How I Scammed My Company for Years

He was hired by a big company and never supervised. Bored, he used the time and income to start his own business—then quit when it became successful.

View in Browser My Company Forgot About Me for Two Years, But I Kept Getting Paid I went to the employment agency and the agent asked, "Can you do ten key?" I knew ten key, an accounting calculator, from working in restaurants and adding up people's bills. I said yes, and the agent asked, "Is $19 an hour enough for you? By the way, it's for a major credit card company."   I was twenty, I had never worked a white collar job in my life, I didn't even have a high school education, and they offered me a job nearly three times the minimum wage. I said yes.   I didn't even know what the job was. All I was given was an address. I showed up in a button-down shirt I bought from a thrift store, got my security tag and they walked me around the office, giving me the formal tour. I was shown to my desk and told someone would come around to train me—but nobody ever came.   That's awesome, I thought. Easy first day. Read the Full Story A Definitive Guide to the Most Luxurious Winter Style Let's be honest: the best part about spending a day on the slopes is everything that comes after—the après-ski, when you throw on a turtleneck and unwind with a drink around a roaring fire. Whether you're jetting off to St. Moritz this winter, taking a long weekend upstate, or meeting friends at the pub, you can channel that après-ski vibe with the clothes in the following images, all of which are investment pieces that will last a lifetime. We heartily endorse them.   This story also marks the return of an Esquire tradition: The Big Black Book.   First published in 2006, The Big Black Book appeared twice a year as a standalone magazine. We'd conceived it as the style manual for successful men, with an emphasis on fashion and design. Then came the very unstylish Covid pandemic, forcing the Big Black Book into cold storage.   But we're back, partly as a public service. The world has changed dramatically since the birth of The Big Black Book, starting with the vast access you now have to style coverage; this very minute, your phone is pulsating with pics and recs from all manner of influencer. And yet access to everything means access to nothing. Without thoughtful curation and good taste, it's all just...stuff.   That's where we come in.  Read the Full Story 26 Martin Scorsese Movie, Ranked From Worst to Best Ah, the smell of Catholic guilt and prison sauce is in the air! It can only mean one thing, fellow cinephiles: a new Martin Scorsese film just hit theaters. This time, it's Killers of the Flower Moon, which is based on David Grann's 2017 nonfiction book, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. Flower Moon is one of the best, and surprisingly, most stripped-down films the 80-year-old director has ever made. We highly recommend you clear the necessary three and a half hours to see it, dehydration be damned.   To celebrate the occasion, we ranked the director's films, from worst to best. One important note before we send you on your quest through the Scorsese-verse: this list only includes his narrative films. So, you won't find his also-great documentaries, music videos, and commercials (starring Timothée Chalamet!) here. Read the Full Story What If Things Get Better? Tomorrow is my daughter's fourth birthday, and as I write this, the temperature is projected to be 107 degrees here in Portland, Oregon. Our kids wanted to cool off in the river, but the extreme heat has caused toxic algal blooms. The scale of our climate emergency often keeps me awake at 4:00 a.m., when I struggle to steer my imagination clear of powerful headwinds pushing it toward the worst-case scenarios. We have been living in emergency lighting for so long that I think even our inner eyes have adjusted, and it can seem "only reasonable" to expect (and accept) that the climate scientists' most dire predictions will soon become fact.   Perhaps you find yourself in a similar state, with an imagination that can produce a bumper crop of smoldering dystopias but that struggles to generate pictures of a healing world. It's frighteningly easy to extrapolate from "business as usual" to cemetery skies and seas, societal and ecological collapse. Dystopias flood our screens and our bookshelves. (I have written some of them). "We need better realtors for the future," I joked with my husband recently. "The one we want to live in." Read the Full Story Thanks to This Pitcher, I've Stopped Buying Cold Brew I'm not proud to admit it, but I definitely drink more iced coffee than I do water. I'm a coffee person through and through, and even in the coldest winter months I can be found sipping an iced beverage. An iced oat latte is always a favorite, an iced Americano never fails. But a cold brew? A really damn good cold brew takes the cake.   If you're a true coffee snob, you're willing to sacrifice coin (and, these days, lots of it) in favor of getting a satisfactory drink. There was a time when only coffeeshops operated by hipster baristas could provide a high-quality drink. Then came the age of at-home espresso set-ups to rival even the most luxe of professional machines. That solved the problem of making hot coffee and iced espresso pretty quickly. But even with all my gadgets and gizmos, I never quite found a method to make cold brew at home that was to my liking. That is, until, I found the Sio Cold-Infusion Pitcher by Ohom. Now, I'm drinking more cold brew (and spending less money on it) than ever. Read the Full Story 60 Years In, the Rolling Stones Still Have Something to Prove When did Mick Jagger get so sensitive? The first words we hear on Hackney Diamonds, the new album by the Rolling Stones, are "Don't get angry with me." Elsewhere, he adds "Why'd you get so pissed off/Why'd you bite my head off?" and asks what happens "when the whole wide world's against you."   It's not a theme you expect from one of rock's great outlaws—isn't the whole point of being Mick Jagger that you don't give a good goddam who gets mad at you? Wasn't the very idea of the Rolling Stones when they started more than sixty years ago to piss off as many people as possible?   But maybe feeling a little bit hurt, with something to prove, serves the band well, since Hackney Diamonds—their 26th studio album and first collection of original material in 18 years—is a startling and unlikely triumph, a consistently solid and swaggering set of songs from a group still stretching the limits of what's possible in rock n' roll. Read the Full Story Follow Us Unsubscribe | Privacy Notice | CA Notice at Collection Esquire is a publication of Hearst Magazines. ©2023 Hearst Magazine Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This email was sent by Hearst Magazines, 300 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019-3779