Strange on Strange: March 4, 2007

I have authored a column called: "Can You Believe This?" for more than 18 months. . Basically, the premise is that real news is ALWAYS stranger than fiction. Moreover, in my job as a journalist, I've covered cops/criminals---always fodder for general insanity of humans against humans. If I used every article I came across, I would be dead for decades before I'd run out of stories to print. Some of the articles are happy, some sad. Most are simply inane and leave you shaking your head. These are stories you could live without...but you won't want to! Here's the latest, an exclusive to Associated Content.

---You Have a Lot of Nerve. Or, do what you love, and you'll never work a day in your life. We've all heard stories of people who have been fired from their jobs only to turn around and seek unemployment insurance. Some cases stick with you longer than others.

Take 25-year-old Emmalee Bauer. She was fired from the Sheraton hotel company in October, 2006. Her technical job description was as a sales coordinator at the Four Points Sheraton on Army Post Road. It seems she was extremely bored with her job.

According to Fox News, when company officials learned of her laziness, they let her go. She filed for unemployment after admittedly spending most of her time journaling about ways she devised to get out of work. In all she put together 300, single-spaced pages of avoidance tactics. In one entry she penned, "I have managed half of the day."

She reasoned that others would think she was hard at work as long as she was typing. "This typing thing seems to be doing the trick..." she wrote.

Wanna get even stranger concerning Ms. Bauer? Book publishers have been following her, trying to get her to write a book detailing her employment with the company. It gets better, the journaling she did about her exploits were done on a company computer.

If there's an upside to this, she was denied unemployment...but resource woman that she is, she appealed the verdict. Luckily, she was denied yet again.