“13 Songs for the Freelancer”
By Lora Shinn and Peter Imbres
- Baby’s Got Back-to-Back Skype Meetings
- Please Mr. Postman, Stay a Little Longer Because I Haven’t Talked to Someone In Person for Days
- While My All-in-One Printer Gently Beeps
- Knockin’ on Kinko’s Door
- I Heard It Through the Grapevine and Then I Spent Two Hours on Snopes.com
- Feel Like Makin’ Copies
- Under the Boardwalk There Isn’t Any Wi-Fi Reception
- You Can’t Always Get Paid When You Want
- Every Breath You Take is Audible on This Conference Call so Please Mute Your Line
- Invoice You Like a Hurricane
- You’ve Lost That Proactive Feeling
- Great Balls of Expense Receipts
- Sympathy for the CPA
“Instant Credibility”
by Justin Laub
I have a lot great ideas. I have even more good ideas. I also have a handful of medium ideas and yes, even some bad ideas. My point is, I have a ton ideas. I don’t see any reason for me to be written off by the professional community just because I have no background in any of the fields I want to get involved in.
This is why I have decided to start pretending to be a doctor. When you’re a doctor you have instant credibilityand that’s what I need – credibility.
In our every day life we run into doctors all the time. You can be a doctor of all sorts of things. A doctor of medicine, of surgery, of teeth or of the brain. Some people even get to be doctors just by being really good at reading books. What do all these doctors have in common? They all think they’re better than me.
Well, they’re not. Sure, some of them are, maybe even a lot of them are. But there are certainly a whole bunch who aren’t better than me.
From my experience, I’ve found that it’s very rare that anyone ever questions the legitimacy of a doctor’s credentials. Usually that only happens once it’s waaaaaay too late. Like if you kill someone, or botch their butt cheek implants. It might sound like I’m bringing up butt cheek implants as a silly example of something you can mess up. But that actually happened. For real, in the real world. A man claimed to be a doctor and this lady let him give her butt check implants. He botched it up so bad, the lady ended up dying from complications related to the butt cheek implants.
This story is incredibly sad because an innocent woman lost her life. However, that shouldn’t negate the reality that it’s also incredibly funny because it involves the phrase “butt cheek implants” so many times.
Either way you view this story the point is this – he wouldn’t have been caught if he was slightly better at giving butt cheek implants. Clearly, he didn’t have plan. The key is to have a plan and a plan, I have.
To start, I going to make up a fake diploma. In fact I’ll probably create several fake diplomas. I’ll also need some nice frames, really nice frames. I can’t risk killing this illusion with a fourteen dollar frame from Target.
My next investment will be a lab coat. I’m going to get my name stitched above the breast pocket and everything. It’s going to look doctory as all hell. Once I have the look down, it’s time to start flaunting it in public. I’ll probably starting hanging around those medical complexes where they have offices for twelve different doctors. I’m not talking about wearing the lab coat to the mall. That would look ridiculous. At that point, I might as well toss on a stethoscope and one of those metal circles that attach to a strap on your head. Do those things have a name? I’m sure they do, but I don’t care. I want to steer clear of those things, they’ll make me look silly. I’m not going to start researching things that I don’t need to know more about. In fact I need to know less about those things.
Another important key to this ruse is my dedication to NEVER PERFORM SURGERY. In fact, I plan to avoid giving out medical advice altogether. Sure, I might toss around some surface tips like “it’s probably best to cut down on sugars,” but I certainly won’t go any further than that. Follow that path and the next thing you know you’re talking about carbs. I don’t know shit about carbs. Are they good? Are they bad? I don’t even think real doctors are completely sure.
To help steer away from having to dispense medical information, I’m going to create a fake friend who’s also a doctor. This adds to my believability as a real doctor because doctors usually have friends who are also doctors. More importantly, I can also use him (or her… fake doctors can be ladies too!) to deflect medical questions. My response to these inquires will always be “that’s not my field of expertise, but I have a friend I can ask.” Sounds convincing, doesn’t it?
Let me be clear, I’m not pursuing this endeavor because I think my ideas aren’t credible on their own. However, pretending to be a doctor certainly will give me a nice little credibility “nudge” in the right direction. Doctors are always taken slightly more seriously than regular folk and I feel I deserve that same treatment.
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