Auctions
I think I've mentioned my schoolfriend B on this site before - possibly in the "cheap tat" QotW.

B is one of the most intelligent people I've ever met; this intelligence is manifested in terms of his fabulous business brain.

When we were at school, he used to go to auctions and buy job-lots of all kinds of things, which he'd then sell on at a profit. At one point, he had in his possession three photocopiers, three 3-piece suites, 20 liquid soap dispensers and - my favourite - 20 broken telephones.

He managed to sell them all on at a profit. Even the broken phones.

One day, he turned up at school in an incredibly old and barely-roadworthy ambulance, which he'd bought for £50, largely because it had a full Calorgas cannister in the back - which, of course, he sold separately.

Oh, yes - he once bought a derelict farm-building in France because (a) property prices in France were, at the time, comparatively low, and (b) because it had a rusting and siezed-up MG-B inside it that noone else seemed to want. One restoration job later...
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Fri 1 Aug 2008, 9:49, 3 replies)

Charity shop music
Not vinyl- they're wise to that and there are precious few bargains to be had. CD's however are a different story.

About a year ago I was killing time in a Cancer research shop. I'd already established that the small supply of vinyl was shitty, overpriced and for the most part fit only for Panto props. As such I was browsing through the CD section when I found a copy of "Do Androids dream of electronic beats" an Unklesounds mix album and something of a rariety. It was in very good condition and cost- £3. I already owned a copy of it but snapped up this one and popped it on Amazon market place where it sold in less than a day for £45.

Since then I spend a bit of time each month in charity shops and the occasional car boot, looking for CD's that are for whatever reason are rare and sought after (I do still look at vinyl but much of the good stuff is hoovered by the pro's long before we ever see it). The sort of profit I turned on that first album are the exceptions that prove the rule but if I find a copy of "Perfecto Fluro" in good nick in the big double box with the paper inlay still there and get it for less than a fiver, it generally clears another fiver on fleabay.

Christmas 2008 saw my friends and family get some good gifts paid for exclusively by selling CD's and one or two bits of electronics (Linn Kolecktor pre-amp in a charity shop in Marlowe for £30? Don't mind if I do). It isn't really a get rich quick scheme but it is profitable and challenging. Find a genre of music you know your onions on and get stuck in.

Course, if I find you on my patch they'll be trouble- you understand?
(Leonard Hatred briefly did some work on, Fri 1 Aug 2008, 9:36, 1 reply)

Get laid, get rich...
A friend of mine went on holiday and pulled. He stayed in touch with her and eventually they married. (This all happened a while back.)

I wonder whether the fact that she apparently comes from a family of multi-millionaires made any difference to his decision to propose?

I also wonder whether there was a pre-nup, and whether having these thoughts at all makes me a bad, cynical person?
(Gravity's Raincoat, Fri 1 Aug 2008, 9:32, 12 replies)

The easiest way to double your money
is to fold it in half.

I'm going a step further and quadrupling mine - I got £20 out of a fiver before I'd even had my cornflakes this morning.
( crackhouseceilidhband Fuck off back to Mumsnet, Fri 1 Aug 2008, 9:00, 3 replies)

i was
So desperate I got a job as one of those salesmen that walk around town and into shops businesses and pubs selling "quality" licencened products. It was horrible over a course of the massive 3 days I worked with them I got paid (commission only) €250 quid which covered the rent and electricity. wow easy money etc etc but you feel like scum interrupting families having meals people in shops and other places that made you feel just dirty.

Plus I paid in fake 10 euro notes in Dublin and was told to go into some old granny shop and ask for change to get rid of them (I just ripped them up instead cause I’m gonna have enough trouble staying out of Hull for my sins already) and had to go selling knives in Limerick (Irelands stab central) shitting it walking down back streets asking people if they wanted knifes. In the end I told them a relation had received a punishment beating in Nordy Land and had to go up and see him and I never returned.

Seen them a few times around towns since and I’m so happy I'm not one of them.

