I was snoopy at a fair.
The job description said “must be 160 cm or shorter”. I am 161 cm. This one cm was felt for all the 6 hours.
I was also insanely hot and blind so at one point I started and kept dancing macarena to not pass out and stay awake. I kept getting phone calls for three years afterwards because they wanted me to work for them again. No way.
Not that unusual, but I responded to an ad of an older dude looking for someone who’d go shopping for him. He couldn’t get down the stairs easily anymore. But really, he just wanted someone to talk to. So I’d go to his place, grab the shopping list and money, walk across the street to the nearest supermarket and be back in 20 minutes. And then he’d often cook for me and tell me about his life, travels, the music he composed on his very old computer, stuff like that. I’d get paid for 3-4 hours of which 90% was just talking to this guy about electronic music.
Was any of the music good?
Well, I didn’t like it but I think he had some skills. He was into this minimalistic music, I forgot what it was called. I found it boring, but I could also tell he must have known a thing or two about music theory.
Back when I was in 5th and 6th grade, I used to sell pens, pencils, erasers, pencil sharpeners, compass and many other items. It started mainly from me realizing that many people over there nonstop kept asking for spare pens, pencils etc. every day. Some even asked multiple times a day but it was less common. Hell, many didn’t even return stuff I lend them. And I realized I was kinda being used. So, I created a new policy. If you want pens, pencils etc. from me, BUY IT! And at some point, I also realized that some products were a bit cheaper than the shops around my school (yeah, my school was a bit far from my home and I used to travel by bus). So I started buying the cheaper pens and selling them at a higher price at my school (basically at the same price as any other shop near my school).
Hell, I even sold chewing gum one day (which I got as a gift once) and made some money.
One thing I have learnt in life is that if people are in an emergency and they need a certain product extremely in the situation, and you’re the only source at the moment they can get the product from, they will tryna get it even you overcharge them. I did overcharge some people who I had beef with 😹😹
In middle school I rode my bike to school and stopped by a convenience store most days and bought two packs of gum. At school I sold pieces for 10 cents each and selling one pack paid for both, supporting my habit. It wasn’t big money but I felt like a genius.
I would have done the same but packs of gum like that unfortunately are pretty expensive in my country. Since the pack of gums aren’t produced by any of the companies in my country and all available are from abroad lol. + When I sold that stuff, they really got popular in the class, and people were rushing to buy. Hence, many people knew about it and unfortunately on the same day, the principal came to visit the class and he saw some kids in my class chewing the gum during class-time 🤦 They did me dirty by telling the principal that I was selling gum and I also sold it to them 😭 Fortunately, I didn’t get punished in any way. He just left with disappointment and had told me that selling gums isn’t allowed at school.
I was messaging a guy on Grindr, and he asked if he could buy my socks — ie the socks that I had been wearing all day. I obliged. I made (iirc) 30$ 😎
Stacking firewood, the summer I was 13 years old. The guy said he’d pay me five bucks a cord, meaning that for every 8 foot section I stacked to four foot high, I got paid five dollars.
Had to bike about seven klicks down a back road every day, to get to a metal warehouse with a yard out back. They kept a log splitter and a conveyor belt set at an angle back there. Strange place, with an old cargo van converted into a flat bed rusting in the tall grass to the side. Their dog didn’t like me.
Hard, hot, heavy work. Firewood sections still slippery and dense from sapweight, and a pile that was liable to collapse if and when you pulled at the wrong piece. I was slow to start and did not improve over time. I believe I averaged about four or five cord a day, which is not bad for a thirteen year old if you ask me.
After a few days of stacking, I had a few rows finished and the pile was getting low. They started running the splitter and belt again, while I was picking firewood from the pile. Once they started that, I couldn’t keep up. This was partially due to the fact that I now had to approach the pile with one eye on the conveyor belt, to time things so that I didn’t get hit with falling pieces. They brought in some other guy one day, who lasted a few hours before getting hit in the hand by a falling piece of wood. I didn’t see him again.
First time I went to ask for my pay, the man counted out 25 five dollar bills and handed them over. He wasn’t lying - it was genuinely five bucks a cord. I was baffled at the time as to why the man would have that many low denomination bills - I learned much later on that he was basically laundering money from illicit sources through this operation, which explained a lot.
I stayed there for about a month and a half, ending my summer with about 500 dollars - enough to buy myself a snowboard with some help from my parents. Strange times.
