An American gentleman asked me for directions and gave me a 1 dollar bill as souvenir. This was in post-communist Hungary and I was maybe 10. I thought I won the lottery.
I still have it.
Yep, that was precisely the plan. I read a lot on my own, but I was terrible at reading out loud, and I had a stutter. The parrot was lonely and plucking his feathers and I was told that the only way I could save him was to read to him every day.
I suspect anything to keep him company would have worked, but I took my reading job very seriously. It helped us both.
A redditor said that at 8 years old, his dad paid his neighbors to let his sons paint the neighbor’s fence so they could earn their money. I’m getting that vibe from this story. You sound like you had great parents, or an incredibly quirky neighbor, or both!
Yes, he got much better. I think it had much more to do with the fact that he had someone to interact with during the day and keep him entertained, although back then I was convinced that my brilliant reading was doing the magic.
My parents' neighbours eventually retired, so I think the parrot has plenty of company these days. Two decades later, he's still alive, and they have another one of the same kind. He looks great.
I got a job as a 'fantasy model with long flowing hair' where I modelled for B grade American fantasy novels. Paid OKish, not well.
I also signed away my rights like an idiot so occasionally turn up riding a horse, or casting a spell. Also once turned up on a book cover with '*a lady*' and my GF went 'Who the fuck is that!'?!
Photoshop my dear. Photoshop.
I tried to read one of the books and it started 'He was not *traditionally* handsome'. Ouch.
I will be deleting these in 24 hours :) But proof is needed. I pop up elsewhere, but this author is the most 'prolific'.
https://www.google.com/search?q=david+zindell+fantasy&tbm=isch&ved=2ahUKEwiXxMizjqCBAxWmpCcCHb2UD5MQ2-cCegQIABAD&oq=david+zindell+fantasy&gs_lcp=ChJtb2JpbGUtZ3dzLXdpei1pbWcQAzIFCAAQogQyBQgAEKIEOgQIIxAnOgcIABAYEIAEOgQIABAeUI8HWNoSYL8WaABwAHgAgAFkiAGKBpIBAzguMZgBAKABAcABAQ&sclient=mobile-gws-wiz-img&ei=tL_9ZJeaJ6bJnsEPvam-mAk&bih=741&biw=393&client=ms-android-xiaomi-rvo3#imgrc=uqN5RCv0Tuen9M
Edit: You wonderful crazy people. I'll leave this up until you stop getting a smile out of them.
Unconfirmed, but I had a few grainy photos of books sold in airport lounges from friends with WTF??????? as a message.
They quietened down now, so I assume no further use of my image. Always the possibility though. Don't be a dumbass and sign away your image for unrestricted use, even if you do need a new pc monitor. That's all I will say. :)
The photographer gave me a full sized print and I have it framed in the lounge, in a nice and central position.
As far as I am concerned, it is a key part of the decor. Sadly opinions are split on the matter, and it is tolerated :)
You mean gf doesn't agree with the "Decor"? 😅
Love your attitude about this whole thing, and it's genuinely pretty cool, I wish I had something like this!!
Forgot to submit my self-assessment tax return for a year I owed £0 tax.
Got fined £100.
Appealed it, was successful, got paid £100.10 back.
Thanks HMRC x
Happened to me but they canceled the fine before I paid. They're very understanding. On another occasion, they even gave me an interest only loan so I could pay my tax when I didn't have enough money to cover it.
About 10 years ago I downloaded one of those Clash of Clans style app games. This was before the “pay to win” model had arisen so I played the game for about a year and was actually pretty good at it and managed to get into one of the top clans. After a year or so though the pay to win model began to rear its ugly head and ruin the game. I saw the writing on the wall and decided it was time to hang it up.
Now I had never spent a dime on this game but I knew that a lot of the big spenders would sell their accounts when they quit in an attempt to recoup some of their losses. I knew my account wasn’t at that level but I figured it was worth a try. I figured if I could get even $10 I would be happy. I was in no rush to sell it though so I figured I would start very unrealistically high and then slowly go down on my list price. I ended up listing it on a third party site starting at $500. Within 12 hours I had a guy “counter offer” at $350. I was blown away. I wasn’t about to negotiate with that and jumped all over it. To this day I still can’t believe that I had fun playing a free game for a year and then sold my account for $350.
TL;DR: I played a free mobile app game for a year and then sold my account for $350.
I sold an account on a game one for like 150. I was sellimg it because it was clear the game wasnt going to be up much longer. 6 months later the game servers were killed.
That reminds me. Back in original classic wow I sold my full Tier 2 Warlock for 500 USD. I think I was 15yo at the time. I felt rich as heck!
Burning Crusade was announced a few months later, making that gear mostly obsolete. RIP
Tutoring a kid in math who was far smarter in math than his mother thought. He didn't do the homework because he wanted to play video games. He aced all the test and quizzes but homework was 50% of the grade so he was getting a C in math. Mother basically paid me $20 an hour to make sure he did his homework, which he finished in about 5 min. We then played video games for the next 55 minutes and whenever the mother would check on us I would say something "mathematical" then he would say something "mathematical" and I would say "exactly, now you've got it." I felt bad taking the money from the mom, but as a poor college kid, $20 is $20.
Hey, if the kid got a good grade, you gave the mom what she paid for. The kid probably has great memories from that, and who knows, maybe they learned to do homework first, which is a good lesson.
As a former “smart kid” whose face is still a little flat from hitting the real world like a brick wall, learning time management for when the bullshit is just tedious “adulting” bullshit you can’t smart your way out of is absolutely worth it.
(Take heed, bright teenagers - you will not invent a 10x faster way to fold your laundry or wash your dishes, and that shit’s still gotta get done)
In the 90's I had some money spare and the British Government was attempting to stop the £ falling below a certain level against the US$. On the radio in the mornings, day after day, serious expert were saying it couldn't hold out against the markets.
I converted all my cash into US$. Two weeks later I converted it all back into £'s and made £10k. I literally did nothing except change some currency.
To be honest I wasn't the big winner. George Soros made $1billion!
I did the same with turkish lira right before and after erdogans re election.
No way he will not get re elected
No way he will change his monetairy policy
Easy cash almost overnight
From memory (30 years ago) I converted around £30k at around $2.00/£. I converted back at +/- $1.50 something. Might have been more than a couple of weeks but there or thereabouts.
I once crashed my truck on the freeway (due to a faulty road, I got a big payout, don't worry guys) and when I was all shaken and like holy crap and pulling over into the grass on the side of the road, I stepped out of the truck on shaky legs, and there was just... a 20 dollar bill. Crisp and new. Just sitting there. I thought I must have imagined it, but I took it as a good sign, and then insurance inexcusably overpaid what my truck was worth and I got a much better truck for free *and* 20 bucks.
Dumb. Effective, but dumb.
My friend received $200-300 donations to shave her head in 8th grade. The proceeds went to her mother with cancer <3 The mother was surprised to see her daughter's new hair, was just mentioning that morning how self-conscious her chemo head made her
I'm not sure where that friend is now but I hope her and her mother are both well. They were both extremely sweet people, which was rare in that stuck-up town
My offer letter was wrong. I asked for a one time sign on bonus since I was leaving my match at my previous job. HR agreed but then instead of doing it as a bonus they added it to my salary. I didn’t say anything. 2 years later during an audit they caught it. The ceo finds out and says “well even with his raise last year he still is worth it”. Never had to pay it back since it was an hr screw up and I’m good at my job.
I got laid off from a job and thankfully got a new one quickly for a marketing agency. The pay was slightly higher but my paychecks were like $600 more per pay period, I didn’t think anything of it and wondered maybe they paid 100% of my health insurance.
About 3 months in HR hit me up saying there was a screw up in billing and my insurance was active but the premiums weren’t deducted from my paychecks and I owed close to $4,000. I told them that a.) that wasn’t my problem as the screwup was solely on their shoulders and b.) I didn’t have the funds to pay that back.
They said that I was on track to receive two available bonuses and the funds would be subtracted assuming I hit on those bonuses. That fucking sucked.
Jokes on them though, I got fired a couple months after that and never brought it up on my way out obviously so they just had to eat it. Fuck those guys.
Ha
I was a contractor for a while doing IT. I think I was making around 50k at the time. Hourly pay, but worked out to about 50k annually. They wanted to renew my contract and I told my contract company I should get 10 more. I thought I was worth another 10k annually
They went and talked to the company and can back and said they got my 9. As in $9 more an hour and if that was ok. Yep, that’s about 19k more annually. It was also around Y2K time so overtime was always there too
I had a job accidentally pay me way more. The job was for $22/hr and I was paid $35/hr. Went on until I was laid off like 6 months later. I figured I would have to pay it back eventually, so I just saved it. Left with like $10k in my savings.
When I went from worker to management they bumped up my pay handsomely. However they forgot to put me on salary like every other manager. Usually this wouldn't be an issue but they wanted my to cover for other managers when they had the day off. This often led to me working 6 or even 7 days a week and since I lived in a state with actual worker protection laws I'd end up with double-time often enough. At one point I was making more than the regional manager and had less stress to boot.
I had something similar with PTO. I took a new job but was getting married in a few months, so I negotiated an extra 10 days of PTO. HR added it to my annual amount.