Stay away from ads saying earn 900 quid a week no experience required and fast growing marketing company. Sounds great, isn't

lennth? 3 days like good tantra
(Samantha Bricks Better half done a poo on, Fri 1 Aug 2008, 8:56, 2 replies)

Darth Vader
Darth, you're often made out to be the ultimate bad guy, yet not once did we hear of you being in it for the money (yes I'm looking at you Han Solo, and ok you joined the alliance in the end but that was really for the poontang wasn't it? And your so-called mate Lando, he was only in Bespin for the profits really and even then he sold you out to keep his moneymaking schemes protected)

Poor, misunderstood Darth.

There was no massive safe featured anywhere in any of the death star plans. No planet 'MBNA IV' where you kept your stash.

You had all of those stormtroopers to feed, the construction workers to pay, not forgetting the investment required in water filtration and waste management. Yet you never heard your guys complain about facilities, condition or pay.

All of those guns to buy, ships to build - and you built massive ships Darth - not forgetting your constant reinvestment into developing technologies. You kept your men in the very best of equipment which surely would go some way to saving their lives in the line of duty. A noble thing indeed.

Hell, your own outfit, which you wore for years, didn't have pockets; not even a place to keep an egg card, and you even stuck with the old trusted lightsaber you had as a young adult.

Even as second in command in the universe you didn't employ any servants. Why have someone there just to fetch you what you need when a wave of the hand or the odd mind trick can save on such unecessary overheads?

Sure, you were brutal, but you didn't waste money on unecessary PR, press conferences, spin and such like. You just did what you did using your own resourcefulness.

The planets that you ruled were pretty well kept. You didn't see them being stripped of their natural resources, nor did you ever heard Mon Mothma talk about it as a reason to remove you from power.

Sure, there were taxes, people had to be kept in line from time to time. Yet it was never for personal financial gain, you had a universe to rule and taxes helped maintain the status quo and standard of living. OK, there were victims. There always are. Collateral damage we call it now.

I mean though, you didn't even have your own TV network to brainwash the masses with, nor did you luncheon with other leading businessfolk in the universe and do contras to line their pockets and keep you in power.

You were just a simple guy who wanted to rule the universe whilst maintaining your Sith belief system.


Poor misunderstood you, Darth. The evilest bad guy ever.

Whilst here on earth we vote in Blair and Bush who do much worse than you ever did.
(Heyzeus, Fri 1 Aug 2008, 8:48, 3 replies)

Simple but effective
Picture the scene: two eager young school children, somewhere near the top of the playground heirachy, are on the bus on the way to school. All is normal, we sit next to each other and share a pair of headphones listening to a mixtape on our walkman consisting mainly of Kevin Bloody Wilson and old Tupac records.

We were cool - we had style and good taste and everyone knew us for this. We started many a trend in school ranging from what music was 'in' to what were the fun games to play at lunch. Life was good. Only on this fateful morning, the walkman that was our lifeblood on the bus decided to rebel against our cool and stopped working. Balls.

Now both being 14 and having no job - an infinite amount of cool did not equal an infinite amount of money, and we NEEDED a new walkman. We couldn't ask our parents as we knew they would say no - so we drummed up this absolutely legendary money making scheme.

We decided to both go our separate ways and ask EVERY PERSON WE SAW if we could borrow 20p. Now, 20p is not a lot of money, so who would want it back? Most people would tell us to keep it, and, for those that wanted it back - we would have ample to be able to repay that person and still have money. It's a guarunteed get rich quick scheme and there is no way it can fail!

So off we trotted and slowly but surely our pockets grew and grew and grew, I personally must have asked around 100 people and every single person had 20p. I had £20 in my pocket and had not done a single thing to earn it! Score! (Much like now I guess where I am being paid to post this! - oh the irony.)

Eventually, people started to cotton on what was happening here - but rather than people refusing to give us the money, they actually offered us more! One girl (Simone Tye - you foxy bitch) gave us a fiver toward the cause and some others chipped in a quid.

At the end of the day when we tallied how much we had, it totalled around £70!!! We were minted - we felt great knowing that we had all this cash and knowing that our plan worked. Que us walking into Argos with a HUGE stack of change and buying a really snazzy walkman and back to oozing cool again. Tupac had never sounded better.

