A New Low ....

[allpurposewriter]

Well, I'm stuck paraphrasing or the Upwork Police will throw my arse in the pokey. 

Here's the new low, sadly paraphrased:

"I'm looking for someone to write letters (a specific number is given -- more than 40, less than 50) to my child, who is at camp."

The style is to mimic the actual parent (a Dad in this case) and the style, we are told is "parental/goofy." The parent will provide some ideas for content, but is also "open to suggestion."

"Dear Son,

We went to Disneyland without you.

Love, Dad"

I really thought I'd seen everything. Apparently (no pun intended), not.

[florydev]

Wow

[mwiggenhorn]

What a sad commentary on parenting these days.

[prestonhunter]

This is a parent who loves his child enough to commission over 40 letters to that child.

Maybe you are simply jealous that your parents never hired someone to write letters to you.

[florydev]

Lol, hadn't thought of it that way Preston...that's an interesting way to look at it.

[gilbert-phyllis]

Is it possible this person wants to publish the letters as a book, and thinks for some reason a faux letter-writer would be less expensive than a ghost writer? Please let that be the case.

[wendy_writes]

Any parent - and any child - would disagree with you, Preston.  That ain't love; it's laziness to the max.

[mwiggenhorn]

Wendy, +1,000.

[boshoffirene]

It's pathetic, really. Poor kid.

[luce-neidert]

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Wendy C wrote:

Any parent - and any child - would disagree with you, Preston.  That ain't love; it's laziness to the max.

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How can you say this person is lazy? Didn't he take the time to write a job description? 

[Anonymous-User]

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Luce N wrote:

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Wendy C wrote:

Any parent - and any child - would disagree with you, Preston.  That ain't love; it's laziness to the max.

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How can you say this person is lazy? Didn't he take the time to write a job description? 

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Probably paid someone to do that, too. For less $, of course.

[lysis10]

I can see the letters now.

"Sir, your dad loves you, sir. Sir plz give me job, sir. You got a promo code for Upwork premium membership, sir?"

[martina_plaschka]

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Phyllis G wrote:

Is it possible this person wants to publish the letters as a book, and thinks for some reason a faux letter-writer would be less expensive than a ghost writer? Please let that be the case.

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Definitely a movie script in that story. Such as the letter writer, a young orphan girl (over 18 obviously), 10 years later, meets the boy who is now a young man, because he rents a room from her, and when she realizes he is the boy that she wrote the letters for, they fall in love and she donates a kidney to him. Or the other way around. 

[etrusca]

Anthony, I'm envious. I would have a lot of fun in such a job.

[Anonymous-User]

Millennials.

[allpurposewriter]

Very funny, Cairenn. I might just give you a few kudos for that. 

Antonia, I agree. It would also make a great Tom Hanks movie. Where is Nora Ephron when we really need her?

Preston, wow. Very insightful. I do wish someone had paid someone else to be my father. You nailed that one. 

My real fear, Preston, is that the father of the kid in the next bunk paid someone to write 60 letters! Now, which is the better Dad, the fraudulent one who can afford 45 letters or the fraudulent one who can afford 60? Yeah, we really could use Nora Ephron's help here.

[richard_wein]

I'm so bad at letter-writing that any child of mine (if I had one) would probably be glad to get a letter from Anthony instead of me.

[sergio-soria]

I don't think this is for real. The line about Disneyland is funny, so I guess it's for a parody or something.

[colettelewis]

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Sergio S wrote:

I don't think this is for real. The line about Disneyland is funny, so I guess it's for a parody or something.

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_______________________

Maybe the guy is putting a book together - a  sort of antithesis to Alan Sherman's "Hello Muddah, hello Faddah,  Here I am at Camp Grenada"?  

[xaigo]

I'm not buying the whole thing either.:) Maybe in a year or so we'll see a headline somewhere "An independant study of 60 parental letters showed parents still care about their kids. Totally not a scam, totally legitimate study!" 

