BackRub

Ms Brown was not in a position to haggle. She was recently divorced and living with her sister, so when a small technology start-up offered her a job in 1999, she welcomed it with open arms. The post paid $450 a week, plus a pile of what were then worthless stock options. She was the 41st employee of the organization, which, like many other startups, was incorporated in a garage by two students.

Today, nine years later, the company has 15,916 employees, sports a revenue of $10.6 billion (2006), has a stock market worth of $207 billion, and is the most popular name on the internet—Google. Ms Brown is one of the 1000 employees who have accrued fortunes of at least $5 million apiece from the web-giant.

Oh, did I tell you about Ms Brown's job profile? She was hired as a masseuse. After five years of kneading engineers’ backs, she retired, cashing in most of her stock options, which were worth millions of dollars. Phoebe, are you listening?

Google shares recently hit an all-time high of $747.24, up nearly 900% from their debut. “I saved enough stock for a rainy day, and lately it’s been pouring,” Ms Brown said. “Every time I give some away, it just keeps filling up again,” she told The New York Times of the fortune that she reaped from her former employer in the course of just five years. She now owns a large house of her own and spends time travelling the world overseeing the charitable foundation that she founded with her windfall.

She is also looking for a publisher for her memoir—"Giigle: How I Got Lucky Massaging Google". And as you would expect, these days, at least once a week, she splashes out on her own private masseuse.

PS: The Google search engine was originally nicknamed "BackRub" (because the system checked backlinks to estimate a site's importance). I wonder whether that was Ms Brown's suggestion.