This plan was so simple it was genius - and also extremely effective. It was only whilst listening to our awesome new walkman we realised that there is a term for this technique of making money. Begging.

So to finish, a tip for beggars - if you ask for 20p, not just for "any change" you may just get enough cash to be able to buy yourself a walkman too - I will even provide the mixtape as a reward.
(Spangulum nailing your mother since 1824, Fri 1 Aug 2008, 8:38, 2 replies)

be female
get a big old pair of fake plastic tits

pose naked

sleep with some "celebrities"

profit
(Halfy By light alone, Fri 1 Aug 2008, 8:16, 1 reply)

Erm, that phone number doesn't work
For the next month I have free international dialing..I dialed my brother, mums boyfriend, a few other people back in England etc.
I just tried dialling the number above and it basically said "fuck off, you can't dial that number".
( Batshitmentalist is sane for once, Fri 1 Aug 2008, 8:02, 4 replies)

Post an ad on Gumtree...
...and wait for the offers to roll in:

belfast.gumtree.com/belfast/65/26888865.html
(nathanielle_jones, Fri 1 Aug 2008, 6:03, 3 replies)

Ahhh, love. Blind, ignorant love.
My dad was on the phone to an associate of his two days ago - the conversation turned my brain into porridge (he put the phone on speaker so I could hear).

So, it seems that his friend, (who is a gun owning, fundamentalist christian, numerologist guy who tells weird tales about things that he has supposedly done), has met a girl online!

They are in love, and soon to be married.

A good thing too, because after the sudden death of her parents recently, she stands to inherit a great sum of money, but only after she is married.

Where is she from? Oh, Nigeria originally, but now she is living in London.

So anyway, they are in love, and soon to be wed! All she needs is $20,000 in order to pay for the processing fees and legal bills on the funds transfer. He's sent $3500 already (this guy is broke, I hate to think that he borrowed the cash), and now he just needs to raise another $16,500. (hint hint)

Yes.. So... He just needs the extra money (hint) and can get a huge sum in return. Just needs... that extra money. (hint hint hint).

Dad told him that he should talk to a bank about getting a loan, surely with the security of the $8,000,000 he would have no problem securing the money from a bank.

I was pretty much in shock after hearing this. Dad tried to tell him `it's a scam.. It's the Nigerian money scam'. But was repeatedly ignored.

Someone is getting rich quick off this. How could he not know about the Nigerian scams? You type `nigeria money' into google and it's everywhere.
(Tomble Underground, overground, Tombling free., Fri 1 Aug 2008, 3:56, 3 replies)

It's really quite easy
Just PayPal me 20 dollars, and in return I'll tell you how you can get clueless suckers to send you their money.
(oball needs Satan more than he needs me, Fri 1 Aug 2008, 3:26, 1 reply)

Online Texas Hold 'em
Easy one this except it takes an initial outlay.

Sign up for 5 accounts with an online gambling site then sign it from 5 different machines, the odds of winning get much better when you are getting dealt 10 cards compared to the other suckers 2 card draw.

I now have this down to a fine art where I am sat with 3 laptops and two desktops all logged in and make about £30 a night on the bigger money tables.

If they ever ask I live in a house share so that's why all those different accounts connect from the same address.

Seems to be working so far and reading the rules isn't even a problem :-)

BDC
(bill, Fri 1 Aug 2008, 2:29, 4 replies)

Stripping
I did this for a couple of years at the turn of the millenium.

Learn a few dance routines, and get your nob out on a regular basis. Plus you get paid decent money for it and get more than your fair share of nudie fun and shenanigans with whoever tickles your tastebuds.

I never felt demeaned or exploited once, you need to be working call centres or minimum wage to really know what exploitation is.

I should also mention the staying in shape thing is really really really hard.
(magic the cat will someone please think of the kittens, Fri 1 Aug 2008, 1:51, 1 reply)

Try This
.

Set-up two bank accounts in your own name. For one account, tell them that you're starting your own business and that you'll be trading as DVD SALES.

