Missionary/Actor

My teammates and I share a lot of emails from day to day. Most of the time they’re work-related, but sometimes they’re offers for acting jobs:

Hey I just got a phone call from a representative of a company who is trying to do a professional advertisement. They need someone to play the part of a foreign CEO or business manager for their ad. The shoot will only take one hour, next Wednesday the 25th at 3pm. They will even pay you $50 for your time.

Apparently this Kharkov-based company had found David’s number online from one of our English events. They gave him a call and offered him the part, but since he had plans he couldn’t change he gave them my number and forwarded the rest of us the email. Though it’s illegal for us to earn money with the visas we have, I went ahead and called to find out more information just to see what this whole thing was about.

The lady told me they were shooting a video testimony to put on their business’ website which specializes in search engine optimization. I would come in and play the part of a foreign CEO by reading some dialogue about how happy I was that I chose to go with this company.

Uh huh. I asked her if I could call her back in a few minutes.

I told Katie and we both laughed at how ridiculous this was. They were going to pay me to give a fake testimony about how great they’re service was. The lady on the phone even gave me their website so I could go and see that they were for real. For real? Paying someone to lie about how “real” you are? Classy.

The irony of all of this was how this lady had no idea who she was asking to do this. Even though I’m sure no one would ever be the wiser, paying a missionary to pose as a successful CEO and give a fake testimony for a search engine optimization site is just too funny. I called her back a few minutes later and officially declined the role. “Why? Are you scared?” she asked. I told her I didn’t feel good about it what it was, to which she replied that it wasn’t a big deal. Apparently she thought my credibility was on sale for fifty bucks.

And you know, this isn’t the first time something like this has happened either. Not too long after we arrived to Kharkov we were sitting in a newly-opened Mexican food restaurant. The waitress walked up an asked if we’d like to be in their print ad that was shooting at the bar. All we needed to do was wear sombreros and sit at the bar pretending to enjoy ourselves. We politely declined and enjoyed laughing about the prospect of actually having done it.