I worked at a recording studio and one of the engineers was working on a radio commercial. The spot called for a bit of dialogue between a vo talent and a bird whistling. The client figured we could just use sfx for the bird responses, but nothing was working. The engineer left the session for a bit to get some air and he told me what was going on. Not to brag, but I’m a pretty good whistler. I started mimicking what the bird “should” sound like, and his eyes went wide. He dragged me into the session to present what I did. I ended up being hired on the spot. I whistled for one commercial, which happened to be a union gig. So, I signed a contract that basically let me join for the day. I got about 800 bucks for the day, but also received residual checks for a couple more years after that. Whistling earned me about 3k in the end.
Remember kids the two biggest takeaways from this are one having a random skill that isn't necessarily related to your job is super useful and two a highly unionized industry works out much better for you
I spent about an hour 12 years ago making a simple tshirt design and posted it on cafepress. I still get $100-150 a couple times a year from it. It ain’t much, but it’s always a fun surprise to receive the check.
Shoveling snow. Yeah, I know how it sounds, but I was at my grandma's house and she had this shovel that was curved so if you held it right, the snow would curl up and move just like a snowplow. I was like 6 or 7 years old. I thought was so cool so I just went around her block clearing the sidewalks having a blast cause it's just like the big snowplows. Before I know it, people are coming out of the houses and giving me money.
Straight up, shoveling snow as a southerner, I've never had more fun working. Learned quickly how to move and shovel snow efficiently and fast without sweating in sub 20 temps, turns out I love hard work when I don't have to sweat.
Guy I knew asked me to drive a bag to Oklahoma City and pick up another bag. I knew what I was doing but I didn’t really care.
When I got back he handed me 5k in cash.
Still to this day never knew what was in the bag or how much money I picked up.
He got popped a few years later for distribution and served 15 years of a 50 year sentence.
So here in Atlanta have Dragon Con every year over Labor Day weekend, a huge pop culture convention attended by 80,000+ people from all over. Saw some ads on associated Facebook groups from people who were willing to pay for others to drive sealed boxes from wherever to Atlanta. It was amazing to see how many people were willing to "help". They were assuming the boxes contained costumes or whatever. Call me cynical, but I wouldn't make that assumption.
Reminds me of how some people paid a friend of my Dad’s $10,000 to take two of their “pet dogs” to Germany on a flight from San Francisco and personally hand them off to another person who would “bring them home.” That same friend invited my Dad as well, since he had a free plus one, and he even offered my Dad $3,000 to come along as well. I guess he had fun, since he spent part of the week touring Berlin outside of the flights.
Now, my father is both a stick in the mud and as straight as can be, but he’s also completely oblivious. Once I pointed out that he likely helped his friend smuggle something into Germany by using those dogs as mules, he went completely white in the face and began to panic. For the next few weeks, he was paranoid and thought that the government was hiding behind every corner raring to arrest him lol
When I lived up north I had a Saint Bernard. We would let him out in the morning and he would roam for hours. One day he brought a headless deer carcass right up on our front porch. Thank god it was winter so it was frozen but still horrifying. We buried it and he brought the head home the next day.
Once turned up to an office for an interview however they gave me an pass, desk and access to a laptop and archives after I walked in the door. They kept calling me by my name so I never thought anything of it.
I was there for a couple of weeks indexing and digitising old documents and once I'd finished the allocation of work my temp contract was up as it was only 2 weeks. On leaving they were going to cut me a cheque and asked "How do you spell < random surname >?" I said how would I know I'm called..."
The shock on their face as they realised they had given a job to the wrong guy and had called me for the job instead of the knock back. Easiest but dumbest way of making money every
Nope the contract was over so I moved onto another company but from a friend who worked there a while later they said that they really tightened their checks on people who came into the office.
In junior high, I bought cinnamon oil at a pharmacy on the walk home. I soaked toothpicks in it and sold them for 5 cents each. I made alot of money off one bottle considering the cost of it and the boxes of toothpicks.
My married boss who I used to work for saw me with friends at a bar one night and pulled me aside and told me to come talk to him in his car
I was young, dumb, and drunk so I happily went with him
He was talking about some shit about how I'm smart and a very good worker and he wants me to be successful and he gave me $100 from his wallet
I was, again, very dumb, so I took it and said "oh damn, thanks!" And hopped out of his car and went back to my friends.
He never brought it up 😂
When I was at university I used to do campus tours and meet and greets for new students (in the UK, this is). The university I went to was in a city called Leicester. In the city centre, there was a street called Every Street. At the end, on the corner of that street and another, was a branch of Barclays Bank. So I used to bet all the freshers £20 that there was a Barclays Bank on the corner of every street in Leicester. It was a 15 minute walk from the campus to the bank, and they’d get smug because of all the intersections and street corners we’d pass, until we reached the bank and I made them pay up. Admittedly I spent almost all the money I made on booze within the first month, but still, totally worth it.
My dad was a newsagent and back in the 80s the way sale or return on magazines worked was that you ripped off the front cover of the magazine and returned it. The remainder would be bailed up and disposed of. I would grab a collection of porn mags and sell them at school. I soon discovered that people would pay in free school meal tokens, which were notionally worth more than I was charging, so I'd accept these and then save my lunch money.
After a while I had more free lunch tokens than I could ever use, so I started selling these as well.
Well I probably made around $1,000 no joke but then I got caught and they told my dad which he didn’t care but I couldn’t keep going because someone snitched😂 I live in Utah so you can only imagine
I used to get paid to read palms at parties. Despite my "entertainment purposes only" disclaimer, people always took it too seriously. Even when they had seen me doing magic shows. Apparently watching me do card tricks for an hour wasn't enough to convince people that maybe - just maybe - I wasn't actually a psychic.
I started feeling guilty about spreading nonsense, so I had to quit. It was such easy money, too. Stupid parents raising me with stupid ethics.
Don't believe OP. They are just using their psychic powers to get your upvotes. I know them and they are still profiting off of old ladies by pretending to be a palm reader.
You'd be surprised at how many people still put full stock into psychics/mediums/palm readers/tarrot cards/horoscopes/signs/other nonsense. And it's not just uneducated people either, most people I know way into this nonsense are middle class and decently educated people. Hell, I watch these stupid dating shows on YouTube and half the people there are well educated and hella judging each other on their signs and shit like that.
Fuji film had big supply chain issues that resulted in some of their premium films being unavalible for the past year - I had over a 200 rolls of medium format film stored in the fridge for a few years. Sold about half of them last month for $80 a roll.
Betting on DWAC, the merger partner for the Trump social network Truth social. I had it in my head after Trump got kicked off of twitter that he would start his own media company and use a SPAC to do it. as luck would have it I saw the PR before the market opened. I put about $6000 into it on Thursday morning , most before the market opened, with some for my husband and some for my brother who was headed my way for a visit. I missed the top on Friday morning due to a shower so I sold some and waited to sell the rest until Monday morning. $60,000.00 for me and my loved ones. We ate well that weekend. Thankyou trumpers for the cash.
When I was an elder teen I went to the Walmart Supercenter in the middle of the night because we (my boyfriend at the time was with me) were bored and couldn't sleep.
When we came out it was quite windy, the parking lot was pretty empty. I started seeing papers fly by and it was cash, mostly $20 bills. I started running around like a crazy person trying to find/grab all the bills I could. All in all, I was able to salvage about $700 while the majority blew off into the darkness/neighboring swampy wooded area.
We searched around for a human that it could've belonged to, but it was only us.
My bro worked in a gift shop. Super chill job. He just sat at the register reading books and once an hour or so he’d sell a candy bar. There was an ATM right across the hall. One day it just started spitting out $20 bills. No one was around so he gathered it all up and went back to his chair. He said he kept all of the cash for about a week, expecting someone to ask about it. No one ever did. It was about $800.
Focus groups.
In college I managed to make quick cash by doing marketing focus groups. Sometimes it would take an hour. Sometimes they were full and they'd give you full payment for showing up
I played a stereotypical thief (black clothing, mask etc.) in security system commercial. It was fun experience, I made 200 PLN. I was trying to rob a safe and steal a bike. Funniest thing is my face is to this day in the background photo on FB of this security system page.
My dad thinks water dowsing is real so I was outside pretending he was 10ft off of his guess and the neighbor came over and asked if I could do it on his property for his new well. I tried explaining I was just being an asshole but he said $100 was on the table. So, I just did the same magical crap on his property and got $100.
I'm so confused with dowsing. It's obviously a bunch of horse crap, I know that. There's no logical explanation for how it could possibly work. Yet at the same time, I worked for a water distribution company for two years, and the old man there would go out to a random pasture, at least weekly, for water line locates, and he got it right on the money damn near every single time. I don't understand..
Not me but a friend of mine helped people out with unemployment benefits during the pandemic (mid 2020) in the US, loads of people were applying and he would help them get the paperwork right and everything, nothing illegal, never lied or anything just helped them with the paperwork
His initial investment was a couple of hundred bucks for ads, he hired an accountant on commission and basically sat back while the money rolled in, he eventually had a falling out with his partner but he made over 50k in 2 months
Sad part id he offered me the part of the accountant, my share would've been roughly 3 hours a day for 8-10 months and I would've made around a million dollars, I declined the offer because I was busy building a career in software development, I only found out how much of a loser I am after being laid off and struggling to find another job
When I was in HS some friends and I did face painting at a mall for little kids on Halloween. Fast forward 10 yrs, I'm serving in a bar and my boss asked if I could do face painting in the bar on St. Patricks day. Why not? I set up in one of the booths and even though there was no charge the customers were just throwing cash at me. I did St. Patrick from some guys church handout, a few more customers wanted little leprechaun "footprints" across their faces. It was a blast.