Advertise in a few national newspapers selling 10, 2 - hour porn DVDs for £20. The hottest hard-core DVDs ever to hit Britain. Then wait for the orders to roll in with cheques made payable to DVD SALES.

Then you toddle off to the bank and cash the cheques. And while you're there you change the name of your second account to TA (Trading As) ANAL SEX AND FROTTAGE CLUB. Wait the few days it takes for your new cheque book to come through and then write to all of your customers explaining that, due to unprecedented demand, you can't fulfil their order and enclose a cheque, made payable to them, for their £20. Made out from the ANAL SEX AND FROTTAGE CLUB.

90% of them won't cash it as they couldn't stand the embarrassment of presenting it to the bank.

Go to pub.


Cheers
( Legless Mister Stabby - shanks for the memory, Fri 1 Aug 2008, 1:19, 8 replies)

Dodgy insurance
About six years ago, I partook in a bit of dodgy insurance wrangling, which ended up netting me just shy of $NZD8000. It was an elaborate, sneaky scheme and it took about three months of planning and a further three for the claim to be accepted and paid out, but it was worth it in the end.
Probably the easiest $8000 I'll ever earn, but undoubtably the most stressful. I am reluctant to post the story as you never know who's watching *paranoia* but if you're THAT interested in how I did it, message me and I'll tell you.
(dhroadie, Fri 1 Aug 2008, 0:50, 2 replies)

Sell advertising space. That's it.
You'll be a coke-snorting, arrogant, lying, flash ten-a-penny cunt in no time.
( routine has perfected burgers, Fri 1 Aug 2008, 0:13, 2 replies)

How I singulalrly failed to become rich via adult movies.
When I was a younger Monkey (merely a viscount instead of a Lord, and no i wasn't covered in chocolate and slightly minty...well only a sunday..but I digress) I was skint, severly skint, and unemployed in the holidays.

How could I go out with my happy non-student friends who all had cars, jobs and £100 shirts, whilst i was relying on shanks pony, the genorosity of said friends to drive me around and wearing the classic early to mid 90's designer label Canda?

Even worse I had no money for weed, by that I mean none at all, and was relegated to scrounging fags off the barmaids at the loacl.

So how could I turn my life around? earn some ready cash, and live the golden life that my friends were living with their trips to that top night spot, The Zone in the thriving bustling town of Rotherham where the nights out were so legendary that is was like someone had taken St. Tropez or Monte Carlo and placed it in South Yorkshire.

And the women, oh the Rotherham women were legendary, their intellect and their beauty were out of this world and something beautiful to behold.

I wanted, no needed to be part of this golden world, this hectic social whirl of the beautiful people, and to do that I needed money for my smirnoff, money for the club, money for the kebab and money for the taxi.

But where would this money come from?

How could I get rich quick?


How indeed?

I thought about selling my brothers kidney, but he wouldn't stay still long enough for me to cut it out of him.

I tried to sell old vinyl to charity shops, before an old dear pointed out that they didn't pay for stuff being donated, so that plan ceased.

I thought about busking, but as I can't play an instrument or indeed sing that was a non starter, and as I have an irrational fear of mime artists I couldn't pretend to not be able to get out of an invisible box (I might have suffocated and as no-one could see the box, how could they find the lid?)

Until idly browsing through an old Readers Wives there it was, the answer to all my problems, 'Would you like to Earn £££££' in the classified section.

Men wanted for adult movies.

Well, I put my cock away and my magazine in my bag(which was lucky really as my Mum brought me a cup of tea in afterwards) and plotted my entry into adult entertainment.

I liked sex then, and still like it now, and with the arrogance of youth I thought I was pretty damn good, and why the hell not get paid for doing something you like?

What to call myself? Porn Stars always have cool names, so in the end I went for Rocky Studman, having discarded names like Stud Studley, Chuck Monkey and simply 'The Legend'.

There was a number for me to ring (this was back before every home had an internet, and beleive it or not kids I didn't even have a mobile) so I rang the number, was asked to create a mailbox and profile, and also say where I was from, and then 'Local filmakers' would check my box, and leave a message if they wanted me.

