On The Side

We are always paid for our suspicion by finding what we suspect. - Thoreau

He went for the interview and got the job.

When the first payday came, everyone received a check.

He was handed a salad.

Dumbfounded, he asked the boss, "Why did you give me these greens?"

"Oh, salary.  I thought you said celery ..."

Author's Note

“The ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead downward. To have done anything by which you earned money merely is to have been truly idle or worse. If the laborer gets no more than the wages which his employer pays him, he is cheated, he cheats himself. If you would get money as a writer or lecturer, you must be popular, which is to go down perpendicularly. Those services which the community will most readily pay for it is most disagreeable to render. You are paid for being something less than a man. The State does not commonly reward a genius any more wisely. Even the poet laureate would rather not have to celebrate the accidents of royalty. He must be bribed with a pipe of wine; and perhaps another poet is called away from his muse to gauge that very pipe.” - Thoreau