What's the Weirdest Thing You've Ever Done for Money?

By stella.louise (view all posts by stella.louise)
at 1:05PM Friday July 10, 2009
under Loose Change

I came across an article on MainStreet with ideas for unusual ways to earn money, including tattooing a company logo on your body or the less permanent billboarding of auto wraps. Added to a recent post on WalletPop about ball hawking and this CNBC story about an $80k job opening for a witch, it got me to thinking about some of the more offbeat ways I've made ends meet over the years...

When I was much younger, I had a couple of stints pet-sitting prima donna pups and one gig where I was hired to iron dozens of men's shirts while watching my favorite soap opera, but even recently I've taken odd jobs to fill fiduciary gaps. I've collected as much as $200 a pop in market research focus groups (Being paid to give my opinion? Talk about DREAM job!) and even more being a human guinea pig for medical research studies.

I canvassed my co-workers to see what weird things they'd done for money. Talk about some "odd" jobs:

Erika delivered phone books, Lia transported bread from one bakery to another and Erik drove a Zamboni. Holly was a phone operator referring callers to a Russian treatment center and Joe G. worked as a caddy. Annie has a had a number of odd jobs: market research participant, bit part on celebrity reality show and Cabana girl which she says entailed "tanning for money."

"And I'm still awesome at setting up beach umbrellas," she added.

Heather S. and Lindsay both worked as costume characters at kids parties, with Lindsay declaring it the "most difficult part time job I've ever had."

Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys--or Tinkerbell for that matter...

Even stranger was the job Lindsay had as a monitor on a religious prayer website. "Sometimes people prayed for bowel movements," she reported.

Like me, Sheryl participated in medical studies.

"Tested new MRI software, which entailed lying in an MRI (My first time ever--I was petrified!) for 45 minutes and then getting to see the colors of my brain afterward. Ruined my ATM card because I didn't know MRI stood for "Magnetic Resonance Imaging" and I'm not sure I would have not had my ATM card in my pocket anyway since I was dumb on electronics and magnetics at the time anyway."

Ah, yes--an earning AND learning experience!

Turns out many of my co-workers were entrepreneurial from an early age. Craig sold bootlegged disposable cameras which he purchased for $6 at the World Cup for $15 a piece while Jacob S. rummaged through junk yards for hard-to-find auto parts which he would clean-up/refurbish and resell for a big profit. Â Â Once he found seats in an older Porsche for $40 each and after cleaning and conditioning the leather, he sold them for $200 each.

Nice!

But my favorite story came from Manu, comic book scalper and miniature tycoon in the making:

"I would lend comics to my classmates for 1 buck per lecture session. Given 6 lecture sessions a day and 10 to 15 students renting...I would make anywhere from 60 to 80 bucks a day. The business was doing great until only two weeks later, when another 8th grader started lending comics for half a buck. Unfortunately I had to match his price in order to prevent him from stealing away my classmates. However, he decided to go a step further and reduce his rental to 3 comics for a buck. When that happened, it was time for a face-to-face talk. We settled at renting to our respective classmates and not intrude in each other's territory.

But fate had something else in store for us. [O]ne of the students got caught reading a comic during the lecture and we both were reported to the headmaster of the school. An exhausting one week assignment accompanied with a "special" note to our parents was served as punishment to both us. That pretty much ended our short-lived ordeal to launch and run a business."

Ryan once ate a pound of lamb fat for 10 British pounds. He makes sure to note the conversion rate to US dollars was 2:1--as if that makes it any less icky! Tom says he has been known to take ridiculous dares/bets from friends to get out of a sizable bar tab after a long night out and Jose is right there with him:

"I've never done it specifically because I'm broke, but I usually take people up when they say, "I'll give you $__ if you eat ______." Â It's probably brought me a couple hundred dollars over the years."

I have witnessed Jose toss back a can of tomato juice that had been sitting on a conference room table for who knows how long for the princely sum of $1.00. The man is fearless.

Robert had a gig as slug collector for a kids nature exhibit. Although he only ended up netting $2/hr, at least he wasn't required to eat the slugs.

I bet Jose would have...

Pete worked as a Production Assistant and while that may not sound all that odd, the job basically is poorly paid slave labor:

"I was a horribly miscast stand in for Chris Isaak, babysat Chipper and Nipper the RCA dogs, ordered to recover a $15,000 trained bird that escaped from set, asked to get frozen yogurt at 1 am in Downtown LA, etc. Â

Here's one story in particular that I will never forget:

I worked on the set of a Japanese ham commercial starring Â Sylvester Stallone. Â Rumor had it that he got paid in excess of $1 million dollars to show up on set two days and essentially be filmed slicing a ham. Â Â Before the big moment came we needed to get a couple of photographs for a print ad but the photographer almost lost it when he saw that Sly was about to step on his rented backdrop with filthy shoes. Â (Stallone was hitting golf balls in a portable driving range in-between takes).

As Stallone approached the set the director threw me a towel and said "wipe his feet." Â Â I drifted into thought for a moment about my Dad patting me on the back when I graduated from college and then heard "wipe his feet!" again. Â So I walked up to Stallone and asked for his shoe. Â With deft aloofness he looked away from me, bent his leg at the knee, put one arm on my shoulder and allowed me to clean the sole of his dress shoes. Â

All in a days work."

I thought pet sitter was bad, but both Sara and Ray know the pleasures of taking care of...chickens. Said Sara: "When I was much younger, a friend of my family asked me to take care of the chickens on his farm while he was out of town once...I got paid a little bit. Totally not worth it though...those chickens were mean."

Jeff once drove an old lady to the Christmas tree lot, picked out a tree for her, put it on the roof of her car and helped her decorate. Iva's old lady experience was a bit different:

"I worked for a nanny agency that would send me to different families, when they needed a babysitter. One time they asked me if I wanted to help out a women for few hours (no babysitting) and just house sit for her, while she is doing errands. They gave me the address and I came to this apartment where this older lady lived.

Her windows were covered with some plastic foil so you could not see inside. She asked me if I can sit in her house for few hours while she was out and not to let anyone in. She didn't have much furniture in the house and the strangest thing was that she specifically asked me not to open the bedroom door, because she had two dogs there that were not really friendly. I don't know why I even stayed, but I did. She was gone for few hours.

While I was there I never heard anything that would indicate that the dogs were really there. I walked by the door several times, but it seemed like there was no one there. Or maybe it was, but for sure not the dog--this is always going to remain a mystery. She paid me when she came back, but I never figured out if she was just little bit crazy or she had a bigger mystery to hide. "

Sounds like the opening to a great horror movie, huh?

With the recession eating tens of thousands of jobs daily, ANY job--odd or not--is a welcome thing. If you're up for an offbeat way to earn some money, check out Odd Job Nation for openings or post one of your own. Or maybe make or accept an odd proposal via PayPal's Do Stuff for Money.

If you offer Jose enough cash, I bet he'd eat a slug.

What's the weirdest thing you've ever done for money?