So I did, Rocky Studman was there, willing to do everything and anything to willing females, like martini, any time, any place anywhere! And I really felt I could do well in these films, after all i'd had a lot of solo practice over the years.

and I waited......

and waited...

and waited....

and waited......

every day i would trudge up to the phone box, feed it inordinate amounts of money to check my messages and every day the same.

Nothing, nada, zilch, not one reply, no-one checked out my proflie, or if they did they didn't want Rocky Studman, and so thats where it ended.

A career in adult movies ended before it had begun, there was obviously no Kubrick, Spielberg or indeed Walt Disney of the adult world, willing to take a chance on an eager young unknown. And belive I was still practising, as if training for a marathon, ready for my big break.

In the end I got a job on minimum wage cleaning tables at a motorway service station, the adult entertainment industries loss was the service industries gain, and i never did make my money.


Length? just think if someone had answered my profile you could have been watching it on some DVD now....
(Lord Monkey of Yorkshire,OBE killed a gipsy on...., Fri 1 Aug 2008, 0:01, 2 replies)

It all started with the best of intentions
Doesn't it always. I soon descended into stark, raving madness.

I work for a large company. Huge company in fact. One group in my office has to time their weekly meeting so that people in India *and* America can join in as well.

We write financial software to do financially type things and someone came up with a great idea. "Let's put on a fake trading session based on Euro 2008 and let employees use our own software to buy or sell shares in teams and they can win or lose money based on the trades they make." Dangling the football based gambling carrot would in theory make us all understand the software we sell inside out.

But I didn't care about that. It was the chance to gamble on football but not in some primitive way down at the bookies. This was a proper trading simulation! It would be all, "Buy Germany, they never give up. Sell Portugual, prima donnas!" etc. Long before the trading was to start I was totally gripped by the romance of the combination of two of my great joys: football and capitalism.

But the thing was, I didn't have a clue about trading. I work on market risk which is all about analysing the results of trading once all the deals have been done. I thought to myself, I don't know how to use this software, I don't know what I'm doing. I'll get screwed over by these fancy arbitrageurs* with their automated deal placing programs. Well this is capitalism, I should stick to my strengths. Maybe I don't know anything about trading but I do know about market risk. I know, I'll write a small program. Nothing fancy, it'll just be able to enter some trades e.g. bought 100 shares in The Netherlands at 6.7 cents, and give me the possible payoffs for various outcomes.

But then it started. For every little bit of functionality I added to my program my eyes glazed over more and more. I could see myself running simulations based on past results (or as we call it in the business, historical value-at-risk). I could run random simulations based on probabilities of teams' strengths and weaknesses and the scheduled matches they were due to play (Monte-Carlo value-at-risk). I could add a positions sheet to take care of multiple trades in the same team and show my total exposure. I could generate best and worst case scenarios. I could knock up a shiny drag-and-drop GUI. I could...

...

And so I did

Screenshot of my stupid, over the top Euro 2008 program

I could picture all the money rolling in as I took sensible positions in all the teams based on my program minimising my total risk.

Unfortunately for me it was about halfway through the Euro 2008 tournament before I realised that not only was I losing money because of some shocking decisions (spending over £10 backing France. I mean, France for fuck's sake, they finished bottom of the group of death!) but I had wasted so many nights labouring over this pile of shite program. And it was useless. All it could do well was tell me exactly how much money I was losing inbetween trading sessions.

Thankfully the insanity faded as I realised how much time was wasted, and ultimately, time is most important resource you can own. In a flash of inspiration I but the keyboard down and stopped trying to add that last bit of killer functionality that was going to turn it around and make me all my money back. I did a quick calculation that closing all my positions would leave me guaranteed in the red but only by a meagre £20.

After doing so I finally got my life back, I could relax and watch the football simply for the sake of it.

So in an attempt to show what a crazy, get-rick-quick opportunist can do with a compiler and some caffeine, ladies and gentleman b3tans, I give you my Euro 2008 program**.

You will find it comes with no documentation nor user manual but that's ok as it doesn't actually fucking do anything. However, as with all free programs, if you do download and find it entertains in anyway please consider contributing a click to the general upkeep of the poor mental b3tan responsible.

