Balmy northern nights without mosquitoes, the summer cicadas chirping in the lush green grass, the beer chilled to 0.1 C of its optimum drinking temperature, this is a setting in which chats pop up during which more secret knowledge than beer gets spilled.
The joyous evening described in this post took place some time ago, not this year. We had mulled a post at the time but let it go.
The happy group that night included an older mustached German guy, OMG for short. At some point during the get together, we were outdoing each other with stories of funny, strange, or creepy events.
OMG was nattering along when he paused, stroked his mustache and said: "Want to hear about my invisible recruiter? It's spooky."
"Let's hear it! Poltergeist recruiters? Didn't realize that Siemens employs ghosts, but that would explain a lot of things."
"This happened a while ago, when I was getting ready to leave my first job after five years. I registered with the job center, as any good German does, hoping to get some offers. One day, a letter arrived from a government agency I had never heard of, it actually looked kind of boring. I ignored it. Only later did I find out who they were: the Bundesnachrichtendienst, our foreign spy service."
"That's not very spooky, man."
"Yeah, come on."
"Wait, the best part is this. Quite a bit later did I run into someone I had been working with earlier and I told him about the boring little agency. You know what he said? He explained that these were the spies and that the letter from the job center was just a cover -- he said, they don't work like this. They got your name from someone who works for them, maybe from your university, you had an invisible recruiter, my friend."
After the great spying fuckup this year, we called up OMG to chat.
"By the way, your mustache, is it real or fake?"
"I can neither confirm nor deny."
You might want to mention in your post that the Germans don't do lie detectors and despite this we have fewer leaks per capita than you guys, he said.
Ah, well.
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