Yesterday my dad came upstairs and gave me £1 for my half eaten plate of chips.
Went without sleep – I was in college (uni for the non U.S. types) and the psych dept. was doing a sleep deprevation study and needed people. Basically it was sit around a room for three days and take tests.
The irony was that I did it to make college money and then I slept through the next week’s classes (midterm week) and flunked half my classes.
I also wrote speeches for a person I have no idea exactly what he was running for or who he was (well, I knew his name, but whether he was a Republican, Libertarian, Democrat, Prohibitionist or what, I am not sure). A friend told this candidate that I wrote good speeches and he called me and asked me if I would write speeches for him. I said I would. He would email me the topic, the speech length and his general stance and I would knock out a speech and email it back.
After he was elected (I think it had something to do with the Indiana legislature), he said he didn’t need me any more (people of Indiana if your legislature is really screwed up, it may be partially my fault-sorry).
TV
Modeled for a wheelchair catalog. I had to pretend to have cerebral palsy.
my best one
medical testing…the effects of viagra with alcohol!!!
sounds like fun no?
but you try drink a glass of pretty much neat vodka at 10.30 on a thursday morning!
…actually it was fun.
n.
just read it the thread …gotcha ya!
I once walked on my husbands back for $50 barefoot. Come to find out later that he had a huge foot fetish. I totally felt like a prostitute after that and wished I could boil my feet.
I ran a spotlight for a rinky-dink Salvation Army Christmas pagent in a old, run-down theater in downtown L.A. A real surreal experiance, to say the least.
She told me she loved me like a brother. She was from Arkansas, hence the Joy!
Shit!! That was supposed to say my friends husband!!!
:smack:
The weirdest thing is probably appearing as an extra in a hollywood sitcom, but the first thing that occurred to me was:
In the eighties, students at my college could pick up money going over to the GTE research labs and getting involved in weird computer experiments. When they were first really trying to make convincing voice recognition and speech, I remember reading one syllable words into a mic for an hour, then having a computer read me SAT-style passages and answering questions based on what I understood.
I was paid a hundred bucks to dress like a crash-test dummy and walk around a traffic-safety fair getting my ass grabbed and groin punched by six-year-olds.
For two consecutive summers in my early years at university, I was paid $16+ an hour to count seeds at a research station. For 40 hours a week during my vacation period, I carefully scraped tiny legume seeds into little paper bags. We used counters similar to those used by nightclub bouncers to keep track of the seeds.
Around the same time period, I kissed another bloke at a pub for $25, which bought a jug of beer and a cocktail shaker.
My regular work sometimes gets on the same level of weirdness as some of these, but the strangest one-time thing I did for money was wrestle with a bunch of guys while dressed as some kind of macho cowboy (jeans, tank-top and cowboy hat) for about $120.
They told me it was for a kids’ TV show, but never saw it. That’s probably a good thing.
Sacrificed our 8 month-old daughter on the altar of Scientific Advancement.
No, really, we did. Somebody at the U of TN was doing a graduate study of… something to do with how/if infants memorize things. Baby Sophie had to look at some flashing lights for about 45 seconds, and we got $10 for it. Come to think about it, that baby has made more money on an hourly basis ($800/hour!) by her 8th month than her old man likely will ever.
I’m feeling left out and way too normal, here. But my son once worked as a temporary fuzz-plucker. In California, the voting machines use (or maybe used, by now) cards that have perforated pull-off tabs on the top. When you turn in your cards after having voted, the monitor tears the tabs off the top of the cards and gives them to you. They can be used to prove that you voted if you took the time off work.
Anyway, they don’t always tear perfectly. Sometimes they leave behind bits of paper fuzz at the perforations. And the fuzz will jam the counting machines. So they hire temps for one night to pluck fuzz off of the voting cards before they’re fed into the counting machines.
I also knew a person who spent the summer sexing aphids. That is the aphids were trapped on sticky paper and he would look at them with a microscope to determine how many of each sex there were. Not sure why.
Another person was hired for a few weeks to mimic sheep grazing with a weed-whacker. She knew why. This ecology experiment had been set up in the sheep fields at UC Davis. The question was how big and how close together did enclosed areas protected from sheep grazing have to be to actually become available as an environment and support an ecology.
Unfortunatley, the scientists running the sheep were doing their own experiments at their own pace for their own reasons. And the sheep went bye-bye before the ecology folks were done. So they hired her to take the sheep’s place. If the grass had grown up between the enclosures, it would have voided the whole experiment.
I once took a radio survey for four bucks. (Kind of cheap, wasn’t it? Why did I do that?)
I also two-stepped with a male bar guest once, for half of “Neon Moon,” for twenty bucks.
Hey, that’s ten bucks a minute! TOP THAT, I DARE YA!
I did tell him afterwards that he could’ve gotten three lap dances, plus tip, for that amount of money.
A friend of mine (no, really!) consumed a entire bottle of tomato ketchup (on its own) for £5 (approx $7.50).
I hope tomato ketchup translates into American 
- it’s a thick sauce and tastes good on chips (fries!).
And a friend told me about a group of intoxicated guys at his office. One claimed he can first get a Big Mac into his mouth then out again (for the usual £5). He slowly achieves it.
This ‘gooey’ hamburger is about to be thrown away, when the next drunk offers £100 (approx $150) if yet another drunk will eat it.
Ugh.
My first tax-paying job was as a clown and juggler at Elitch Garden’s Amusement park in Denver, CO for two summers. Ran around and made people smile, occasionally dressed up as Popeye. It was not as fun as it could have been because I was the youngest clown and got picked on by the older clowns. Seriously. Ever been beaten up by a guy with a red-sponge nose? Doesn’t do much for your self-esteem.
-Tcat
In college I “won” $20 by holding a lit cigarette to the back of my hand for 30 seconds. And I used to wonder why people thought I was just a little scary.
The summer after I graduated from high school, I spent a week hand-shelling cocoa beans for the research labs at Ambrosia Chocolate. They have big industrial shelling machines for the gargantuan batches of chocolate, of course, but they can’t run the small samples required for lab work through the machines.
Note to people walking by hotels in 2trew’s neighborhood, watch out for falling pigeons and pigeon crap.
I was paid a little over US$20 to sing Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer to an assembly of about 3,000 Youth Pioneers and their parents. I was told it was a “Christmas party.” There was a Christmas theme, yes, but I did not find out until a few months later that the Cub Scouts are to the Boy Scouts as the Youth Pioneers are to the Chinese Communist Party.
It was all very innocent, I swear.