A Chicago scene website is highlighting businesses serving citizens of the Windy City that market lies. It focuses on three of the breed. The first, The Alibi Network, was one of my Unethical Websites of the Month years ago. For a fee, it will concoct and document elaborate support for excuses, fake illnesses, adulterous getaways masquerading as business trips. It’s the kind of enterprise George Costanza might have started; if you have a strong stomach, you can read about it here. The second is “Rent-a-Date,” which is less objectionable than it is sad, an escort service with no sex, for guys who can’t get a date and want to impress employers, old classmates and other shallow people by hiring one and pretending that the relationship is real. You know, George would have used this one, too.
The third of these slimy businesses, however, is truly awful, an outfit called “The Reference Store”
The business creates phony former employers, complete with websites and local phone numbers, for job seekers worldwide. (You know, George could have used this service to give credibility to his favorite fake reference, “Vandelay Industries”! It’s a George Costanza Tri-fecta!) Its first Chicago client, a man dishonorably discharged from the Army, got a job a personal trainer thanks to The Reference Store’s fake former boss, who vouched for the man’s integrity.
This prompted operations manager David Everett to utter The Incredible Self-Disproving Rationalization. While professing pride, rather than shame, for deceiving employers on behalf of his company’s desperate clients, he said…
“We believe that everyone deserves a second chance.”
This is brilliant oxymoronic irony, a self-serving rationalization for bad conduct that self-destructs upon execution. Everyone deserves a second chance, and the way The Reference Store gets a client that chance is by helping him prove conclusively that he doesn’t deserve a second chance!
The dishonorably discharged client, for example, deserved a second chance to prove he was trustworthy, but he got it by using The Reference Store to deceive his employer, proving conclusively that his dishonorable discharge was no fluke, he can’t be trusted, and thus he had failed his second chance before it has even begun. Any job seeker who uses The Reference Store is necessarily demonstrating why he or she shouldn’t be hired.
Ethics Alarms 
At the risk of seeming very young , who was George Costanza?
That aside, this is just silly, but way way too common. The people spit on the rest of us who struggle to EARN our way through life.
*these people.
Oh, Jeez, Chase. Next you’ll ask who Fred Mertz, Hamilton Berger, Miss Brooks, Sam Malone, Radar, Buddy Sorel, Jack Paar, Mel Blanc, Bret Maverick, Gilligan, Marcia Brady, Chester, Ralph Kramden, Edith Bunker, Arnold Horschak, Mr. Haney, David Brinkley, Ed McMahon, Miss Piggy, Dean Martin, Andy Williams, Gomer Pyle, Lou Grant, Mr. Spock, Dr. Smith and and The Fonz are. How can you function?
Who are these people? Isn’t Radar a device for determining distances? I believe Gilligan owned an island somewhere? Is Miss Brooks Mel’s daughter? I’ve heard of The Fonz, but only because he infamously jumped over a shark.
Jack, don’t be too rough on Chase. Who’s Lady GaGa and Snookie? I seem to function just fine, but my teenage daughters think I live in a bubble.
But Seinfeld is still on tv 19 times a day in syndication, often on network tv. When was the last time you say Mary Tyler Moore or Welcome Back Kotter on anything but a station dedicated to old sitcoms?
Hey, I haven’t seen my copy of “Great Expectations” for a while, but I still should know who Miss Havisham is. Great and famous TV characters, like great fictional character’s in a culture’s literature, need to be known and understood by succeeding generations.
Well, maybe not Horschak.
She’s right. Can’t understand today’s U.S. without knowing about Ga-Ga and Snookie.
I wish I didn’t know who GaGa or Snookie were. I feel dirty even having their names bounce around in my skull.
If it takes knowing GaGa or Snookie to understand the U.S., we are truly a lost civilization.
I didn’t say THAT wasn’t true.
Actually, I checked and Seinfeld isn’t on. I have 150 channels and Seinfeld isn’t on any of them. Those of you from the East coast should also realize that Seinfeld wasn’t really super popular across the entire country. I only watched it 3 or 4 times, mostly because nothing else was on. I have roughly the same idea who the Seinfeld characters are as I have of who this ‘Snooki” is (can that really be a name someone uses?).
When a series adds numerous cultural catch phrases still used in print and speech twenty years later, one has to mark it as culturally important. “Master of your domain.” “yada yada,” “Soup Nazi”, “Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” “re-gifting,” “close-talker,” “man-hands”—“Seinfeld” is right up there.
What about all the fake comments on your blog? Isn’t that unethical too?
WHAT?????