The Timber Launderer
I designed a board game as a personal challenge and posted my notes online along the way. As the game got close to being finished a publisher messaged wanting to help finish and sell the game. Royalties were enough for a couple small family vacations. That experience really helped cement board gaming (and designing) as one of my core hobbies.
That’s super cool how many more games have you made for your family since?
I now have 2 more published games, several expansions to that first game and a few more ready to publish.
Would you like it to be your main source of income and, if so, how far away is that from becoming a reality?
No, that’s not realistic; I would probably transition to video game development if I wanted to make a career out of game design. I’m happy to keep this a hobby.
Ah that’s cool, hope you keep enjoying it. Happy cake day.
I can fit quarters and €2 coins in my nostrils. I used to have a drunkenness level that would prompt me to assert this at parties or bars, and then I’d obviously show people.
Nobody wants their coins back after that, but it’s not very lucrative and I shudder to think now about the diseases I tempted.
Likely got some beta-hemolytic staphylococcus aureus all up in there. It’s a community derived strain of a common microorganism of the skins biome that can kill blood cells. Do you get sore-throats often, itchy nostrils?
It’s been a decade or more since I did it, but I wasn’t very frequently sick at the time, nor am I now. I do get more severely sick than my husband now, but he’s an overweight omnivore and I’m an underweight vegan, so I assume it’s more related to that. Itchy nostrils sound awful, but I’ve never had them.
Having my pets pose for chewy pics
When I was maybe 13 years old my younger sister and I got paid to clear out trash from the home of a family friend who was a hoarder. This person had enough self-awareness to know it needed to be cleaned out, but didn’t have the spoons to do anything about it and so just gave us the keys and full reign while they spent a week traveling. We dealt with lots of old food, stacks of ancient newspapers and magazines, useless decades-old kitchen gadgets ordered from the Home Shopping Channel and never removed from the boxes, dead mice and their poop, that kind of thing.
In retrospect that was a huge health hazard to be irresponsibly throwing kids into, the job should have been done by a team of expensive trained adults with protective gear rather than two idiot children with some yellow kitchen gloves and lawn-sized trash bags, but we were happy enough for the pocket money at the time.
didn’t have the spoons to do anything about it
I see you dabble in disability. I always appreciated this metaphor for it’s usefulness and kindness
can you explain this to me ?
Spoon Theory is a metaphor for describing certain limiting effects of a disability to those unfamiliar. It comes from this original post by writer Christine Miserandino which explains the basic idea. Here’s its Wikipedia article.
Cheers
It’s called Spoon Theory
If you ever played a Zelda game, its how many “hearts” you have before you “faint”. It’s a metaphor about how much energy a person has, that can be usefully descriptive when discussing one’s experiences with managing a chronic illness
Wanna shower? That’ll cost ya a spoon. Maybe you’ve got eight of them, so how do you choose to use them? If you run out, you won’t be able to cook yourself dinner, and there’s no amount of “will power” that will help you
Use some medication to help you “push-through” because you’re hungry? That’ll cost ya a spoon on credit (when you wake up)
When it comes to disability — if you over-exert, it can cost you your entire next day while you rest and “restore hearts”. So you have to learn how to manage your energy more conscientiously than you would if you didn’t have “that disability”
The theory can help, not only to teach yourself how to manage your energy for everyday tasks, but also how to discuss the hurdles that your situation presents
In my own experience — it can be especially helpful in discussing how an “invisible illness” affects you… with family, friends, and sometimes acquaintances. And I find that to be kind, because it’s easily digestible for the person who hasn’t had those extremes of experiences
Regardless of my struggles, I’m very grateful for the amount of spoons I’ve been given
Had the only printer in my dorm room of about 70 rooms and charged just slightly less than the university did per page so naturally people printed with my printer. Made some scripts that hooked into google cloud print to log users and had spreadsheet to track funds for users and send emails about what was printed and how much funds they had left. I made mony only because people forgot they had extra funds when they moved out and never asked to get it back. Its not a lot but stil strange to me why I put so much effort into a very low profit business.
Nice try, IRS.
I created an open source image gallery (floating image) in my spare time. Some company (Archos) wanted to embed it into their products, but wanted me to add support for 3rd party hosts (I had Flickr, they wanted Google, photo bucket and others). I earned about €3000 on the work and my project got better for it. Not completely unheard of, but probably the most unusual way I have made extra money.
Housesitter/pet sitter for disabled pets - giving twice daily insulin injections to a diabetic dog was very stressful.