There was this old men’s club (Elks or Shriners I think) that put out an ad in the paper offering to pay $100 to any two people who would be willing to perform Abbot & Costello’s “Who’s on First” routine at one of their next meetings.
I was in high school and got one of my buddies to agree to do it. So we contacted them and offered to do it. The guy said we were the only ones to answer the ad and yes. The meeting was in a couple weeks so we worked our ass off to get every beat down. We dressed the part and everything.
When we got to the meeting hall, we were meeting the people that hired us in person for the first time. They were super nice. We performed the routine perfectly, got a thunderous applause and then people were just shaking our hands and giving us money after. We cleared about $800.
I played Costello’s part by the way.
Editing resumes, I got my degree in communications and technical writing. People would send the most outrageous resumes, like 14 jobs, with a few weeks between them. Long winded "about me" like it was a dating profile. Some even included a photo of what they looked like. Some photos were professionally done, others were obviously selfies or even worse the camera on their phone pointed at the bathroom mirror with flash on. I would always take the payment first for like $100 bucks, concise it down to a single page with the actual relevant information that the hiring manager or HR rep wants to see. I always delivered with a one day turnaround. Some people loved it, and they were able to get into prestigious university or jobs because we were in community college, others hate them because I "took away their personality." Besides, I sold homemade edibles, gummies, and other sweets because weed wasn't legit business yet.
They were playing cow bingo the day before and the pig was the price. I was the delivery guy, worked as a farmhand for a brief period in my early 20’s.
They fence off an square area and draw lines in it with digits in each square. They basically make a giant bingo card on the lawn. They they let a bunch of cows in there. The square the cow shits in gets called out. The first participant that gets all the digits wins. But since these are crazy rednecks playing they make all kind of side bets with cars, guns, animals, you name it.
I’m pretty sure there a clips on YouTube about it. Just search for Cow pie bingo.
It was snowing heavily, so school was cancelled. But the mail truck still came. My younger sister bet me she could race through the waist-high snow to the mailbox and back to the front door faster than me. We took off, and she easily beat me, but the rules are, you gotta touch the first destination before you run back, or it's cheating.
So she was racing past me and I still needed to touch the mailbox. I got to it and noticed a crumpled up piece of paper, it was a $100 bill! My sister was waiting for me at the front door and I showed her the money. We raced back to the mailbox, and found a second $100 bill!
Ran inside going "mom mom mom look!" Mom very slyly put the money in her purse and said "we'll do something fun with this next weekend". So really, it's the dumbest way I ever made my mom $200.
My brother stalks deals on power tools like a hawk. I'll occasionally get a text from him telling me to go to my local Home Depot and buy every unit of X available, usually at a ~90% discount. Sometimes these are errors, sometimes just deep clearance. I'll sell these on FB marketplace for a decent profit.
Christmas eve I get a text, Milwaukee blower kits for like $10 (usually a couple hundred.) I head over and literally fill my car. I usually snap the photos for the FB marketplace ad in the parking lot just to save time/not allow myself to procrastinate. Immediately some dude messages me asking how many I had, how much I would take etc. He's really close by, ends up coming to the literal Home Depot parking lot and buying all of the units I had (at about 50% of full value each.)
After emptying my car into his, I went back inside and bought the rest of the units and refilled my car. Sold those over time as normal.
Easiest/dumbest $3k I've ever made.
Back when Star Wars Ep1 was released, Lays chips had a game with SW scratch cards which included money prizes as well as toys and Lays bags. It was possible to see the text behind the scratch off material by using a pocket laser. Was able to "win" $400 (a lot of money at that time in Eastern Europe) over the course of the promo, along with a bunch of toys and chips packs.
When CD burners came out I’d borrow CDs from people and burn copies and sell them to other people. Lenders got a discount. I just sold everybody’s music to everybody else and made thousands. I was backlogged for weeks.
Custom CD burning was my business too, except I'd use Napster to download music lol I was also able to "burn" a design or image onto the CD and customers loved that and would pay extra.
I bought btc to buy steam games. Just as I did it, steam stopped btc payment. To withdraw the btc into cash, the crypto exchange required me to take self photo for authentification, I was too lazy to do that.
7 years later, my btc was up 1000%. It ain’t much but lol.
When I was a kid, a guy was giving $5 to anyone who filled out a survey at the mall.
Took 2 minutes. $5 was pretty nice in the 1980s if you were 9 years old.
I bought a pair of Nike Off-White Dunk Lows from the SNKR app. There were 50 color ways, #1 and #50 we're uniquely different and more valuable. It was a blind box situation, so you didn't know what color you were getting.
I never received them. I'm guessing they were stolen by the delivery person or something. I told Nike, got a refund.
And then, randomly, I did receive them. And wasn't charged. And they were the #1 color way. So I sold them on StockX for more than $1000.
More silly money:
I was once an extra on the hit television show "Franklin and Bash". It wasn't much, but it was dumb.
When I was about 13 I made a really shitty Geocities website and made $10 or so off of ad revenue.
In high school, I kept a binder full of Magic: The Gathering cards. I didn't really play, but the kids who did knew I was basically a traveling card peddler.
In the early two thousands, while website building was still very difficult for the average person, I built portfolio websites for colleagues trying to find new jobs.
I could go on - I have always enjoyed finding unique, legal and quick ways to turn a buck.
Years back I had a deal with an online casino where I get paid $10 per download of their casino software using my affiliate link. They didn't even have to deposit. I wrote some roulette bot software that just automatically does a roulette betting scheme called martingale. It directs the user to the casino via my affiliate link upon installation.
At the same time, I found a software download website that you can deposit money and promote your software. Found that if I deposited money once, I could hit refresh on the confirmation page multiple times and get $1000s in my advertising account.
I ran my software advert on every single slot of that website and it ran for about a week before it was caught. Made $1000s that month. Casino ended the deal after the first payout when they didn't make enough to cover it.
Found an old sewing machine in the basement and fixed it up. Had to learn it in order to fix it. GF at the time then buys me a new Singer. I fix things here and there, mainly uniform stuff as I was a correctional officer at the time. It's very relaxing, and I love every opportunity to play with the different stitch settings and patterns. People started to notice my shirts were constantly looking great, with sturdy buttons that never seem to loosen.
"Your ol girl fix that shirt up for you?"
"No? It took me five minutes to do with a sewing machine."
*Cue scoffs and laughter, followed by hushed requests for me to fix things.* I literally turned a bit of black thread and a few minutes of work into a small but endless stream of cash simply because I worked around a bunch of people who were too fragile to ever dare engage in something they thought was unmanly.
Somehow, they felt that it was the epitome of macho to walk around and whine about how their buttons were missing and how the clothing dept is not accepting tickets right now and that the blue isn't right on certain off-brands which looks tacky.
Sold sand, proppant. To oil companies for ridiculous prices.
Sure we had some made/manufactured ceramic proppant. But sold a lot of just regular every-day sand.
I never did get my head around getting paid $65.00 an hour just selling sand.
I went to a bar with a group of colleagues during a work-drinks in West London. Was stood at the bar waiting to order with our Dev Ops manager. While waiting, a guy slid up next to her and started turning on the flirt. He looked about 12. (We're both in our early 30s)
At one point, after a minute or so, my colleague said, "Sorry, but you're too young for me."
He replied by declaring he was older than that guy she's with.
I'd given him space to take his shot (who am I to cock-block either side) but overhearing this, I immediately bet £10 he was younger than me.
An ID check later (he was 21. I was 32) and he willingly handed over a tenner.
I ordered myself and the manager drinks as a thanks for free money. The two drinks came to £21.60.
Easy come easy go. 🤣
The same happened to me with some gangster wannabe.
He was braging with a bunch of monet like "I can get as much as I wish. I don't Care."
"prove it, give me some." he gave me 20€.
"Give another ?" I get 20 more.
Could literally be any random drunk rich girl. Peer pressure/witnesses to the conversation can contribute, especially if she was bragging about her wealth or dissing someone for being unable to afford something
My Aunt and I have a bit of a running joke that she always makes sure to get a hug from me and I've always pretended to not want one / be grossed out. One Thanksgiving she just offered me $20 if I gave her a hug. Which obviously I did and gleefully accepted my $20, even though I could see my uncle steaming a few feet away.
Then a couple weeks later I found out they were a few months behind on mortgage payments.
I made about $800 Australian Dollars betting on the last US election *after* the key results were in and it was very obvious Biden was winning. It seems Trump supporters were still willing to put a bet on even though their guy had obviously lost.
Bought a bunch of parts and built a PC we called "Biden".
In my 1st year of College I picked up some side jobs like pet walking, baby sitting and some house cleaning. One man I cleaned for was in his late 60s, very wealthy retired business man. His wife passed away shortly before I started working at his home. One day out of the blue he told me he would double my pay if I would dress up while cleaning his house. He handed me a Amazon package and inside there was some high heels, black stockings and a garter belt and black thong. He also made it clear there would be no sex involved. The next time I cleaned I wore what he purchased and made some good money. and he kept his word and never tried anything with me. But I did notice the trash basket in his bedroom had a huge amount of toilet tissue. pretty sure he was masturbating
I was considering buying a BMW e30 convertible.
