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A Day in the Life
© Loco Nunca Enterprises.
All Rights Reserved.
I quit my last job at the end of the summer of 2003. I had been making seven dollars an hour working at a chain used bookstore in Texas and you don't need me to tell you how much that sucks. And it only gets worse the older you get. At nineteen you can work shitty jobs and get off on the fact that you're working a shitty job- it's cool cuz your future's so bright, you gotta wear shades, Fonzie, and this is just "before they were stars" fodder for future magazine interviews. And then one magic summer goes by and you realize this isn't just something you do; it's who you are. The defining characteristic of your miserable, lonely, pathetic, downloading-porn-and-crying-yourself-to-sleep-every-night-holding-the-pillow-like-it-was-a-person-who-could-love-someone-as-wretched-as-yourself life is being the guy who wears an ugly t-shirt with a store logo on it and doesn't even have time to think about doing something better because he's always at goddamn work. You start to see your future, the highlight of which will be coming home late at night with a prostitute who may in fact actually be a man, and you fear that you'll have to take solace in the cripplingly self-delusional myth of your own superiority to your work, your co-workers, and your customers, saying to yourself, "I am so much better than those people, the customers who read those bullshit books, not the great works of literature that I would create if only I had the energy after I get off to do more than smoke a joint and play Grand Theft Auto, so much better than the managers who are in their thirties and have sold out, believing that their job matters in exchange for an extra two dollars an hour, unlike me with my ultra-cool punk rock mentality and bald spot, yes!" And aloud you will say, "How much does it cost to pee in your mouth?" and the prostitute will look at you with pity and reply, "Fifty bucks," and you will hand over two wrinkled twenties and ask if, please, this favor can be done for forty dollars because it is all you have and the kindhearted whore will sigh and say, "All right, but I ain't gonna swallow," and you will realize that this will have to be enough. You will never even summon the energy to ask the girl with the club foot that comes in every Tuesday to sell used Star Trek paperbacks if she wants to come over to watch Battlestar: Galactica and you will die as though you had not lived at all. And this is an ironclad reality; every one of you who works one of those jobs at that age has this experience monthly. And so I quit mine.
In the years that followed, I've lived in normal apartments and eaten regular meals in both Austin and Chicago without sponging off parents or friends who actually work for a goddamn living. Not bad for someone with no education, no skills, and no experience. Here's what to do:
First off, Craigslist is your friend. Your best friend, the one you trust, the one who you know will not ever mention the fact that he saw your dick when you passed out naked and covered in vomit in Hailey Rankowski's bathtub. Go to the [etc] jobs section on the sire and start scouring. The word you're looking for is "study".
The biggest chunks of unearned money available to you are yours when you check yourself into an inpatient study at a clinical pharmaceutical research unit. The way these work is you sign up, get a free physical, pack your bags, and stay overnight for a set duration of time and take drugs. But don't get too excited, they're boring drugs. Cholesterol or high blood pressure or diabetes drugs, or maybe even cancer or AIDS. No, you don't have to have diabetes or cancer or AIDS, and no, they don't give you diabetes or cancer or AIDS. They're checking to see what the side effects are so they can have a calm-voiced narrator rattle them off at the end of a commercial in which happy people's lives are greatly improved by the drugs you got paid to take. These drug studies pay around two hundred dollars a day and they include a place to sleep and all your meals for the duration. They also last anywhere from a weekend to six weeks. According to my own unscientific research on the matter, a month is about the maximum amount of time that you can be in a clinical pharmaceutical research unit without losing your fucking mind. But you can repurchase your sanity with the roughly five grand that you'll get handed to you on your way out the door. PPD in Austin is the granddaddy of all CPRU's, but there's also Cedra, which has a branch in town and another in San Antonio, as well as Radiant in Dallas. If you feel like taking it on the road, there are also more in Madison, WI; Great Forks, ND; Princeton, NJ; Evansville, IN; and Waukegan, IL, all of which do anywhere from six to twenty studies a month, plus countless smaller clinics that do one or two. Some travel may be required, as there are "laws" that prevent people from doing too many studies in a certain period for reasons of "safety", but it's illegal for a facility to identify you in any way.
If you're a girl, another option is selling your eggs. They call it being an egg "donor", but let's be real- if you're going through the weeks of hormone therapy and the invasive surgery, you're not donating shit. You're in it for the six thousand bucks that some desperate couple in need of a child of your particular ethnicity is willing to pay. Most egg donors are recruited by ethnicity, maybe with hair or eye color thrown in the mix. On Craigslist, these'll say, "Jewish egg donor needed- dark hair- $6000" or "Half-Asian female needed to make family's dreams come true". If you fit the bill and don't plan on using all your eggs anyway, you can make the same amount of money this way that you would in half a year at your seven dollar an hour job.
