Jorge

I don't know why.

Maybe it's the boss's reputation.

By now you all know about that.

But, whatever the reason, we always find it really difficult to recruit new staff here at what Sam calls our "corporate HQ" - Twink Towers.

Take last week, for instance.

The boss had put an ad in the paper for a new office junior (don't ask what's happened to the old one - but at least he's dropped the threat of taking us to court.)

Nothing too difficult there, you might think.

A bit of inputting on the PC, photocopying, working the phones, making coffee, "extra duties as required" (hmmm…)

But even after the ad ran for three days, all we got was a single applicant.

Jorge.

Not, I have to say, the brightest bulb in the lamp - but then beggars can't be choosers.

In his last job Jorge had been a sort of janitor's assistant (no jokes about pipes, please) - so maybe that explained the strange outfit he wore when he turned up for his first morning at work.

It only took a morning to find out that office work wasn't exactly his cup of tea.

He was the sort of kid who tried to get onto the internet using the fax machine and thought that "filing" meant buffing up his nails with an emery board.

So by lunchtime the boss had come up with yet another of his proverbial brainwaves.

"Tyler", he said.

"You're always telling me that you're overworked.

"Let's see if Jorge can help out on the photography side of the business."

The kid himself was pretty keen on the idea.

He seemed to think that, if all he had to do was press a shutter on a camera a few times a week, he'd stumbled into a neat kinda job.

But he'd made a crucial mistake.

Jorge forgot that he was working for HMBoys.com

And, as you'd expect, the boss insisted that, if our new little helper wanted to make it as a top porn snapper, he'd have to do a shift in front of the lens first "to help you empathise with the models" (an aspiration - like most three-syllable words - that was completely lost on Jorge.)

It was then, though, that the kid showed he wasn't as dumb as we'd thought.

"Hey, you guys", he said.

"This is just training, yeah?

And I'm not being paid for these pictures, right?

So I'm not signing one of them forms to say you can put my pics on the site, OK?"

Well, there was no answer to that and so after the "shoot" - in several senses of the word - we just locked away the images and forgot about them…

Until, that is, the day Jorge showed us the pics he'd taken on the first photo assignment we'd given him.

Aagghh!

In spite of all the training we'd tried to drum into him, it was clear he hadn't yet grasped the importance of lighting a scene properly…

Then there were other shots in which, though he'd got the lighting set up a little bit better, his idea of even something as basic as correct focus left a lot to be desired…

And then there were a few shots which, if Jorge had been a professional, might have been thought avant garde masterpieces - but which, when taken by an amateur, just looked like unrecognisable crap…

With just 24 hours to go before he had to post something on the site, Sam was facing disaster.

He called Jorge into his office.

There was, he said, only one possible solution if the site was going to be updated this week.

At which point Jorge, with the greatest reluctance, picked up the pen and signed the form…