* - an arbitrageur is someone who exploits internal contradictions in the pricing of financial instruments to place multiple trades which will make a guaranteed, 100% risk free profit, or, more formally, a bastard.

** - Microsoft .Net v2.0 may need to be installed to get this working. You have my word it's not a virus or anything dodgy.
( djtrialprice, Thu 31 Jul 2008, 23:58, 5 replies)

Hmmm
I started a website, asked people to contribute sick jokes then dared to sell them all back to them in a book!

fnar
(Jimmy Large Is huffing Jenkem on, Thu 31 Jul 2008, 23:57, Reply)

Call Centre Rounds
In my call centre days, I met so many people doing this it explains a lot about customer services.

1. Via a temp agency, find a call-centre job with a half-decent company (e.g. telecoms or banks, no cold-call selling). This should be easy.

2. Attend 2-3 week training course for company x. This will inevitably be the easiest thing in the world - just daydream at £6.20 an hour.

3. Start the job. Do everything you can to be utterly useless. Avoid sitting at your desk as much as possible. Dodge calls all the time. Walk around aimlessly. Believe me, you have to go a long way to be worse than some of the people who work there. Take the absolute piss. The avoidance of work can make a rubbish job into an exciting game.

4. Eventually, probably after about a month, your contract will be cancelled. There will be no bad rep as the company will not want to go through that process, and you'll just get a standard reference. You may find, as with some places, that you become a permanent member of staff and that there is no reward whatsoever for actually doing any work, and everybody is doing the same.

5. If asked not to come in monday, return to step 1, hopefully with the same agency. Now you have call centre experience and should have the pick of call centre jobs, despite the fact you're utterly useless to any employer.

Repeat. Get paid £6.20 an hour for continuously doing fuck all, half of it sitting through training courses.

It's not quick money, but it works, as long as you're never tempted to lift a finger, because the jobs are as rubbish as you would think.
(meepmeep is, Thu 31 Jul 2008, 23:41, 1 reply)

Become a singer!
I can only speak for the North-East circuit but you can earn up to £175 a night four nights a week for 90 mins of atonal warbling.

Even after buying my own PA I was making profit within 3 weeks, it's mental.

Length......90 mins plus two more.
(allyourbasekris Hotdog, Jumping Frog, Alberquerque, Thu 31 Jul 2008, 23:34, Reply)

How not to do it
My pay day was today. I was going to invest pretty much all my wages back into one of the shiny products in our shop, except the bastards have paid me for less than half of the hours I've worked this month. Wankers!
Moral of the story: failed to get paid, failed to make my post fully appropriate to the question = fail overall.
(Robbish is twitching & salivating like with myxomatosis, Thu 31 Jul 2008, 23:22, 1 reply)

Resign!
Oddly enough the only time I made a stupid amount of money was the time I resigned at exactly the right time to receive a company bonus plus holiday pay from the old job (I had untaken hols cos I couldn't fucking afford to go anywhere). Paid handsomely for a festival, a number of other events and the 5 week period before I got paid for the new job. Given that I'd been at the old job 8 years and never even got a sniff of a bonus, this was indeed a pleasant surprise :)
( Whodathunkit, Thu 31 Jul 2008, 23:03, Reply)

PART THREE
My sister is a sucker for these schemes. She is always replying to the Get Rich Quick adds in papers etc.
Anyway, she ultimately fell for a real belter and lost a fair bit of cash.
The guys scam was brilliantly simple. He had adds in some horse-racing journals and a few tabloids, advertising his scheme that had made him rich, send a SAE for details... she sent off and got the info pack back, which was very glossy and full of photos of some guy posing next to a Ferrari, a Yacht, a big Mansion etc...the real millionaire dream.
He reckoned he had worked out a mathematical system to predict the winner of horse races! and now that his system had made him rich, he was willing to share the knowledge with those who subscribed to his scheme.
My sister signed up.
Signing up involved setting up a direct debit to pay the guy £100 per week. In return, you got a telephone number to call each day where you could listen to his recording telling you which race and which horse his system had picked as the most likely to win.
Off you went to the bookies to place your bet...
Thing is, his miraculous system just picked the favourite at various races each day, so you put your money on and maybe won a bit back, but the winnings were never startling.
The real winnings were being made by the guy raking in £100 per week for doing sod-all.
Just think about that for a minute - say if 100 people signed up...this should be an easilly achievable number nationwide, thats £10,000 a week rolling in to the guys account....10k a WEEK, thats half a million a year...nice work if you can get it.
(dave likes cheese, Thu 31 Jul 2008, 23:03, 5 replies)