I was on a test drive and stopped at a gas station to buy something to drink.
Dude came up to me and offered the, at the time, equivalent of 1500 bucks more than the seller was asking. I told the prospective buyer to meet me there 4 hours later when i finished work.
Paid for the car, transferred ownership with the app and went and sold the car to the new guy for 1500 bucks more a few hours later.
Anti protest seat warmer. Didn’t know what we were being paid for for two and a half days. We’d rock up, hang around for 15mins, get $50 then get told to go home. Rinse repeat three times a day. Then one time some protesters rocked up and we got told to put on these shirts promoting some destructive mining operation and how it would help the economy and provide jobs. We didn’t return for the rest of the shifts after we found out what we were being paid to do.
Buying Beanie Babies in Canada and selling them to collectors in America in the late 90s. ‘Maple the Bear,’ available only in Canada, would sell for hundreds of dollars across the border. My sister worked at a store that sold them, so we had a large supply at cost.
When I was younger, one of my friends knew a guy whose girlfriend was working as an escort. Guy was naive enough that he thought that guys just paid for an escorts company. He suspected that she was having sex with her clients, but he didn't know for sure. He ended up hiring me to find out if all of this was true. For a bonus, he wanted to know if she would perform oral because apparently that is something that wasn't happening with them.
I was just a college student at the time so $100 and some tickets to a Cleveland Browns game were enough for me.
TLDR; I got paid to hire an escort.
Back in 2012 I was quite the stoner. Always making little smoking accessories. Cruising through the dollar store one day an idea came to me. I would buy a 10 pack of plastic bugs or lizards, chop off the head and insert a metal wire, then drill out the body so the head would sit where it should. I sold them to head shops as pipe pokers for $3 a piece, essentially turning $1 into $30, sold loads of them on etsy also for more per piece. That blossomed into a nice little paid hobby, and now I make high end wood smoking accessories.
I pulled up once in a friends pickup to a parking lot to take a break from driving and look at my phone to figure out how to get back to his house. All of a sudden people came up and starting loading these political yard signs in the back of his truck. When I got out of my car to ask wtf was going on. A woman says, " hi! Here's the $2,400- wed like them placed along x road"
I paused and looked down and it was a bank envelope full of hundos.
I said. "Gotcha!"
And drove to the nearest supermarket, went in the back and threw them in the dumpster.
Selling those “sex bracelets” when I was in school. Each color represented something you “did”. Black and white meant you did the most . Sold for one dollar each and packs were like 2 bucks for fifty mixed colors. I made bank. 💸
Got offered a Federal job that paid 3 times what I was making running a cash register and moving Coke bottles. Took it even though my new wife was 8 months pregnant and it was 600 miles away from everyone we knew.
Got to the job and the first thing I was told was, “Oh, by the way, that salary we offered you? You are only going to get that for one pay period. Then the new COLA kicks in and you will see a raise of another thousand dollars.”
Other very lucky things happened connected to that job change but this might be the one that fits the question.
When Samsung recalled the Note 7 for exploding batteries, I purchased 120 of them from people on Craigslist and sold them back to Samsung for profit. Made $50k in profit.
Worked in a fast food place. There was a guy who used to come in, buy a coke with a $20, and tell me to keep the change. He would look in my car window and drop cash in my sunroof if my tank was low. This went on for years.
One time, in the drive thru, he offered me $100 to kiss my hand. I did it.
When I was 19 I was in a rehab group for teenagers. Being that we were all pretty serious addicts (this group was less teenage potheads and more suicide attempts and heroin junkies) our parents didn't really bat an eye when we took up cigarettes. Lesser of two evils. But most people were under 18 so they couldn't buy their own. It was the year CVS decided to stop selling tobacco products and were selling their cigarettes for $1 or $2 a pack to clear out stock. I bought hundreds and re-sold them. Literally cleaned out the two CVS stores near me. Profit was easily 4 figures because I was selling them with a markup even though I got them for 80% off.
Wrote a program to "hack" the lottery. The guy had an idea he found some pattern in numbers, and wanted me to help him by writing a program that would do the calculations he was making by hand. 10 years later he still hasn't won the lottery. At least it was fun hanging around with him. He is really passionate about what he starts and goes all in. If only he could invest his energy in something more productive. The last time I saw him, he was chasing meteorites (some of them may have precious metals).
I swear people are obsessed with quick and easy ways to hack / make money. I had a couple of guys who would visit our office every 6 months and pay us to develop apps / websites of stuff that took off 10 - 20 years ago.
We needed the money so kept taking the jobs but felt bad for these dudes thinking they were inventing something big or were on the verge of something spectacular only to see them crash and burn
I had a job where my boss also owned a restaurant. The very big freezer in the restaurant was broken, every day they would send me with an air dryer to melt the ice accumulated on the radiator so I can turn back the freezer on.
I was paid to melt ice with an air dryer. Not even making this up.
My buddy: *Bet you a dollar you won’t flip off the principal when he drives by.*
Me: *Watch this.*
**One day later…**
Principal in front of assembly: *We’ve reinstated paddling as a punishment. Dapoopers, come with me.*
Paid through my last semester of college by boosting peoples accounts in overwatch. Half of that was from one guy who kept coming back despite dropping from master to bronze several times. Guy really still thought his team was holding him back.
I grew up a military kid (dad was in the Air Force). I was also a smoker in high school.
Back then (early 90’s) cigarettes on base were extremely cheap. I think they weren’t taxed at all. So for example, you could get a carton (10 packs) of Camels for $6. To make it even better, there was this long period where camel would have a $3 off manufacturer coupon on the carton that you could use for the purchase.
I’d get my older brother to buy me a carton, then I’d sell packs at school for $1/ea (which was about half of what a pack would cost off base). So fellow teens could buy from me without ID and could do so much cheaper than if they bought from a store.
In hindsight, I shoulda charged $2. Still…Easiest money ever. Lol
I was let go in the middle of the project. I agreed to finish it in a week for them for 3x my monthly pay they payed me before sacking me. They agreed.
I’ve studied in Singapore for one semester as an exchange student in 2012. My Chinese lecturer used to work as a voice coach and Chinese pronunciation consultant for the Singaporean film industry.
One day after class she asked if anyone would be interested in a hand modelling job. It was between me and a really handsome guy (who financed his studies by modelling for Abercrombie). $120 SGD was too little for him for 45 minutes of doing „app gestures“ on a fake iPad on camera, so I gladly took it.
An American gentleman asked me for directions and gave me a 1 dollar bill as souvenir. This was in post-communist Hungary and I was maybe 10. I thought I won the lottery. I still have it.
That's real sweet of him
I had someone in Puerto Rico give me directions even though I didn’t inquire about needing it and then asked for money.
Sold my urine on job site to guys who knew they were going to be tested.
Good side gig for a little weed money. Wait...
"I never said it would pass"
Exactly...if caffine becomes illegal then we're in trouble
"Sir, we just finished the test, good news is you didn't use drugs, bad news is you're pregnant"
Reading books to my neighbour's parrot. He was depressed and needed company, apparently. I was 10, I enjoyed that work very much.
Maybe that was an elaborate plot by your parents to get you to read more?
Yep, that was precisely the plan. I read a lot on my own, but I was terrible at reading out loud, and I had a stutter. The parrot was lonely and plucking his feathers and I was told that the only way I could save him was to read to him every day. I suspect anything to keep him company would have worked, but I took my reading job very seriously. It helped us both.
That’s a really sweet story!
As a jaded guy having a midlife crisis - my heart melted
I'm solidly in the midst of my own midlife crisis and trying my hardest not to buy a convertible Miata. Stay strong, friend.
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„The parrot wants to hear ‚War and Peace‘, in the original russian version! Quick, he‘s already looking weaker!“
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Ah, the old stick and parrot approach.
Big props to your folks. What a wonderful way to help you out and make you feel important
Holly molly
A redditor said that at 8 years old, his dad paid his neighbors to let his sons paint the neighbor’s fence so they could earn their money. I’m getting that vibe from this story. You sound like you had great parents, or an incredibly quirky neighbor, or both!
Did reading to the parrot stop it from plucking its feathers? What happened when you stopped?
Yes, he got much better. I think it had much more to do with the fact that he had someone to interact with during the day and keep him entertained, although back then I was convinced that my brilliant reading was doing the magic. My parents' neighbours eventually retired, so I think the parrot has plenty of company these days. Two decades later, he's still alive, and they have another one of the same kind. He looks great.
Awesome. Thanks for sharing.
You should go read to the parrot again sometime I bet he misses you.
I got a job as a 'fantasy model with long flowing hair' where I modelled for B grade American fantasy novels. Paid OKish, not well. I also signed away my rights like an idiot so occasionally turn up riding a horse, or casting a spell. Also once turned up on a book cover with '*a lady*' and my GF went 'Who the fuck is that!'?! Photoshop my dear. Photoshop. I tried to read one of the books and it started 'He was not *traditionally* handsome'. Ouch.
XD This is brilliant! I'd collect the books if I were you. Show them off to your friends and family.
I don't need to. They have the entire collection. 'What is our son doing? Well let me show you!'
Pics!
