The phantom tempter

At the end of last week, I was contacted by a friend about a too-good-to-be-true job opening.

(An expat friend it was, too, rather than a Chinese friend.  I begin to worry that prevailing local levels of naivety make take over all of us eventually.)

So, would I be interested in attending a seminar in a city down south (somewhere I've never visited before, and hear is quite nice) and giving a short presentation?

Well, you know, in outline, it sounded all right.  So, they want a token 'white face' at some government-sponsored trade junket?  OK.  So long as they're giving me some decent material to present (or, better yet, giving me a free hand to talk about whatever I like??), and they're not trying to pass me off as something I'm not, well... I was certainly willing to give the proposal some consideration.  

Until I heard the fee.  It was enormous.  Obscene.  I mean, really, really big. Five figures!!  As much as I can make in a whole month.... for a 15-minute speech??!!

Something definitely not right here.  I suspected at first that the sum mentioned had simply been misquoted (it is around ten times as much as I've ever heard of anyone being offered for this kind of gig before; order of magnitude mistakes do happen very easily in this country).  And I would have been much less wary of the engagement if the fee involved had been just a few thousand kuai.  But there is no way that I could possibly earn a sum in the tens of thousands for such a fleeting appearance.  In fact, for that kind of money, you'd think that the organisers would be able to get hold of someone of genuine substance and reputation, an academic or a journalist or a business leader - perhaps even quite a heavyweight.  Not Froog.

No, at the very least, they would be grossly misrepresenting my authority to speak on whatever the designated topic was to be.  In all probability they would actually be expecting me to impersonate someone famous.  I started reaching for my bargepole....

I was curious to learn more about this bizarre job offer, though.  And it would have been a stern test of my personal ethics: my earnings have been worrisomely fitful over the past two years, and it would have been very, very hard for me to walk away from that kind of money.

But of course, it was the typical friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend introduction.  And the mysterious 'fixers' at the end of the friend chain have still not been in touch; 5 or 6 days on from their original "urgent" request to find a foreign speaker, and not a word from them.

I should be grateful, really.  In my current state of penury and depression, this is taunting I can do without.