PART TWO
When I was in my last year at school, a "clearance auction" was to be held in the local hotel. Flyers had been doing the rounds the week previously advertising big screen tellys for £50, cheap jewelry etc etc...a few friends and I went along for a look.
The place was MOBBED, everyone was standing in the room, rammed in like at a concert. The guy at the front with a microphone was whipping everyone up into a frenzy with his sales pitch and the odd sale of some electrical equipment at rediculously low prices to people in the crowd who were, to me anyway, obvious plants working for the guy.
within 20 minutes, the crowd were literally throwing their cash onto the stage in return for tokens which they exchanged for goods at the end of the event. He was literally being showered with ten and twenty pound notes, and his cronies were handing out tokens to those throwing their cash.
The guy wound down his speil, then him and his cronies went to work, unloading the "top brand products" from the back of their van. It was like scenes of food-aid drops to starving africans, the back of their Luton was beseiged by people desperate to get their purchases. Everything was dealt out very rapidly and the van left immediately at high speed.
The fall-out started within minutes, as people opened their boxes to find the cheapest shoddiest knock-off crap you could imagine. genuine top of the range Pentax cameras turned out to be plastic kids toy type affairs where most of the dials and buttons were just painted on. The big-screen tellies turned out to be geniune big tellies, but were a European format that isnt compatible with UK signals (pal / secam maybe? dunno) and most seemed to be damaged in some way.
The jewelry the women had been cawing over turned out to be the sort of gaudy plasic crap a 5-year old would wear.....Lots of people were very unhappy indeed.
I hadnt bought anything so found it all quite amusing, but a mate had bought a Sega Gamegear at a silly-cheap price, and was a tad upset to find the box contained the empty plastic casing of a game-gear.
(dave likes cheese, Thu 31 Jul 2008, 22:52, 2 replies)

PART ONE
Years back I worked as a shelf-monkey in a car parts shop. Some guy asked for help finding spark plugs or something. He told me he liked my sales style (!) and invited me to his house to see a presentation and make me an offer I couldnt refuse involving untold wealth.
I went round to see what the deal was. Unsurprisingly, it was a pyramid scheme selling cleaning products.
Got a free cup of coffee and biscuits, so it wasnt a total loss.
(dave likes cheese, Thu 31 Jul 2008, 22:39, Reply)

'Specialist' material
I wrote, self published and sold a book last year, catering to a very specific and secretive breed of nerds. Each copy yielded a massive profit margin and in five months I had put so much cash through my Paypal account that I had to prove I wasn't laundering money.

Not particularly quick, it took years to write, and not actually rich, it turns out the money laundering threshold is quite low. However, the money did come in very handy setting up my own business. 2nd edition comes out soon, and hopefully it will pay for a month in Japan.

Nice!
Oh, not very funny though... sorry. Also length etc.
(ManekiNeko loves horses, Thu 31 Jul 2008, 22:18, 4 replies)

Sadly
This QOTW will never apply to me. I got paid this morning - first pay cheque for a real job!! no longer a scummy student! Yay!

Until I found that the university are paying me as if I'm a scummy student (they'd got confused over which salary scale I was on, so put me on the lowest), and they are only paying me from the 14th, although my boss swore blind I'd be paid from the 1st. consequently, I've moved across the atlantic ocean, leaving my beloved mr vit c behind, to earn less than I would on the dole in the UK.

Not a happy bunny right now. Especially since although it will get sorted eventually, not until August 30th...
( ascorbate, Thu 31 Jul 2008, 22:13, 1 reply)