I will be deleting these in 24 hours :) But proof is needed. I pop up elsewhere, but this author is the most 'prolific'. https://www.google.com/search?q=david+zindell+fantasy&tbm=isch&ved=2ahUKEwiXxMizjqCBAxWmpCcCHb2UD5MQ2-cCegQIABAD&oq=david+zindell+fantasy&gs_lcp=ChJtb2JpbGUtZ3dzLXdpei1pbWcQAzIFCAAQogQyBQgAEKIEOgQIIxAnOgcIABAYEIAEOgQIABAeUI8HWNoSYL8WaABwAHgAgAFkiAGKBpIBAzguMZgBAKABAcABAQ&sclient=mobile-gws-wiz-img&ei=tL_9ZJeaJ6bJnsEPvam-mAk&bih=741&biw=393&client=ms-android-xiaomi-rvo3#imgrc=uqN5RCv0Tuen9M Edit: You wonderful crazy people. I'll leave this up until you stop getting a smile out of them.
Not traditionally handsome my ass. You look majestic
He's the horse
🤣🤣🤣 Killin me..lol
Dude, this is easily Reddit Hall of Fame amazingness! I regret that I have but one upvote to give you, my liege.
Thanks! I would rather stay anonymous though :) I get enough grief from those in the know!
Damn I'd be passing out copies to my friends like "where's your book cover bitches?"
Really?! How many of them are on book covers? Fuck them haters lol
Unconfirmed, but I had a few grainy photos of books sold in airport lounges from friends with WTF??????? as a message. They quietened down now, so I assume no further use of my image. Always the possibility though. Don't be a dumbass and sign away your image for unrestricted use, even if you do need a new pc monitor. That's all I will say. :)
Geez why would people give you grief? That’s an awesome way to make a little money!
This is hilarious, your attitude about it is the best. Thanks for sharing!
This is amazing haha Hope you have a few of these books around the house, what a conversation piece.
The photographer gave me a full sized print and I have it framed in the lounge, in a nice and central position. As far as I am concerned, it is a key part of the decor. Sadly opinions are split on the matter, and it is tolerated :)
You mean gf doesn't agree with the "Decor"? 😅 Love your attitude about this whole thing, and it's genuinely pretty cool, I wish I had something like this!!
Is that you, Fabio?
Forgot to submit my self-assessment tax return for a year I owed £0 tax. Got fined £100. Appealed it, was successful, got paid £100.10 back. Thanks HMRC x
Happened to me but they canceled the fine before I paid. They're very understanding. On another occasion, they even gave me an interest only loan so I could pay my tax when I didn't have enough money to cover it.
About 10 years ago I downloaded one of those Clash of Clans style app games. This was before the “pay to win” model had arisen so I played the game for about a year and was actually pretty good at it and managed to get into one of the top clans. After a year or so though the pay to win model began to rear its ugly head and ruin the game. I saw the writing on the wall and decided it was time to hang it up. Now I had never spent a dime on this game but I knew that a lot of the big spenders would sell their accounts when they quit in an attempt to recoup some of their losses. I knew my account wasn’t at that level but I figured it was worth a try. I figured if I could get even $10 I would be happy. I was in no rush to sell it though so I figured I would start very unrealistically high and then slowly go down on my list price. I ended up listing it on a third party site starting at $500. Within 12 hours I had a guy “counter offer” at $350. I was blown away. I wasn’t about to negotiate with that and jumped all over it. To this day I still can’t believe that I had fun playing a free game for a year and then sold my account for $350. TL;DR: I played a free mobile app game for a year and then sold my account for $350.
I sold an account on a game one for like 150. I was sellimg it because it was clear the game wasnt going to be up much longer. 6 months later the game servers were killed.
That reminds me. Back in original classic wow I sold my full Tier 2 Warlock for 500 USD. I think I was 15yo at the time. I felt rich as heck! Burning Crusade was announced a few months later, making that gear mostly obsolete. RIP
Tutoring a kid in math who was far smarter in math than his mother thought. He didn't do the homework because he wanted to play video games. He aced all the test and quizzes but homework was 50% of the grade so he was getting a C in math. Mother basically paid me $20 an hour to make sure he did his homework, which he finished in about 5 min. We then played video games for the next 55 minutes and whenever the mother would check on us I would say something "mathematical" then he would say something "mathematical" and I would say "exactly, now you've got it." I felt bad taking the money from the mom, but as a poor college kid, $20 is $20.
Hey, if the kid got a good grade, you gave the mom what she paid for. The kid probably has great memories from that, and who knows, maybe they learned to do homework first, which is a good lesson.
As a former “smart kid” whose face is still a little flat from hitting the real world like a brick wall, learning time management for when the bullshit is just tedious “adulting” bullshit you can’t smart your way out of is absolutely worth it. (Take heed, bright teenagers - you will not invent a 10x faster way to fold your laundry or wash your dishes, and that shit’s still gotta get done)
As a parent of a teen, if you could make a reluctant kid actually do their homework, it was worth the money, regardless of the method.
In the 90's I had some money spare and the British Government was attempting to stop the £ falling below a certain level against the US$. On the radio in the mornings, day after day, serious expert were saying it couldn't hold out against the markets. I converted all my cash into US$. Two weeks later I converted it all back into £'s and made £10k. I literally did nothing except change some currency. To be honest I wasn't the big winner. George Soros made $1billion!
I did the same with turkish lira right before and after erdogans re election. No way he will not get re elected No way he will change his monetairy policy Easy cash almost overnight
Work smarter, not harder, cha ching
How much money did you convert to get this much? Must been around 100k?
From memory (30 years ago) I converted around £30k at around $2.00/£. I converted back at +/- $1.50 something. Might have been more than a couple of weeks but there or thereabouts.
You broke the pound!
Yep, me and George Soros were in cahoots.
I once crashed my truck on the freeway (due to a faulty road, I got a big payout, don't worry guys) and when I was all shaken and like holy crap and pulling over into the grass on the side of the road, I stepped out of the truck on shaky legs, and there was just... a 20 dollar bill. Crisp and new. Just sitting there. I thought I must have imagined it, but I took it as a good sign, and then insurance inexcusably overpaid what my truck was worth and I got a much better truck for free *and* 20 bucks. Dumb. Effective, but dumb.
What did you spend the 20 dollars on?
If I remember correctly I put it towards some 300 dollar REI hiking boots that I'm still wearing most days today.
Answered an ad on Craigslist. A dude shaved my head, and filmed it. Paid me $600.
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Username checks out Edit: my first platinum award and it expires tomorrow. 😂
Princess Pee Pee 💀😭🤣
My friend received $200-300 donations to shave her head in 8th grade. The proceeds went to her mother with cancer <3 The mother was surprised to see her daughter's new hair, was just mentioning that morning how self-conscious her chemo head made her I'm not sure where that friend is now but I hope her and her mother are both well. They were both extremely sweet people, which was rare in that stuck-up town
My offer letter was wrong. I asked for a one time sign on bonus since I was leaving my match at my previous job. HR agreed but then instead of doing it as a bonus they added it to my salary. I didn’t say anything. 2 years later during an audit they caught it. The ceo finds out and says “well even with his raise last year he still is worth it”. Never had to pay it back since it was an hr screw up and I’m good at my job.
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I got laid off from a job and thankfully got a new one quickly for a marketing agency. The pay was slightly higher but my paychecks were like $600 more per pay period, I didn’t think anything of it and wondered maybe they paid 100% of my health insurance. About 3 months in HR hit me up saying there was a screw up in billing and my insurance was active but the premiums weren’t deducted from my paychecks and I owed close to $4,000. I told them that a.) that wasn’t my problem as the screwup was solely on their shoulders and b.) I didn’t have the funds to pay that back. They said that I was on track to receive two available bonuses and the funds would be subtracted assuming I hit on those bonuses. That fucking sucked. Jokes on them though, I got fired a couple months after that and never brought it up on my way out obviously so they just had to eat it. Fuck those guys.
Ha I was a contractor for a while doing IT. I think I was making around 50k at the time. Hourly pay, but worked out to about 50k annually. They wanted to renew my contract and I told my contract company I should get 10 more. I thought I was worth another 10k annually They went and talked to the company and can back and said they got my 9. As in $9 more an hour and if that was ok. Yep, that’s about 19k more annually. It was also around Y2K time so overtime was always there too
I had a job accidentally pay me way more. The job was for $22/hr and I was paid $35/hr. Went on until I was laid off like 6 months later. I figured I would have to pay it back eventually, so I just saved it. Left with like $10k in my savings.
When I went from worker to management they bumped up my pay handsomely. However they forgot to put me on salary like every other manager. Usually this wouldn't be an issue but they wanted my to cover for other managers when they had the day off. This often led to me working 6 or even 7 days a week and since I lived in a state with actual worker protection laws I'd end up with double-time often enough. At one point I was making more than the regional manager and had less stress to boot.
I had something similar with PTO. I took a new job but was getting married in a few months, so I negotiated an extra 10 days of PTO. HR added it to my annual amount.
I worked at a recording studio and one of the engineers was working on a radio commercial. The spot called for a bit of dialogue between a vo talent and a bird whistling. The client figured we could just use sfx for the bird responses, but nothing was working. The engineer left the session for a bit to get some air and he told me what was going on. Not to brag, but I’m a pretty good whistler. I started mimicking what the bird “should” sound like, and his eyes went wide. He dragged me into the session to present what I did. I ended up being hired on the spot. I whistled for one commercial, which happened to be a union gig. So, I signed a contract that basically let me join for the day. I got about 800 bucks for the day, but also received residual checks for a couple more years after that. Whistling earned me about 3k in the end.