[tlsanders]

This isn't really a new concept, though--it just isn't usually posted publicly. Tons of military men have made a nice side living writing love letters home for other soldiers, for example. 

When I was in college, a friend asked me if she could "borrow" a break-up letter I'd written, and later I heard of a couple of other women in our dorm who had also "borrowed" my words verbatim.

And, of course, there are people who make their livings corresponding with dating site "candidates" posing as the account holder.

It's troubling, for sure, that something meant to be personal is contracted out. But, I think it's more common than you'd like to believe.

[prestonhunter]

I really have no idea if the job posting the original poster referenced is serious or not. Many here have expressed skepticism that it should be taken at face value.

Of course not all comments in this thread are serious.

I appreciate Tiffany's observations that this isn't such an uncommon concept. Most of you are familar with Cyrano de Bergerac (1897).

So... not a new concept.

I'm sure many of us enlist help in order to help with personal relationships.

My mother receives flowers from me on her birthday and on Mother's Day every year. Do you think I'm actually the one who is sending those flowers?

[luce-neidert]

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Preston H wrote:

I really have no idea if the job posting the original poster referenced is serious or not. Many here have expressed skepticism that it should be taken at face value.

Of course not all comments in this thread are serious.

I appreciate Tiffany's observations that this isn't such an uncommon concept. Most of you are familar with Cyrano de Bergerac (1897).

So... not a new concept.

I'm sure many of us enlist help in order to help with personal relationships.

My mother receives flowers from me on her birthday and on Mother's Day every year. Do you think I'm actually the one who is sending those flowers?

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Preston, I do hope your mother never comes on this forum!

[allpurposewriter]

Yeah, Cyrano de Bergerac'a beloved Roxanne ends up in a convent; the man Cyrano writes letters for is sent to the front, where he is shot dead (exactly as his rival intended) and Cyrano commits suicide. So, yeah, it's been going on for a long time, but it's not like  Edmond Rostand was trying to tell us ghostwriting for personal affairs was a good thing. 

I would definitely try to find out who's sending flowers to your mother, too. Sounds very creepy. 

[colettelewis]

Scribes have been in existence for thousands of years - definitely nothing new! And they are still needed. Who writes the President's speeches (often refuted in Twitter), or the Queen's speeches (who doesn't use Twitter!)

A friend of mine used to write speeches for a particular politician in a European parliament. She was absolutely furious to discover, when there was a change of government, that her speeches were being used verbatim by the opposition. She walked out - to applause! 

Perhaps the writer meant that parents have a role in their children's lives as well. There are a lot of children who don't get this concept. 

[reinierb]

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Nichola L wrote:

Scribes have been in existence for thousands of years - definitely nothing new! And they are still needed. Who wrties the President's speeches (often refuted in Twitter), or the Queen's speeches (who doesn't use Twitter!)

A friend of mine used to write speeches for a particular politician in a European parliament. She was absolutely furious to discover, when there was a change of government, that her speeches were being used verbatim by the opposition. She walked out - to applause! 

Perhaps the writer meant that parents have a role in their children's lives as well. There are a lot of children who don't get this concept. 

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There are also a great many parents who don't get this concept.

[allpurposewriter]

"A friend of mine used to write speeches for a particular politician in a European parliament. She was absolutely furious to discover, when there was a change of government, that her speeches were being used verbatim by the opposition. She walked out - to applause! "

Nichola, true story:

The presidential race between Thomas Dewey and Harry Truman in 1948 was too close to call. It was so close, the Chicago Daily Tribune famously put out a headline that read "Dewey Defeats Truman!" which Truman held up with a big smile for photographers. 

The Tribune, of course, gathered up all the faulty headlines they could and printed the new story with Truman as the victor. What doesn't get publicized is a team of journalists had written an extensive expose of Dewey's foreign policy. But it was too late to write up Truman's foreign policy, so, guess what? Dewey and Truman's names were close enough in size that they just went through the article and switched names and told the world all about Truman's foreign policy platform, even though it was Dewey,s. They got exactly zero complaints. At the time, nobody noticed.