Boondoggle, Inc. — Day 14

Genre: Comedy

Premise: A recent college graduate tricks a senile HR recruiter into giving him the dream job of a lifetime. But by the time he finds out just what his company does, and realizes that it's too late to either quit or come clean, he fears he may have made a Faustian bargain that he can't win.

Plot: Craig Mogford is starting to feel like the most unemployable college graduate on the planet. It's 2009, at the height of the Great Recession, almost a year since he graduated, and Craig's daily life consists of interviewing for jobs he knows he won't get.

Craig goes on possibly the worst job interview of his life for Company X. As he presents himself, the HR interviewer, a woman of advanced years who seems a little batty, is brutally unfiltered about just how under-qualified and unhirable Craig is. She all but laughs him out of her office. Craig goes to leave and is standing by the elevators, head hung low, when he suddenly realizes that he's forgotten his bag. He sheepishly heads back and sticks his head into the recruiter's office, and to his surprise, the woman stands and warmly invites him in as if they've never met. Craig sits, cautiously playing along, his mind racing to see where exactly this is going. The woman asks him all the same questions as in his first interview, except that this time Craig changes his answer to all of them, inflating himself and contradicting almost everything he said in his first interview 10 minutes ago. What the hell is going on here, he thinks to himself? Is this some sort of test? If it is, he seems to have passed. With a tepid smile, the woman offers Craig an entry level position, with a small but fair starting salary.

Craig stands by the elevators again, dumbfounded. What just happened? As the elevator doors open, he pauses as another, even more interesting thought occurs to him... Would it work again?

Craig walks back into the HR woman's office for the third time in a row. He enters with a spring in his step and all the command of a conquering hero. The woman is immediately impressed, and rushes to welcome him. This time around Craig is running the show. He names a ridiculous starting salary, absurd vacation package, and creates a title for himself, telling the woman that he will want to start hiring his staff of ten people as soon as possible. The woman enthusiastically agrees, and thanks Craig profusely for accepting the companies' offer to join them.

Thus begins Craig's hilarious adventure as an overpriced, but seemingly much respected new addition to Company X. For his team of 10, Craig alternates between hiring his other out of work buddies, and the most beautiful women he can find. Impossibly, the experiment not only continues to work but flourish, as Craig's star continues to rise within the company.

There is one mystery though that, despite his incredible fortune, starts to nag at Craig. For the life of him he can't figure out just WHAT his 2,000-person company does. Is it possible that everybody here is harboring a secret like his? By the time Craig finds out the answer, he will realize that he's thrown himself and his friends in to the deep end of a whirlpool that they may not survive. 

Two possible scenarios are:

1) The company is a front, and staffed completely by foreign intelligence agents. Craig is now basically a member of the FSB or similar agency, and has been helping a foreign power spy on the U.S., while also essentially extorting the foreign intelligence agency through his little charade. (In this scenario, the HR recruiter's bizarre behavior would have been explained by the fact that EVERYthing at the company is for show, and these spies don't ask questions of each other since they are assuming they shouldn't know the answers.)

2) They are a real company who provides a very unique service during international crises, (I.e. A private sector FEMA, or perhaps specialists on nuclear-disaster containment and clean-up.)  Soon, some sort of international disaster occurs, and it falls to Company X to save the day, along with its recently promoted Senior Vice President of Crisis management, Craig Mogford and his crack response team. (In this scenario, the HR recruiter's bizarre behavior could have been explained by the fact that she was completely senile, or perhaps, suffering from some sort of dementia induced by many years of hazardous field-work for Company X.)