Nice Work if You Can Get It

During the last summer I was was writing my dissertation, I took a variety of short-term temping jobs to stave off financial ruin. I’d spent previous summers temping (and writing about temping), and I typically found myself with the usual assignments inside a glass office tower, where I’d play Minesweeper and nod off for months at a time. This time, though, I really needed to finish my degree, so I explained to the agency that I was only interested in leaving the apartment twice a week. As a result, the offers I received consisted almost exclusively of single-day assignments or spot work that lasted a few hours at most.

The ad hoc-kery of the system worked well for my writing schedule, but it also satisfied the side of me that wanted to do weird things for money. One morning, for example, I was asked to rush out to the Mall of America and fix defective purse clasps with needle-nose pliers for half a day. The project only took 45 minutes, but I earned four hours’ pay. I still rank that day among my life’s greatest financial accomplishments.

Another job involved making an appearance at a stockbroker’s lunch, where I was paid to pretend to work for a San Diego-based company that was marketing a fantastic new device for heart surgery. An actual representative from that company was on hand to push his overlords’ stock, but my job was to lend the impression that this company was wealthy and caring enough to send a young and talentless man in a suit to collect business cards from brokers. In preparation for the only acting gig of my life, I memorized a few street names from San Diego just in case anyone asked where in the city I lived, and then I watched a room full of white guys oversalt their steaks and listen to a half-hour rap about angioplasty. I earned $150 for this.

Anyhow, all this is a preface to the fact that lately, I’ve been doing a little bit of freelance editing and writing — mostly to fund my corrosive drug habits subsidize various home improvement projects and to pay for my dog’s new knee. Part of this involves trawling freelancing sites for small jobs that require little effort but pay reasonably well for the time commitment. Some of the posted projects are genuinely interesting. This summer, for example, I’ll be writing content for a K-12 educational website about historical figures like Charlie Chaplin, Ernest Hemingway, and Sigmund Freud.

Others projects — which the unreconstructed temp worker in me is really compelled to pursue — are simply bizarre. Here’s one:

We need someone to write 100 unique articles for a website all about toilets. We need articles about the following categories:

• Toilet Products
• Toilet Training
• Toilet Science

You will have a special login that will allow for you to post all of your articles right on the website. Each article must be unique content that might appeal to readers.

And then there’s the occasional opportunity to put my dormant Marxism to good use:

Looking for a ghost writer for my book and bring my ideas to life. Subject will cover why some people are rich and most are not. I will provide my general ideas. Writer must be able to take my ideas and expand on them.

I will be allowed 1-2 revisions. Book will be about 5.5″ x 8.5 and between 200 – 250 pages. More is better.

I suppose we might begin by pointing out that one way people become rich is by farming out their labor to others. I can’t imagine how I’d fill the other 199-249 pages, though. So I’ll have to pass.

And finally, there’s this effort to find someone to turn a broad concept and plot into a detailed, humorous script for an animated short.

The basics: Crazy chimps are trying to break out of the zoo. They never get far, but cause problems for all. A group of Orangoutangs think they’re better than the chimps. Two elephants have a love/hate relationship. And a street-wise Squirrel is the go-to man. People don’t know that the animals can talk — the animals all live double lives. A Giraffe thinks he is from the military.

At the moment we are only looking to produce a 4min trailer, a short story if you will. In the trailer we’re just looking for something along the lines of the chimps using the elephants to sneeze into a tree canon to blow the chimps over the wall. Instead the chimps go nowhere but get covered in snot.

Sounds great, but I’m afraid this one has been done: