Ask Lemmy

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.

Nice try, IRS.

I created an open source image gallery (floating image) in my spare time. Some company (Archos) wanted to embed it into their products, but wanted me to add support for 3rd party hosts (I had Flickr, they wanted Google, photo bucket and others). I earned about €3000 on the work and my project got better for it. Not completely unheard of, but probably the most unusual way I have made extra money.

Had the only printer in my dorm room of about 70 rooms and charged just slightly less than the university did per page so naturally people printed with my printer. Made some scripts that hooked into google cloud print to log users and had spreadsheet to track funds for users and send emails about what was printed and how much funds they had left. I made mony only because people forgot they had extra funds when they moved out and never asked to get it back. Its not a lot but stil strange to me why I put so much effort into a very low profit business.

It wasn't much, but back in high school I basically worked as sort of a personal savings account for a couple weeks.

There was one dude I wasn't exactly friends with but we were friendly, never hung out or really talked outside of school, but otherwise were on pretty good terms. We often sat at the same lunch tables, had some mutual friends and such, talked and joked around between classes, etc.

He was also kind of an irresponsible druggie. Nice guy, wasn't out committing crimes or anything besides drug possession, just made a lot of dumb choices, came to school drunk, high or tripping balls a lot.

I kind of looked the part of a stoner back in high school- long hair, sort of a grungy style, listened to a lot of classic rock and metal, etc. so I was in a lot of the same circles as him, but I didn't drink or do drugs and it was also pretty well known that I was a reasonably smart, responsible, and honest dude.

So a few weeks out from senior prom, he realizes that he's going to need some money for whatever his post-prom plans were (I didn't ask, I figured it was probably better that I didn't know.) He also knew that he couldn't be trusted with his own money, he'd blow it on drugs or something else stupid.

So he asks if he can just give me money to hold onto, and I agreed. He'd hand me a few bucks here or there over the next couple weeks, whatever he didn't use from his lunch money or allowance or whatever, and I just held onto it.

But at the end of it, it added up to a pretty decent bit of money (by "high school kids 20 years ago" standards anyway, it was maybe around $100)

And the day before prom I gave it back to him and he let me keep I think $10 or $20 for my troubles.

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.

When I was 15 or so I was hired from an ad on Craigslist for photo editing - just basic touching up, but like a thousand or so photos. The caveat was - softcore porn. I didn't mind, money is money. My very Christian family who found out however - they did mind. My sister ended up finishing the editing for me.

When I was still in school, I was the computer nerd. A doctor in town, who's son was in my class, asked me to fix an annoyance he had with a software he used. He offered a generous compensation. It took me less than an hour to analyze and patch the program on the binary level. On a per hour base, I earned more money than he normally did...

Was working with IATSE setting up a stage for some band. The road crew forgot about us and we missed all our breaks over about three hours (starting almost immediately with our lunch break). There were four union workers just standing there having there contracts broken with ineptitude. We were all payed ~$900 each for watching other people work for three hours. Like, by the end of the third our I think we were getting quadruple time or something.

Unions are fucking awesome. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a de facto supporter of slavery, with extra steps.

Not that unusual, but I responded to an ad of an older dude looking for someone who'd go shopping for him. He couldn't get down the stairs easily anymore. But really, he just wanted someone to talk to. So I'd go to his place, grab the shopping list and money, walk across the street to the nearest supermarket and be back in 20 minutes. And then he'd often cook for me and tell me about his life, travels, the music he composed on his very old computer, stuff like that. I'd get paid for 3-4 hours of which 90% was just talking to this guy about electronic music.

Cleaning the underside of rich people's boats. I didn't have access to actual scuba gear so I would snorkel around disgusting harbors, holding my breath and scraping/scrubbing barnacles off by hand.

Wasn't bad money, but it was gross. People weren't supposed to release their sewage in the harbor. But they did. Thankfully only did that a couple times before finding much better work.

going to aldi with a pack of plastic cart buckles and stealing peoples quarters

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.

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.

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 (iirc) 30$ 😎

I was commuting back to home from the city where I was doing apprenticeship.

I sat next to an elderly lady who initiated a talk with me and soon has asked what i believed her subjects were she used to teach at school. I believe i got it wrong the first time but right on my second try and explained why i thought so.

After we noticed that we both lived/exited in the same village she offered me a price money and asked for my address so she could send it to me.

I know this sounds super suspicious and writing it makes me wonder why i have given her my address, but i was young and there are probably a lot of details i’m missing which would make it totally reasonable. Some days later i got an letter with 5 € attached :)

Others people responses seem way better then mine. I used to burn pirated cds and dvds back in middle and high school. I also used to sell answers to a couple seniors during algebra 2 when they were desperate to graduate. But as an adult other then selling drugs i also sucked a dick for 600 dollars. I also helped a gf sell photos before onlyfans. So none of that seems very unusual now adays.

Back when I was in 5th and 6th grade, I used to sell pens, pencils, erasers, pencil sharpeners, compass and many other items. It started mainly from me realizing that many people over there nonstop kept asking for spare pens, pencils etc. every day. Some even asked multiple times a day but it was less common. Hell, many didn't even return stuff I lend them. And I realized I was kinda being used. So, I created a new policy. If you want pens, pencils etc. from me, BUY IT! And at some point, I also realized that some products were a bit cheaper than the shops around my school (yeah, my school was a bit far from my home and I used to travel by bus). So I started buying the cheaper pens and selling them at a higher price at my school (basically at the same price as any other shop near my school).

Hell, I even sold chewing gum one day (which I got as a gift once) and made some money.

One thing I have learnt in life is that if people are in an emergency and they need a certain product extremely in the situation, and you're the only source at the moment they can get the product from, they will tryna get it even you overcharge them. I did overcharge some people who I had beef with 😹😹

In university I was into visual art, mostly drawing and photography. So I went to drawing class. At the end of semester the teacher proposed to us to be models for next semester and I took it. It was funny, just sitting or standing still for 2 hours 😁 Easy money.

Little less fun was when they was drawing nude body, so I was standing there in only my underwear 😅

And when they was drawing a caricature I asked them to draw me as a werewolf. One guy did and later donated his drawing to me. I still have it after all those years 😊

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.

Back in my early college years I worked with a buddy doing other people's online math homework. I'd generally get a few hundred bucks per each person's semester. It wasn't a ton of money but it was good to have for buying textbooks or weed.

Technically I didn't make money, I just got some money back. On multiple occasions, a few years after moving homes, the student housing company would suddenly pay back money that I apparently overpaid for gas and electricity. I'd get another email in which they'd apologize (again) and yeet another pile of money my way. It was usually something like 80-200 euros if I remember correctly. Truth is, I never really felt like I was paying much anyway. Compared to what I'm paying now it was absolutely nothing. But hey, I'll never say no to "free money" I guess...

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.

Having my pets pose for chewy pics

I used to get paid to roast people online, like Wendy's.

We got pretty famous locally, but never nationwide. And sales did increase from recognition, so that was nice.

Back then, people would cheer you on as you called a troll a moron.

But now, you call someone a moron, and they would review bomb you. Or worse, shoot up the place. The latter being a real thing, and fortunately, our place was empty. Apparently I struck a nerve.

Of course, the big brands are still immune to review bombs. But roast someone unhinged and them able to walk up to your storefront? Yeah...

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.

Sorting trash and recycling.

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.