“Thanks for your wasting my time.”

Play along and accept the job if they give it to you. Then ghost them so they are left without anyone because they turned down the other applicants.

$30k per month sounds nice. When can I start?

Did this work out badly for the company doing the interviewing? I mean it sucks that they want to underpay people but mentioning this in the manner that they did would seem to serve the exact purpose that it fulfilled, applicants who aren’t desperate enough to tolerate the low pay will be filtered out. The “wait no” part of this story seems kind of strange and difficult to believe being particularly accurate because surely this is the outcome they wanted. It’s nice for OP that they could walk away from insulting compensation and it probably felt good to have that empowering sense of dignity but I feel like the original post and the subsequent screen capping and re-posting of it under the title “mic drop” is intended to frame this as some sort of a victory over the man when it’s actually just a mundane and expected outcome from a process designed to leave the interviewers with only the applicants that are vulnerable enough to accept pay conditions below what would be reasonable.

As I approach middle-age, I still find it hard to describe to people what it feels like to have never found a career that pays better than 25K per year. Now they attribute my not wanting to work to “mental illness.” –Yeah, fine. Let’s go with that.

When I really think about it, it almost seems to me that mental illness is wanting to work for such little compensation.