led to this change in me, no traumatic bed-wetting as a child or other such repressed experience from my development that could have laid a dormant personality somewhere deep inside me. I would find it comforting to be able to blame some awful acts of parental misguidance on the whole thing, to say that I came to this current state because my parents didn't hug me enough, or made me drink my own urine. Unfortunately, my parents hugged me plenty and I've still yet to taste urine.
My newfound insight into myself crept in on it's own, as I sat behind the buzzing monitor at my desk. I had already finished what trivial workload was required of me for the day and was instead being paid to watch an assortment of random videos that I happened to select on YouTube, a technique I had found an effective way of shortening my time left in the workday. It was during one such video, a shaky cellphone recording of an excessively overweight woman throwing a monstrous tantrum in a retail establishment, that I received an email.
To explain the significance that this email played in my present re-evaluation of my sanity, I need to go back a few weeks. I had for the past month, been exploring the possibilities of pursuing new career fields, as I was convinced that my current desk job was physically extracting a piece of my soul every-time I showed up and sat down in my sad and faded little rolling chair. It wasn't that I was ungrateful for my current employment, the pay was decent and I was left alone for the most part, but it was more of a sickening taste in my mouth for the moronic daily routine that this position provided. I'd had quite my fill and was increasingly anxious to escape what I saw as an assured road to weight-gain and some eventual type of heart disease.
I had been submitting applications through a large variety of mainstream employment websites into an equally wide variety of different positions and fields of work. I didn't have anything specific in mind you see, in fact, I would have been willing to accept anything that would offer liberation from my current hell, so much of the work I applied to had nothing to do with my experience or educational background. I used an assortment of resumes that I had tailored to meet general experience required for the different job offers, some of the information I provided being a stretch of the truth, and more of it flat-out falsity.
It wasn't that I wanted to necessarily lie to fraudulently obtain a position. I do have quite a bit of experience in a variety of fields as well as holding an academic degree in Computer Science, but I just felt that I could illicit more interest and response to my applications if I added more information. I don't wholly see the harm in misrepresenting myself as, from my experience, most positions I was hired into in the past turned out to be largely misrepresented themselves. Employers notoriously embellish the descriptions of mundane tasks in their offerings, often using a word like technician for someone that simply answers customer calls. I figure I am simply evening the playing field.
A few days prior, while sifting through a list of offerings to submit my fictional resumes to, I had come across a posting that struck my interest due to the odd presentation and description of the job. Despite the ability to provide much more detail and information into the website, the employer had provided what I assumed was the minimal amount required and I found it strange that a company would allow such a lack-luster attempt to find a candidate for their organization. The job offer read simply:
Cryptocurrency Manager Needed
*Must be proficient at cyber
Salary negotiated upon hiring.
Submit Resume
Normally, and I believe I would very hardly be alone in this opinion, I would dismiss this type of job offering as an obvious attempt to gain personal information through a false job offering. It's not unusual for employment websites to be infested with scams and social engineering ploys targeting the unwary and desperate. The strange sentence that the author had chosen to describe the only experience requirement had also made me pause, given that cyber could be considered really anything involving the Internet. My current navigation through the archive of video on YouTube would qualify me for such a vague description of duties.
However, the particular website I had discovered the job on was well-known for only allowing vetted businesses to create and offer positions over their platform. I figured it couldn't hurt to quickly throw together a newly fabricated resume that very equally offered a vague description of experience of what I could expect a manager of cryptocurrency would be required to know. It wasn't that I flat-out lied, I did in fact own a small portfolio containing Ethereum and Bitcoin which I had purchased one night after drinking heavily and talking to a few tech-savvy friends at a bar, but I certainly didn't know how the hell this was applied in an enterprise setting nor did I have the slightest clue how any of it truly worked. Regardless, I uploaded the resume and sent it off.
As the days past, I had forgotten entirely about the strangely blunt example of an employment request and was simply going about my business of paid Internet voyeurism. It was then that I felt the familiar vibration of my mobile device in my pocket, reached into my slacks to retrieve the phone, and saw that I had a new email notification. I swiped the screen of the mobile and pressed the icon to view my inbox.
The email subject line read:
Crytocurrency Manager Offer - Please Respond
I reflexively laughed out-loud. I opened the email expecting to see some request to schedule an interview or perhaps to notify me that I needed to provide additional information outside of the generously vague resume I had submitted. Instead, the email informed me of my selection for the position and gave a telephone number requesting that I contact the company to establish a report date. I immediately re-read the email. No, no misunderstanding of the message's intent. I was being offered a job in an email without any type of formal interview based on a make-believe resume submitted through a poorly written job offer on the Internet. Everything seemed perfectly legitimate.
As I stared at the phone number at the bottom of the email, I made the poor decision that I was going to call. This is when I realized something was terribly wrong with me.