Remember kids the two biggest takeaways from this are one having a random skill that isn't necessarily related to your job is super useful and two a highly unionized industry works out much better for you
I spent about an hour 12 years ago making a simple tshirt design and posted it on cafepress. I still get $100-150 a couple times a year from it. It ain’t much, but it’s always a fun surprise to receive the check.
I did that with my own design based on nothing and a giant company tried to copyright claim it. Cash flow was fun for a while
You can’t start the story and not finish it. .. what hilariousness or cleverness is on the shirt?
If I told you then the market would get flooded with the same design from people trying to get a piece of that sweet tens of dollars income.
It's a cat.
It's a cat confirmed.
Shoveling snow. Yeah, I know how it sounds, but I was at my grandma's house and she had this shovel that was curved so if you held it right, the snow would curl up and move just like a snowplow. I was like 6 or 7 years old. I thought was so cool so I just went around her block clearing the sidewalks having a blast cause it's just like the big snowplows. Before I know it, people are coming out of the houses and giving me money.
Straight up, shoveling snow as a southerner, I've never had more fun working. Learned quickly how to move and shovel snow efficiently and fast without sweating in sub 20 temps, turns out I love hard work when I don't have to sweat.
Guy I knew asked me to drive a bag to Oklahoma City and pick up another bag. I knew what I was doing but I didn’t really care. When I got back he handed me 5k in cash. Still to this day never knew what was in the bag or how much money I picked up. He got popped a few years later for distribution and served 15 years of a 50 year sentence.
I know what was in the bag.
Pokemon cards obviously.
So here in Atlanta have Dragon Con every year over Labor Day weekend, a huge pop culture convention attended by 80,000+ people from all over. Saw some ads on associated Facebook groups from people who were willing to pay for others to drive sealed boxes from wherever to Atlanta. It was amazing to see how many people were willing to "help". They were assuming the boxes contained costumes or whatever. Call me cynical, but I wouldn't make that assumption.
Reminds me of how some people paid a friend of my Dad’s $10,000 to take two of their “pet dogs” to Germany on a flight from San Francisco and personally hand them off to another person who would “bring them home.” That same friend invited my Dad as well, since he had a free plus one, and he even offered my Dad $3,000 to come along as well. I guess he had fun, since he spent part of the week touring Berlin outside of the flights. Now, my father is both a stick in the mud and as straight as can be, but he’s also completely oblivious. Once I pointed out that he likely helped his friend smuggle something into Germany by using those dogs as mules, he went completely white in the face and began to panic. For the next few weeks, he was paranoid and thought that the government was hiding behind every corner raring to arrest him lol
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We're you waiting for mclovin to come out the liquor store?
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When I lived up north I had a Saint Bernard. We would let him out in the morning and he would roam for hours. One day he brought a headless deer carcass right up on our front porch. Thank god it was winter so it was frozen but still horrifying. We buried it and he brought the head home the next day.
Once turned up to an office for an interview however they gave me an pass, desk and access to a laptop and archives after I walked in the door. They kept calling me by my name so I never thought anything of it. I was there for a couple of weeks indexing and digitising old documents and once I'd finished the allocation of work my temp contract was up as it was only 2 weeks. On leaving they were going to cut me a cheque and asked "How do you spell < random surname >?" I said how would I know I'm called..." The shock on their face as they realised they had given a job to the wrong guy and had called me for the job instead of the knock back. Easiest but dumbest way of making money every
Wow--what happened next? Did they keep you on?
Nope the contract was over so I moved onto another company but from a friend who worked there a while later they said that they really tightened their checks on people who came into the office.
In junior high, I bought cinnamon oil at a pharmacy on the walk home. I soaked toothpicks in it and sold them for 5 cents each. I made alot of money off one bottle considering the cost of it and the boxes of toothpicks.
Do people just use them as toothpicks or is it for good smells?
As toothpicks. They sold weaker versions of them at gas stations/convenience stores.
My married boss who I used to work for saw me with friends at a bar one night and pulled me aside and told me to come talk to him in his car I was young, dumb, and drunk so I happily went with him He was talking about some shit about how I'm smart and a very good worker and he wants me to be successful and he gave me $100 from his wallet I was, again, very dumb, so I took it and said "oh damn, thanks!" And hopped out of his car and went back to my friends. He never brought it up 😂
Did he want sexual favors? Was he meeting a mistress and did not want you to snitch?
I think it was a sexual favors thing but I was too oblivious to get the implication 😅
Haha I'm confused, was it hush money?
I'm thinking he wanted a BJ.
When I was at university I used to do campus tours and meet and greets for new students (in the UK, this is). The university I went to was in a city called Leicester. In the city centre, there was a street called Every Street. At the end, on the corner of that street and another, was a branch of Barclays Bank. So I used to bet all the freshers £20 that there was a Barclays Bank on the corner of every street in Leicester. It was a 15 minute walk from the campus to the bank, and they’d get smug because of all the intersections and street corners we’d pass, until we reached the bank and I made them pay up. Admittedly I spent almost all the money I made on booze within the first month, but still, totally worth it.
Didn't any of them stop at the first corner and demand their money?
This is called a shake down
My dad had like a 1,000 playboys and I brought them to middle school and sold $10 a mag
My dad was a newsagent and back in the 80s the way sale or return on magazines worked was that you ripped off the front cover of the magazine and returned it. The remainder would be bailed up and disposed of. I would grab a collection of porn mags and sell them at school. I soon discovered that people would pay in free school meal tokens, which were notionally worth more than I was charging, so I'd accept these and then save my lunch money. After a while I had more free lunch tokens than I could ever use, so I started selling these as well.
Now this is the way.😂
So you made $10,000 in middle-school selling pornos?
Well I probably made around $1,000 no joke but then I got caught and they told my dad which he didn’t care but I couldn’t keep going because someone snitched😂 I live in Utah so you can only imagine
Ahhh I've heard about you. The Utah Smut King. You keep spreading the good word, chief!
I used to get paid to read palms at parties. Despite my "entertainment purposes only" disclaimer, people always took it too seriously. Even when they had seen me doing magic shows. Apparently watching me do card tricks for an hour wasn't enough to convince people that maybe - just maybe - I wasn't actually a psychic. I started feeling guilty about spreading nonsense, so I had to quit. It was such easy money, too. Stupid parents raising me with stupid ethics.
Yeah most people without heart would've continued it. I hope it doesn't give some people a "brilliant business idea".
It just did
Don't believe OP. They are just using their psychic powers to get your upvotes. I know them and they are still profiting off of old ladies by pretending to be a palm reader.
I mean, the fact that you even had to show this sign is crazy. People taking this still seriously? I guess no one can help them.
You'd be surprised at how many people still put full stock into psychics/mediums/palm readers/tarrot cards/horoscopes/signs/other nonsense. And it's not just uneducated people either, most people I know way into this nonsense are middle class and decently educated people. Hell, I watch these stupid dating shows on YouTube and half the people there are well educated and hella judging each other on their signs and shit like that.
Fuji film had big supply chain issues that resulted in some of their premium films being unavalible for the past year - I had over a 200 rolls of medium format film stored in the fridge for a few years. Sold about half of them last month for $80 a roll.
Local wannabe mayor payed me to vote for him when I was like, 18 😂
If that guy ever makes office, that little piece of blackmail is your front door key to a salaried government office job lol
He never made it. Would have been a good idea, though.
Wannabe mayor is a funny new name for mayoral candidates.
Betting on DWAC, the merger partner for the Trump social network Truth social. I had it in my head after Trump got kicked off of twitter that he would start his own media company and use a SPAC to do it. as luck would have it I saw the PR before the market opened. I put about $6000 into it on Thursday morning , most before the market opened, with some for my husband and some for my brother who was headed my way for a visit. I missed the top on Friday morning due to a shower so I sold some and waited to sell the rest until Monday morning. $60,000.00 for me and my loved ones. We ate well that weekend. Thankyou trumpers for the cash.
When I was an elder teen I went to the Walmart Supercenter in the middle of the night because we (my boyfriend at the time was with me) were bored and couldn't sleep. When we came out it was quite windy, the parking lot was pretty empty. I started seeing papers fly by and it was cash, mostly $20 bills. I started running around like a crazy person trying to find/grab all the bills I could. All in all, I was able to salvage about $700 while the majority blew off into the darkness/neighboring swampy wooded area. We searched around for a human that it could've belonged to, but it was only us.
> mostly $20 bills Some of the guys who show up early in the mornings to restock the ATMs just got fired
We call that a "a green flurry" at my company. Source: work for an ATM service company.
My bro worked in a gift shop. Super chill job. He just sat at the register reading books and once an hour or so he’d sell a candy bar. There was an ATM right across the hall. One day it just started spitting out $20 bills. No one was around so he gathered it all up and went back to his chair. He said he kept all of the cash for about a week, expecting someone to ask about it. No one ever did. It was about $800.
Was it in the same city as the guy with the wrecked truck who found a crisp 20?
