Intrigued by long-running advert in Guardian: Home help needed for female writer...

ska_lover

This is intriguing! I will be watching this!

Mainly cos i is nosey

jap200

Well I emailed my 'application' off last night, so now just waiting to see what happens next - will be straight back with an update as soon as I hear anything.

whitewing

So if it has been advertised for years, has it always been £10 an hour or does the hourly rate go up? How intriguing.

taxiphil

whitewing wrote: »

So if it has been advertised for years, has it always been £10 an hour or does the hourly rate go up? How intriguing.

It was being discussed on a forum here in 2007 and back then it was only offering £9 an hour! The e-mail address has also changed from AOL to Tiscali, and the wording of the ad has expanded to include "reliable, practical, keenly helpful".

Sounds to me like the work of someone who enjoys the feeling of power from calling people in for interviews and making them grovel over a non-existent job.

It wouldn't surprise me if they weren't actually that wealthy, but just spent a large chunk of their income/pension on the Guardian ads in order to feed their addictive "hobby" of bogus interviewing.

When I was young and naive I was given a contact through a family member for a man who claimed to be the top boss of BBC TV in the North West, and could "pull strings" to get friends of friends into good jobs at the organisation. I called him and he invited me to his house for a "chat" but I should have smelt a rat when I arrived there and it was a small semi-detached with a battered old Ford Sierra on the drive.

He droned on for hours about how powerful and successful he was, and got me to do all kinds of psychometric tests. He said he could get me the chance of a lifetime as a studio gallery manager and he would call me in the next few weeks. Needless to say I never heard another word from him, and later found out he just worked for the BBC as a security guard on the front door and eventually got sacked for getting numerous people round his house and playing out the same fantasy with them.

emsywoo123

Well................................







































I've heard nothing!

bap98189

Maybe it contains a secret message sent by MI6. Those numbers stations exist and as far as I know there has never been an alternative explanation for their existence.

Saturnalia

I saw this last night and am really intrigued by it! I've got a few theories but nothing that stands up to scrutiny.

1) It's a placeholder to fill unsold space on the page. But if this were the case it wouldn't be needed every week and wouldn't the paper put their own logo or ad for another section of the paper into the space? Anyone know if it is in the online version or just the newspaper?

2) Someone placed the ad, requested it to run until further notice, set up a dd then died, emigrated, whatever. Sounds plausible, but a thread on Mumsnet shows it has been running since 2007 at least and the salary has increased from £7 to £10ph over the years. So the ad is still being actively maintained. In fact it has turned up on all the London universities' online job boards, placed 23 January 2012!

3) It's a coded message for spies, terrorists, who knows? The wording of the first two lines reads awkwardly and I wondered if the first letter of each word (or 2nd, 3rd...) spells something. (Or maybe the number of letters in each word - the misspacing of Notting Hill Gate is odd, for a writer as well!) It isn't in English or any language I've seen but it could be used with a one-time-pad so each week it says something different to those with the pads to decode it. However, the OP has noticed the ad, others on other forums have too, probably plenty more have but not spoken online about it, and people who speak in code wouldn't want to draw attention to themselves. A different ad each time would deflect attention and using the same code every time makes it easier to crack.

4) Didn't MI5 once recruit via things that had to be decoded in order to see what the message was and find out how to apply for the job? Or am I making that one up?

5) It's an Alternate Reality Game or viral marketing. These start via a website, ad, youtube vid with a phone number or e-mail that people have to contact, then leading to further puzzles to solve as the game continues. But people are replying to the ad and getting no response so it can't be that, and sometimes these games stay dormant for a few months before players pick up on it, but not 5 years surely, whoever is running it would have given up. Plus the cost: £90pw for 5 years = £23,400!

In other words, I've no idea! It's somebody - or a group of somebodies - who have £23k to burn and almost seem to want to be found out.

emsywoo123

Saturnalia wrote: »

I saw this last night and am really intrigued by it! I've got a few theories but nothing that stands up to scrutiny.

1) It's a placeholder to fill unsold space on the page. But if this were the case it wouldn't be needed every week and wouldn't the paper put their own logo or ad for another section of the paper into the space? Anyone know if it is in the online version or just the newspaper?

2) Someone placed the ad, requested it to run until further notice, set up a dd then died, emigrated, whatever. Sounds plausible, but a thread on Mumsnet shows it has been running since 2007 at least and the salary has increased from £7 to £10ph over the years. So the ad is still being actively maintained. In fact it has turned up on all the London universities' online job boards, placed 23 January 2012!

3) It's a coded message for spies, terrorists, who knows? The wording of the first two lines reads awkwardly and I wondered if the first letter of each word (or 2nd, 3rd...) spells something. (Or maybe the number of letters in each word - the misspacing of Notting Hill Gate is odd, for a writer as well!) It isn't in English or any language I've seen but it could be used with a one-time-pad so each week it says something different to those with the pads to decode it. However, the OP has noticed the ad, others on other forums have too, probably plenty more have but not spoken online about it, and people who speak in code wouldn't want to draw attention to themselves. A different ad each time would deflect attention and using the same code every time makes it easier to crack.

4) Didn't MI5 once recruit via things that had to be decoded in order to see what the message was and find out how to apply for the job? Or am I making that one up?

5) It's an Alternate Reality Game or viral marketing. These start via a website, ad, youtube vid with a phone number or e-mail that people have to contact, then leading to further puzzles to solve as the game continues. But people are replying to the ad and getting no response so it can't be that, and sometimes these games stay dormant for a few months before players pick up on it, but not 5 years surely, whoever is running it would have given up. Plus the cost: £90pw for 5 years = £23,400!

In other words, I've no idea! It's somebody - or a group of somebodies - who have £23k to burn and almost seem to want to be found out.

I really want it to be number 4.

Does no one know anyone with any sway at The Guardian?!

PurplePow

haha yeah I would love it to be some sort of MI5 secret recruitment thing. Or have we all been watching too much TV?

Saturnalia

I'm tempted to phone or e-mail the Guardian and ask them what they know! They must be in on it, no?