I was snoopy at a fair.

The job description said “must be 160 cm or shorter”. I am 161 cm. This one cm was felt for all the 6 hours.

I was also insanely hot and blind so at one point I started and kept dancing macarena to not pass out and stay awake. I kept getting phone calls for three years afterwards because they wanted me to work for them again. No way.

Back when I lived with my parents, I had an extended family member who worked in hospitality in Atlantic City. Normally her hotel doesn’t allow pets, but I guess this one guy was rich enough to be an exception to the rule, as he wanted to stay and gamble but had a new puppy that couldn’t be left alone. She made a social media post asking if anyone would be available to dog-sit for him last-minute. I was the first to reply.

I made several hundred dollars by sitting in a random hotel room and playing games on my computer while a sweet puppy slept on my lap. The man expected to be out late, but he came back early and still paid me for the full time.

It was awesome. I would do it again in a heartbeat.

Used to do the Amazon empty box scam, and sell the shipped replacements on eBay.

More recently I’d go through the bins in the barrio, find the clothes that had been left, wash them and sell them on Vinted.

Any electronics were tested and then cleaned and put on Wallapop.

Stacking firewood, the summer I was 13 years old. The guy said he’d pay me five bucks a cord, meaning that for every 8 foot section I stacked to four foot high, I got paid five dollars.

Had to bike about seven klicks down a back road every day, to get to a metal warehouse with a yard out back. They kept a log splitter and a conveyor belt set at an angle back there. Strange place, with an old cargo van converted into a flat bed rusting in the tall grass to the side. Their dog didn’t like me.

Hard, hot, heavy work. Firewood sections still slippery and dense from sapweight, and a pile that was liable to collapse if and when you pulled at the wrong piece. I was slow to start and did not improve over time. I believe I averaged about four or five cord a day, which is not bad for a thirteen year old if you ask me.

After a few days of stacking, I had a few rows finished and the pile was getting low. They started running the splitter and belt again, while I was picking firewood from the pile. Once they started that, I couldn’t keep up. This was partially due to the fact that I now had to approach the pile with one eye on the conveyor belt, to time things so that I didn’t get hit with falling pieces. They brought in some other guy one day, who lasted a few hours before getting hit in the hand by a falling piece of wood. I didn’t see him again.

First time I went to ask for my pay, the man counted out 25 five dollar bills and handed them over. He wasn’t lying - it was genuinely five bucks a cord. I was baffled at the time as to why the man would have that many low denomination bills - I learned much later on that he was basically laundering money from illicit sources through this operation, which explained a lot.

I stayed there for about a month and a half, ending my summer with about 500 dollars - enough to buy myself a snowboard with some help from my parents. Strange times.

Having my pets pose for chewy pics

Trading/selling music gear

I was messaging a guy on Grindr, and he asked if he could buy my socks — ie the socks that I had been wearing all day. I obliged. I made 30$ 😎

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Played pre-TV Tim Allen for a bit. Never got caught, but I did get robbed of a whole delivery once. Quit after that, too stressful.

I’m an artist. I was once commissioned to punt myself around a library on a ladder on wheels, while in drag while singing the One Pound Fish Very Very Nice song operatically.

If people looked game I hit them with my punting rod.

When I was maybe 13 years old my younger sister and I got paid to clear out trash from the home of a family friend who was a hoarder. This person had enough self-awareness to know it needed to be cleaned out, but didn’t have the spoons to do anything about it and so just gave us the keys and full reign while they spent a week traveling. We dealt with lots of old food, stacks of ancient newspapers and magazines, useless decades-old kitchen gadgets ordered from the Home Shopping Channel and never removed from the boxes, dead mice and their poop, that kind of thing.

In retrospect that was a huge health hazard to be irresponsibly throwing kids into, the job should have been done by a team of expensive trained adults with protective gear rather than two idiot children with some yellow kitchen gloves and lawn-sized trash bags, but we were happy enough for the pocket money at the time.

I designed a board game as a personal challenge and posted my notes online along the way. As the game got close to being finished a publisher messaged wanting to help finish and sell the game. Royalties were enough for a couple small family vacations. That experience really helped cement board gaming (and designing) as one of my core hobbies.

I can fit quarters and €2 coins in my nostrils. I used to have a drunkenness level that would prompt me to assert this at parties or bars, and then I’d obviously show people.

Nobody wants their coins back after that, but it’s not very lucrative and I shudder to think now about the diseases I tempted.

Got my first “real” job with a kind of mediator. Their customer wanted me for their project. I got my contract signed with the mediator as my employer. Then their customer was bought by someone and they cancelled their contract with the mediator about a day before I would’ve begun to work. I was already under contract though. The mediator tried to find another customer who could make use of my skills.

They failed to find one and had to let me go. But I was effectively employed by them for three weeks and got my first pay check literally doing nothing for it.

Nice try, IRS.