I can only think of one right now, but it was pretty bad:
Once I didn’t even have enough to buy toilet paper (or napkins or paper towels), so I resorted to using pages of a thick telephone book I had (for about two or three weeks).
The Yellow Pages wasn’t a good technical name for them after that.
I was a guinea pig (test subject) for the allergy clinic at the University of Wisconsin. Since I have a ton on allergies they used me, among other things, to test flu vaccine nose drops (supposedly less likely to cause allergic reaction in asthmatics; that one paid really well.) I also sold them blood as someone was working on a theory that allergic reactions could be predicted by blood (don’t know any details but it was a steady income for almost a year.) All in all, it was a nice source of cash at a time I really needed it.
I ate a hotdog from McGlinchey’s once.
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Unfortunately only Philadelphians will understand what depths I must have sunk to.
Is that a bit like eating a hotdog from CMOT Dibbler?
ew to the newly brown papers man lol , I never really had hard times in my adult life, but when I was a kid my mom said "hard time so u all have to eat bread with oil and a pinch of salt :eek: I ate it, imagine it was sausage.
I’ve been a guineapig for clinical studies. The best were sleep studies; literally getting paid to sleep! The worst study I did involved dehydration. Imagine being the thirstiest you’ve ever been, then being given hypertonic saline IV to dehydrate you even further, and staying like that for hours while a medical team poked and prodded.
Also sold blood and plasma. I once sold a unit of plasma in the morning, then whole blood in the afternoon. The whole blood place was strange. The blood wasn’t used for transfusion, but for research, so they did not screen.
I did the plasma thing for a while. Plasma centers offer bonus incentives for you to donate regularly and often (you can give plasma twice a week, even though you can give whole blood only once every eight weeks).
It certainly isn’t on the level of sucking dick in a truck stop bathroom, but when I looked around the room and saw that everyone else was either a college student or a homeless man, it certainly felt desperate.
On at least one occasion – retrieving from the rubbish bin in the kitchen, Chinese takeaway discarded unfinished by my housemates (my having been absent for the meal), and eating it.
I subsisted on that once for several days, but because that was all I had to eat beyond the first day after I got hit by a hurricane and all the roads were closed for a few days.
For food? Back when I was a starving student I would hoard packets of ketchup, mustard, mayo ketchup, mayo, etc. for sandwiches. I remember dusting off an old can of green beans and adding a salt packet. I once ate an old box of Stove Top Stuffing for a meal.
I’m guilty of “borrowing” a few items from my room mates.
My part-time job would collect food for the Food Bank and I would poach items out of the mountain of cans, pasta, sauce, etc… I rationalized it because I would visit the Food Bank occasionally anyway.
Remember when Coke (Pepsi??) came out with Tab? In the neighborhood where we poor students were living, 5 to a 2 bedroom apt. and constantly broke, we noticed that as a promotionAL effort, the company was putting 2 bottles of Tab on every doorstep for as far as we could see. 2 GLASS bottles, back when there was a 2 cent redemption. We picked up as many as we could, multiple trips, carrying big bags of them, took them home, poured that nasty shit down the drain, redeemed the bottles and bought BEER! And maybe some food.
I’ve done the plasma thing. It felt weird (?) to SELL part of myself, but I really needed the cash to help pay for gas after buying my books for the semester.
The employees at the plasma center were great. I also didn’t blend with the rest of the people donating, and was asked why I was there. After I explained the situation, they helped get me to the front of the queue so I could make my next class.
When I was young, I once had to take a bath with my brother because that’s all the water we had. I think my mom says it was because she couldn’t get someone out to repair the pump in time rather than we couldn’t afford the repair. Actually come to think of it there was an isolated creek on our property and it wasn’t in winter so we could have bathed in the creek, but I was too young to think of that at the time.
I worked my way through college. Mostly in fast food. Even at the maximum part time (for that time) allowed hours of 38/week and the cheapest ratty apartments near the college (and I didn’t have a car, only a bike), I couldn’t afford food. (Strangely the dorms cost more than the apartment!) So to supplement my poor diet of rice and beans, about once a week I’d take a raw potato, pint of milk, or a cookie from the store without paying for them. That’s the only time in my life where I stole stuff. It’s not that I felt it was justified, just that… I was hungry.
Payday loans on multiple occasions when it meant the difference between the electricity getting cut off or not. I despise that industry and hated contributing to it, but at the time, there weren’t any better options.
Send me five bucks and I’ll tell you.
I pretended to be the former Finance Minister of Nigeria.
I never went so low as to need to sell anything of myself thankfully, but I had a friend who donated bone marrow twice. It’s especially bad because they have to poke a thick needle down and – crunch – through your hip bone into the marrow. Then they literally suck out what they need. He was told by the doctors that the pain is as close as a man will get to feeling what a woman feels with bad menstrual cramps.
He also did flu studies for money as well, where they have you contract the flu on purpose in order to study new treatments and such.
I’m glad I’ve always had at least a few bucks in the bank so as to avoid having to do anything desperate.
When I was a young, poorly paid military guy in the 60s, I sold the Bulova watch that my parents gave me for graduation for $15, then told them that it broke.
I pawned a stereo system in college for $20, two months after my Mum paid a couple of hundred bucks for it. I don’t remember what I needed the money for.
Bathing in natural water sources always sounds much better in fantasy novels than it is in real life. Unless it’s a mountain spring or something, you’ll come out dirtier than you were when you went in.