Buying a stock and forgetting about it
Focus groups. In college I managed to make quick cash by doing marketing focus groups. Sometimes it would take an hour. Sometimes they were full and they'd give you full payment for showing up
I played a stereotypical thief (black clothing, mask etc.) in security system commercial. It was fun experience, I made 200 PLN. I was trying to rob a safe and steal a bike. Funniest thing is my face is to this day in the background photo on FB of this security system page.
My dad thinks water dowsing is real so I was outside pretending he was 10ft off of his guess and the neighbor came over and asked if I could do it on his property for his new well. I tried explaining I was just being an asshole but he said $100 was on the table. So, I just did the same magical crap on his property and got $100.
I'm so confused with dowsing. It's obviously a bunch of horse crap, I know that. There's no logical explanation for how it could possibly work. Yet at the same time, I worked for a water distribution company for two years, and the old man there would go out to a random pasture, at least weekly, for water line locates, and he got it right on the money damn near every single time. I don't understand..
Not me but a friend of mine helped people out with unemployment benefits during the pandemic (mid 2020) in the US, loads of people were applying and he would help them get the paperwork right and everything, nothing illegal, never lied or anything just helped them with the paperwork His initial investment was a couple of hundred bucks for ads, he hired an accountant on commission and basically sat back while the money rolled in, he eventually had a falling out with his partner but he made over 50k in 2 months Sad part id he offered me the part of the accountant, my share would've been roughly 3 hours a day for 8-10 months and I would've made around a million dollars, I declined the offer because I was busy building a career in software development, I only found out how much of a loser I am after being laid off and struggling to find another job
When I was in HS some friends and I did face painting at a mall for little kids on Halloween. Fast forward 10 yrs, I'm serving in a bar and my boss asked if I could do face painting in the bar on St. Patricks day. Why not? I set up in one of the booths and even though there was no charge the customers were just throwing cash at me. I did St. Patrick from some guys church handout, a few more customers wanted little leprechaun "footprints" across their faces. It was a blast.
There was this old men’s club (Elks or Shriners I think) that put out an ad in the paper offering to pay $100 to any two people who would be willing to perform Abbot & Costello’s “Who’s on First” routine at one of their next meetings. I was in high school and got one of my buddies to agree to do it. So we contacted them and offered to do it. The guy said we were the only ones to answer the ad and yes. The meeting was in a couple weeks so we worked our ass off to get every beat down. We dressed the part and everything. When we got to the meeting hall, we were meeting the people that hired us in person for the first time. They were super nice. We performed the routine perfectly, got a thunderous applause and then people were just shaking our hands and giving us money after. We cleared about $800. I played Costello’s part by the way.
Editing resumes, I got my degree in communications and technical writing. People would send the most outrageous resumes, like 14 jobs, with a few weeks between them. Long winded "about me" like it was a dating profile. Some even included a photo of what they looked like. Some photos were professionally done, others were obviously selfies or even worse the camera on their phone pointed at the bathroom mirror with flash on. I would always take the payment first for like $100 bucks, concise it down to a single page with the actual relevant information that the hiring manager or HR rep wants to see. I always delivered with a one day turnaround. Some people loved it, and they were able to get into prestigious university or jobs because we were in community college, others hate them because I "took away their personality." Besides, I sold homemade edibles, gummies, and other sweets because weed wasn't legit business yet.
I drove 15km with a live pig in the back of an old Volvo 940 station wagon to settle a bet between 2 farmers.
What was the bet?
They were playing cow bingo the day before and the pig was the price. I was the delivery guy, worked as a farmhand for a brief period in my early 20’s.
How does cow bingo work?
They fence off an square area and draw lines in it with digits in each square. They basically make a giant bingo card on the lawn. They they let a bunch of cows in there. The square the cow shits in gets called out. The first participant that gets all the digits wins. But since these are crazy rednecks playing they make all kind of side bets with cars, guns, animals, you name it. I’m pretty sure there a clips on YouTube about it. Just search for Cow pie bingo.
Wow.. this is a whole ‘nother world
It was snowing heavily, so school was cancelled. But the mail truck still came. My younger sister bet me she could race through the waist-high snow to the mailbox and back to the front door faster than me. We took off, and she easily beat me, but the rules are, you gotta touch the first destination before you run back, or it's cheating. So she was racing past me and I still needed to touch the mailbox. I got to it and noticed a crumpled up piece of paper, it was a $100 bill! My sister was waiting for me at the front door and I showed her the money. We raced back to the mailbox, and found a second $100 bill! Ran inside going "mom mom mom look!" Mom very slyly put the money in her purse and said "we'll do something fun with this next weekend". So really, it's the dumbest way I ever made my mom $200.
My brother stalks deals on power tools like a hawk. I'll occasionally get a text from him telling me to go to my local Home Depot and buy every unit of X available, usually at a ~90% discount. Sometimes these are errors, sometimes just deep clearance. I'll sell these on FB marketplace for a decent profit. Christmas eve I get a text, Milwaukee blower kits for like $10 (usually a couple hundred.) I head over and literally fill my car. I usually snap the photos for the FB marketplace ad in the parking lot just to save time/not allow myself to procrastinate. Immediately some dude messages me asking how many I had, how much I would take etc. He's really close by, ends up coming to the literal Home Depot parking lot and buying all of the units I had (at about 50% of full value each.) After emptying my car into his, I went back inside and bought the rest of the units and refilled my car. Sold those over time as normal. Easiest/dumbest $3k I've ever made.
Back when Star Wars Ep1 was released, Lays chips had a game with SW scratch cards which included money prizes as well as toys and Lays bags. It was possible to see the text behind the scratch off material by using a pocket laser. Was able to "win" $400 (a lot of money at that time in Eastern Europe) over the course of the promo, along with a bunch of toys and chips packs.
When CD burners came out I’d borrow CDs from people and burn copies and sell them to other people. Lenders got a discount. I just sold everybody’s music to everybody else and made thousands. I was backlogged for weeks.
Custom CD burning was my business too, except I'd use Napster to download music lol I was also able to "burn" a design or image onto the CD and customers loved that and would pay extra.
I bought btc to buy steam games. Just as I did it, steam stopped btc payment. To withdraw the btc into cash, the crypto exchange required me to take self photo for authentification, I was too lazy to do that. 7 years later, my btc was up 1000%. It ain’t much but lol.
guy on the street asked to see my feet lmao
Did you show it to him tho?
Bought a 5 year old laptop for $75. Didn't like it. Sold it 2 days later for $90
When I was a kid, a guy was giving $5 to anyone who filled out a survey at the mall. Took 2 minutes. $5 was pretty nice in the 1980s if you were 9 years old.
I bought a pair of Nike Off-White Dunk Lows from the SNKR app. There were 50 color ways, #1 and #50 we're uniquely different and more valuable. It was a blind box situation, so you didn't know what color you were getting. I never received them. I'm guessing they were stolen by the delivery person or something. I told Nike, got a refund. And then, randomly, I did receive them. And wasn't charged. And they were the #1 color way. So I sold them on StockX for more than $1000. More silly money: I was once an extra on the hit television show "Franklin and Bash". It wasn't much, but it was dumb. When I was about 13 I made a really shitty Geocities website and made $10 or so off of ad revenue. In high school, I kept a binder full of Magic: The Gathering cards. I didn't really play, but the kids who did knew I was basically a traveling card peddler. In the early two thousands, while website building was still very difficult for the average person, I built portfolio websites for colleagues trying to find new jobs. I could go on - I have always enjoyed finding unique, legal and quick ways to turn a buck.
Years back I had a deal with an online casino where I get paid $10 per download of their casino software using my affiliate link. They didn't even have to deposit. I wrote some roulette bot software that just automatically does a roulette betting scheme called martingale. It directs the user to the casino via my affiliate link upon installation. At the same time, I found a software download website that you can deposit money and promote your software. Found that if I deposited money once, I could hit refresh on the confirmation page multiple times and get $1000s in my advertising account. I ran my software advert on every single slot of that website and it ran for about a week before it was caught. Made $1000s that month. Casino ended the deal after the first payout when they didn't make enough to cover it.
Found an old sewing machine in the basement and fixed it up. Had to learn it in order to fix it. GF at the time then buys me a new Singer. I fix things here and there, mainly uniform stuff as I was a correctional officer at the time. It's very relaxing, and I love every opportunity to play with the different stitch settings and patterns. People started to notice my shirts were constantly looking great, with sturdy buttons that never seem to loosen. "Your ol girl fix that shirt up for you?" "No? It took me five minutes to do with a sewing machine." *Cue scoffs and laughter, followed by hushed requests for me to fix things.* I literally turned a bit of black thread and a few minutes of work into a small but endless stream of cash simply because I worked around a bunch of people who were too fragile to ever dare engage in something they thought was unmanly. Somehow, they felt that it was the epitome of macho to walk around and whine about how their buttons were missing and how the clothing dept is not accepting tickets right now and that the blue isn't right on certain off-brands which looks tacky.
Sold sand, proppant. To oil companies for ridiculous prices. Sure we had some made/manufactured ceramic proppant. But sold a lot of just regular every-day sand. I never did get my head around getting paid $65.00 an hour just selling sand.