I also spent a good amount of time scrapping old electronics for circuit boards, aluminium, copper, and wire. Very large printers, laptops, servers, appliances, whatever I could savemge from the side of the road, from junk auctions, and businesses. I made pretty good money doing this on my spare time. I made several tools that hastened the scrapping process, and built a cable stripper that would strip off the PVC from power cords so I could get the raw copper wire. I probably only made like $20 an hour, but it was after work and I had nothing better to do. Once a month or so I’d fill up my van and take it to the scrapyard for $200-$500
Man, I’ve dreamt of doing scrapping in the past but didn’t have a vehicle that would really workout for bigger items. But even then, I wish I would have done it with a friend or something. My focus would have been scrapping old electronics, printers, laptops, etc. How long ago did you do this scrapping stuff?
I’ve been doing it on and off since I was a teenager. My first ‘job’ was collecting cans and squashing them for the aluminium at about 11. Then I would also ride my bike to building sites and get the copper wire offcuts from the bins.
In 2020 I lost my job and started a business in a tech field, so I filled my spare time with collecting roadside stuff, and also did a bit of paid disposal - in some neighbourhoods it’s really hard to get rid of a broken appliance, so I’d pick up dead washing machines and very large plasma TVs and they would pay me $5 or $10 to take them away. I got a ton of old servers from friends of friends, and would sell some parts from them, the power supplies were popular. I also sold some appliance spare parts, and also just fixed a few of them and sold them as working appliances.
I still do a bit of scrapping, but it’s mostly old power cords. I have a lead on a company that sells imported equipment where each bit comes with a Euro cable and a US cable that they don’t need, so I end up with boxes and boxes of cords, and the market for scrap copper is high enough that I don’t even have to strip the PVC off, just chop the ends off and sell them a hundred kilos at a time.
I still get appliances and fix them sometimes, or if a friend or family member wants to get rid of something, I’ll do the hard work of carting it off, figuring out if its fixable or not, and selling or scrapping it out.
Technically I didn’t make money, I just got some money back. On multiple occasions, a few years after moving homes, the student housing company would suddenly pay back money that I apparently overpaid for gas and electricity. I’d get another email in which they’d apologize (again) and yeet another pile of money my way. It was usually something like 80-200 euros if I remember correctly. Truth is, I never really felt like I was paying much anyway. Compared to what I’m paying now it was absolutely nothing. But hey, I’ll never say no to “free money” I guess…
It wasn’t much, but back in high school I basically worked as sort of a personal savings account for a couple weeks.
There was one dude I wasn’t exactly friends with but we were friendly, never hung out or really talked outside of school, but otherwise were on pretty good terms. We often sat at the same lunch tables, had some mutual friends and such, talked and joked around between classes, etc.
He was also kind of an irresponsible druggie. Nice guy, wasn’t out committing crimes or anything besides drug possession, just made a lot of dumb choices, came to school drunk, high or tripping balls a lot.
I kind of looked the part of a stoner back in high school- long hair, sort of a grungy style, listened to a lot of classic rock and metal, etc. so I was in a lot of the same circles as him, but I didn’t drink or do drugs and it was also pretty well known that I was a reasonably smart, responsible, and honest dude.
So a few weeks out from senior prom, he realizes that he’s going to need some money for whatever his post-prom plans were (I didn’t ask, I figured it was probably better that I didn’t know.) He also knew that he couldn’t be trusted with his own money, he’d blow it on drugs or something else stupid.
So he asks if he can just give me money to hold onto, and I agreed. He’d hand me a few bucks here or there over the next couple weeks, whatever he didn’t use from his lunch money or allowance or whatever, and I just held onto it.
But at the end of it, it added up to a pretty decent bit of money (by “high school kids 20 years ago” standards anyway, it was maybe around $100)
And the day before prom I gave it back to him and he let me keep I think $10 or $20 for my troubles.
Good on you. I know a lot of people that would’ve “lost” it.
That’s an interesting situation to be in and to get paid for your troubles. Do you know if he was able to get sober from this or even after high school?
He did eventually sober up, I think he did a little bit of time in jail or prison along the way. As far as I know he is generally doing pretty well now, is married, has a kid.
But he’s still an idiot. I remember seeing I’m parroting some bullshit about Trump being better for the middle class maybe about a year ago.
He did message me a bit after the election saying something about how he felt bad, but I was still pissed off myself and in no mood to hear him out and blocked him. I was within days of deleting my Facebook anyway so I was about to lose contact with him anyway since I’ve never had his phone number.
