Weirdest/Strangest Job you ever had....
03-10-2014, 05:55 AM
Pix Wrote:Perhaps my oddest job (which I still have a hand in, though I'm not accepting new customers at this time) is what I call a "proxy mail order" biz. At first I intended it to help secretly get mail order gifts for others but it quickly grew into getting all sorts of controversial magazines (from the paranoid to the horny) which I'd get and discreetly deliver without them worrying about people knowing they get that, the government watching me instead of them, and the spam would come to me. It was far more profitable than I thought, and when one guy thought I was about to drop him as a client he panicked and offered me double pay on the spot. But in addition I DO get a lot of spam, I especially love the color catalogs which I'd bleed with lacquer thinner onto freezer paper and sell as gift wrap (however, after I ran out of my thinner I haven't found any that wasn't at an outrageous price and have thus discontinued that service for the moment).
Some of my odd gigs are worthy of commentary. I guess the weirdest one was where a Russian American friend of mine got me a gig playing the "Snow Maiden" at a Russian Christmas/New Year's party (being held in America they had it in December as their jobs allowed). Sure, they were grabby and condescendingly sexist, but I didn't have to strip or have sex, just put on a performance of the Snow Maiden, a somewhat playful but naive (yet intrigued) granddaughter of Ded Moroz. But the drunker they got the more generous they got, they were actually competing to give me bigger tips (including hundred dollar bills)...holiday spending was not an issue that year.
Perhaps the funniest one time job was how a computer instructor at a community college was frustrated at trying to get his vox to work (definitely an example of how you can be brilliant but have no sense), and saying he'd given up on it I offered to fix it for $20. He was happy and I called up the manual online and instantly went to the "if it's not working then stop being stupid" section where I was quickly inspired to make sure all the screens match on both phones with the vox. One didn't and after I fixed that then it worked. I think it was like 2 minutes to fix and that includes getting the manual! I waited a couple of hours and lied about how it took me the entire time to figure it out so he wouldn't feel so bad and to be sure I got my $20. That had some amusing consequences down the line, too, but that's another story.
But I think the most surreal was how I made my own plushes & dolls but called them "originals" which allowed me to make well over 10x profit in selling them...and amazed that I got away with it I was doubly amazed when I saw the store that bought it from me more than double the price (approaching a hundred bucks)...and they sold within 3 months! :eek: I came close to focusing on my own "originals" after that but I'd had have to cut off some customers who really needed my services (making, mending, refitting for "specially sized" people--which can mean tall & thin as much as anything else, any size considered to trivial for big business to cater to), and it just felt shady somehow anyway.
Oh, btw, quick tip for those good with repairs! I was checking a bin at a Goodwill and found a nonfunctioning musical keyboard which I got for a single dollar and took to a friend of mine figuring he could fix it (and if not then I was only out a dollar) and sell it with a little of the profit kicked back to me as a "finder's fee." It took him less than an hour and less than $10 of parts and then he sold it within a month for $300! And my cut was $75, and he insisted I take that rather than take out the money for parts and advertisement, but probably to help himself feel better as after that he cut me out of the middle and went to find junk to fix and sell himself and made a pretty decent living at it on the side (with no kickbacks to me).
Gawd!!! You are doing good! Every "home" biz I have tried has failed. People want my stuff, but they expect me to give it to them for free....nobody wants to pay for it.
I would be interested in knowing more about this proxy mail order biz. Im still interested in something I can do at home, but so far I have not found anything that costs very little to start up, that I can do from home.
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