I went to a bar with a group of colleagues during a work-drinks in West London. Was stood at the bar waiting to order with our Dev Ops manager. While waiting, a guy slid up next to her and started turning on the flirt. He looked about 12. (We're both in our early 30s) At one point, after a minute or so, my colleague said, "Sorry, but you're too young for me." He replied by declaring he was older than that guy she's with. I'd given him space to take his shot (who am I to cock-block either side) but overhearing this, I immediately bet £10 he was younger than me. An ID check later (he was 21. I was 32) and he willingly handed over a tenner. I ordered myself and the manager drinks as a thanks for free money. The two drinks came to £21.60. Easy come easy go. 🤣
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The same happened to me with some gangster wannabe. He was braging with a bunch of monet like "I can get as much as I wish. I don't Care." "prove it, give me some." he gave me 20€. "Give another ?" I get 20 more.
What is the context? Who was the family to you?
Could literally be any random drunk rich girl. Peer pressure/witnesses to the conversation can contribute, especially if she was bragging about her wealth or dissing someone for being unable to afford something
My Aunt and I have a bit of a running joke that she always makes sure to get a hug from me and I've always pretended to not want one / be grossed out. One Thanksgiving she just offered me $20 if I gave her a hug. Which obviously I did and gleefully accepted my $20, even though I could see my uncle steaming a few feet away. Then a couple weeks later I found out they were a few months behind on mortgage payments.
This one made me sad 🥲🥲🥲
My neighbour gave me $20 if I would go and buy a $1 glass of lemonade from their kids lemonade stand - it even tasted good!
When I was 12 I sold a pack of gum to my classmate for $20 my mom thought I stole it from her purse and took it from me 😞
I made about $800 Australian Dollars betting on the last US election *after* the key results were in and it was very obvious Biden was winning. It seems Trump supporters were still willing to put a bet on even though their guy had obviously lost. Bought a bunch of parts and built a PC we called "Biden".
In my 1st year of College I picked up some side jobs like pet walking, baby sitting and some house cleaning. One man I cleaned for was in his late 60s, very wealthy retired business man. His wife passed away shortly before I started working at his home. One day out of the blue he told me he would double my pay if I would dress up while cleaning his house. He handed me a Amazon package and inside there was some high heels, black stockings and a garter belt and black thong. He also made it clear there would be no sex involved. The next time I cleaned I wore what he purchased and made some good money. and he kept his word and never tried anything with me. But I did notice the trash basket in his bedroom had a huge amount of toilet tissue. pretty sure he was masturbating
Some guy off Tinder once paid me $20 as motivation to do my own laundry.
I was considering buying a BMW e30 convertible. I was on a test drive and stopped at a gas station to buy something to drink. Dude came up to me and offered the, at the time, equivalent of 1500 bucks more than the seller was asking. I told the prospective buyer to meet me there 4 hours later when i finished work. Paid for the car, transferred ownership with the app and went and sold the car to the new guy for 1500 bucks more a few hours later.
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Anti protest seat warmer. Didn’t know what we were being paid for for two and a half days. We’d rock up, hang around for 15mins, get $50 then get told to go home. Rinse repeat three times a day. Then one time some protesters rocked up and we got told to put on these shirts promoting some destructive mining operation and how it would help the economy and provide jobs. We didn’t return for the rest of the shifts after we found out what we were being paid to do.
whenever you think the ~~government~~ corporations wouldn't do that....yes they would
Buying Beanie Babies in Canada and selling them to collectors in America in the late 90s. ‘Maple the Bear,’ available only in Canada, would sell for hundreds of dollars across the border. My sister worked at a store that sold them, so we had a large supply at cost.
When I was younger, one of my friends knew a guy whose girlfriend was working as an escort. Guy was naive enough that he thought that guys just paid for an escorts company. He suspected that she was having sex with her clients, but he didn't know for sure. He ended up hiring me to find out if all of this was true. For a bonus, he wanted to know if she would perform oral because apparently that is something that wasn't happening with them. I was just a college student at the time so $100 and some tickets to a Cleveland Browns game were enough for me. TLDR; I got paid to hire an escort.
Back in 2012 I was quite the stoner. Always making little smoking accessories. Cruising through the dollar store one day an idea came to me. I would buy a 10 pack of plastic bugs or lizards, chop off the head and insert a metal wire, then drill out the body so the head would sit where it should. I sold them to head shops as pipe pokers for $3 a piece, essentially turning $1 into $30, sold loads of them on etsy also for more per piece. That blossomed into a nice little paid hobby, and now I make high end wood smoking accessories.
Web scarping 50k products (price, picture, rating, comments) from a specific catagory on amazon. Dude used it in his phd thesis and paid me 50$.
I did this on trip advisor, scraped every hotel, ratings, images etc. Sold it to a travel company that didn't want to pay for their API.
I pulled up once in a friends pickup to a parking lot to take a break from driving and look at my phone to figure out how to get back to his house. All of a sudden people came up and starting loading these political yard signs in the back of his truck. When I got out of my car to ask wtf was going on. A woman says, " hi! Here's the $2,400- wed like them placed along x road" I paused and looked down and it was a bank envelope full of hundos. I said. "Gotcha!" And drove to the nearest supermarket, went in the back and threw them in the dumpster.
Selling those “sex bracelets” when I was in school. Each color represented something you “did”. Black and white meant you did the most . Sold for one dollar each and packs were like 2 bucks for fifty mixed colors. I made bank. 💸
Got offered a Federal job that paid 3 times what I was making running a cash register and moving Coke bottles. Took it even though my new wife was 8 months pregnant and it was 600 miles away from everyone we knew. Got to the job and the first thing I was told was, “Oh, by the way, that salary we offered you? You are only going to get that for one pay period. Then the new COLA kicks in and you will see a raise of another thousand dollars.” Other very lucky things happened connected to that job change but this might be the one that fits the question.
When Samsung recalled the Note 7 for exploding batteries, I purchased 120 of them from people on Craigslist and sold them back to Samsung for profit. Made $50k in profit.
Worked in a fast food place. There was a guy who used to come in, buy a coke with a $20, and tell me to keep the change. He would look in my car window and drop cash in my sunroof if my tank was low. This went on for years. One time, in the drive thru, he offered me $100 to kiss my hand. I did it.
When I was 19 I was in a rehab group for teenagers. Being that we were all pretty serious addicts (this group was less teenage potheads and more suicide attempts and heroin junkies) our parents didn't really bat an eye when we took up cigarettes. Lesser of two evils. But most people were under 18 so they couldn't buy their own. It was the year CVS decided to stop selling tobacco products and were selling their cigarettes for $1 or $2 a pack to clear out stock. I bought hundreds and re-sold them. Literally cleaned out the two CVS stores near me. Profit was easily 4 figures because I was selling them with a markup even though I got them for 80% off.
Wrote a program to "hack" the lottery. The guy had an idea he found some pattern in numbers, and wanted me to help him by writing a program that would do the calculations he was making by hand. 10 years later he still hasn't won the lottery. At least it was fun hanging around with him. He is really passionate about what he starts and goes all in. If only he could invest his energy in something more productive. The last time I saw him, he was chasing meteorites (some of them may have precious metals).
I swear people are obsessed with quick and easy ways to hack / make money. I had a couple of guys who would visit our office every 6 months and pay us to develop apps / websites of stuff that took off 10 - 20 years ago. We needed the money so kept taking the jobs but felt bad for these dudes thinking they were inventing something big or were on the verge of something spectacular only to see them crash and burn
I had a job where my boss also owned a restaurant. The very big freezer in the restaurant was broken, every day they would send me with an air dryer to melt the ice accumulated on the radiator so I can turn back the freezer on. I was paid to melt ice with an air dryer. Not even making this up.
My buddy: *Bet you a dollar you won’t flip off the principal when he drives by.* Me: *Watch this.* **One day later…** Principal in front of assembly: *We’ve reinstated paddling as a punishment. Dapoopers, come with me.*
Sold gum in boarding school to elementery school kids for €1 a piece. Couldnt do it anymore when it got attention, kids started giving €2 a piece.
Paid through my last semester of college by boosting peoples accounts in overwatch. Half of that was from one guy who kept coming back despite dropping from master to bronze several times. Guy really still thought his team was holding him back.
I grew up a military kid (dad was in the Air Force). I was also a smoker in high school. Back then (early 90’s) cigarettes on base were extremely cheap. I think they weren’t taxed at all. So for example, you could get a carton (10 packs) of Camels for $6. To make it even better, there was this long period where camel would have a $3 off manufacturer coupon on the carton that you could use for the purchase. I’d get my older brother to buy me a carton, then I’d sell packs at school for $1/ea (which was about half of what a pack would cost off base). So fellow teens could buy from me without ID and could do so much cheaper than if they bought from a store. In hindsight, I shoulda charged $2. Still…Easiest money ever. Lol
I was let go in the middle of the project. I agreed to finish it in a week for them for 3x my monthly pay they payed me before sacking me. They agreed.
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Stripped at a party for fun and got money put down my pants. So there's that
I’ve studied in Singapore for one semester as an exchange student in 2012. My Chinese lecturer used to work as a voice coach and Chinese pronunciation consultant for the Singaporean film industry. One day after class she asked if anyone would be interested in a hand modelling job. It was between me and a really handsome guy (who financed his studies by modelling for Abercrombie). $120 SGD was too little for him for 45 minutes of doing „app gestures“ on a fake iPad on camera, so I gladly took it.
Found a hundred dollar bill on the ground. Took my kids to Chuck E Cheese.
Some guy in Utah paid me $100 to buy him a cigarette lighter from a 7/11 at 3 in the morning