The male equivalent of selling your eggs is being a sperm donor, and in that case it's more like a donation. You're gonna jerk off anyway, so why not do it in a cup where it'll be frozen until a couple lesbians decide to bear the fruit of your loins? It pays a hundred dollars a pop. The catch is that they usually want you to commit to providing them with six months worth of spunk ahead of time, your girlfriend will pretend not to be jealous but secretly freak out about you being some other lady's baby-daddy, and you have to have a bachelor's degree in order to prove that you're not spawning a bunch of retards. Hell- if you actually finished college, you wouldn't be in this position to begin with, right? You can lie, but some places really do investigate these things, and having to explain to a woman in a lab coat whom you've handed a cup of your own steaming jism for several weeks that you never actually went to Stanford means that this one should be reserved only for the educated or the shameless.
The absolute best bang for your buck in the free money arena is to do market research studies and focus groups. With these you have opinions. Professionally. You answer questions about things you don't care about and the answers you give are recorded and observed and measured carefully. Focus group pay between seventy-five and a hundred and fifty dollars an hour, and last up to three hours. If you're really lucky, you can pull in three hundred bucks in a little over two hours for talking about beer commercials or contact lens solution or Subway sandwiches or hip-hop or the fucking Internet.
The key to doing focus groups is lying. Not once you're in the study- once you're in, you're golden. Every word you say is taken to be indicative of at least a thousand people in the overall market, and if you say something stupid they'll just assume that you're speaking for the thousand idiots out there they're trying to get to buy their product. The lying comes when you're trying to get in.
First off, to get on the market research circuit, you have to elevate hitting F5 on Craigslist to the status of a full-time job. The whole point of this is to avoid a full-time job, I know, but at least with this one there's no one to look over your shoulder while you cruise MySpace for girls with low self-esteem. If a focus group's been up for more than three hours, it's already full. You'll apply for every one within a couple hours of where you live that comes up that doesn't expressly prohibit people like you- if it says "women with children under two" or "men with curly hair" and you don't fit the bill you can't fake your way out of it, but besides criteria like that feel free to ignore the concept of "truth" entirely. "Men who spend five hundred dollars a month on electronics"? Sure. "People who purchased a cell phone within the past three months"? Fine. If they can't physically verify that you're telling the truth, once you're in as long as you can bullshit some answers to some questions you'll be fine.
First you answer the ad. The ad will have a list of initial questions. Sometimes it won't tell you exactly what the study is for, so you have to learn to read between the lines. If it gives you a list of clothing brands and wants to know which you wear, you can guess based on whether or not they list more high-end or low-end brands if they want people who shop mostly at Target or mostly at Nordstrom's. Whatever it is they're looking for- you're that.
This can occasionally lead to ridiculous situations. I responded to an ad once looking for white kids who consider their lifestyles to be "urban". My phone rang ten minutes later and since we all know what "urban" means I told her that I listen to nothing but hip-hop, wear hip-hop brands, read nothing but hip-hop magazines, that I had a fucking Kangol on my head tilted to the side right as we spoke, that I was the slimmest, shadiest motherfucker in the city of Chicago. She explained that what they were really looking for were the white kids who were trendsetters in urban culture and could I explain to her what hip-hop meant to me and how important it was to my lifestyle. I started to answer but about halfway through I was filled with self-righteousness; I told her that hip-hop meant not trying to prove to some marketing person how hip-hop I was or not, that it means not trying to tell people what they want to hear in order to sit in a room full of white kids who think they're black so some company can find other ways to make these kids feel as though they're accessing something authentic when the very act of trying to do so makes it less real, that hip-hop is a moving force that is a real and genuine part of too many lives to be something that can be proven or disproven based on what clothes or magazines a person buys, that whatever my relationship with hip-hop was, she didn't have a damn clue about it.
After my monologue she told me that I was exactly what they were looking for. Some beer company was trying to market to white kids who believe they break the mold in living an urban lifestyle. I told her I didn't drink. We are unemployed, children, not prostitutes. Maintain your principles.
You'll into get maybe one out of every ten focus groups that you apply for. If you can average one a week you're working the system pretty well. Most companies have rules requiring that you not do more than one every six months, but that's just another quick lie. Most of them don't even have databases of previous volunteers or take much personal information- you get paid in cash- so you can do studies with the same company over and over again with no one the wiser.
What happens in the group itself depends on what the product you're focusing on is. There are usually eight to ten people in the room, and who they are will be determined by what they're looking at. If it's a focus group for people with minivans, it's you and a bunch of moms; if it's for the newspaper, it'll be a bunch of old people; if it's for bloggers with laptops, you'll be in a room with a bunch of fat virgins. And so forth. The focus group is the easy entry point for hopping on the free-money train- no commitment required. You don't have to be in good health, like you do for drug studies; you don't have to take hormones for six weeks, like with egg donation; you don't have to be college-educated and commit to six months like you do to be a sperm donor. The catch is that it's more or less impossible to get enough of them to live off of- it's supplementary income, and you have to combine it with something else to get by. But once you do, you can make it pretty easily.
One thing that becomes apparent when you start living without a job is how much you've been undervaluing your time. Even if you're not doing anything worthwhile with it- man, seven dollars for an hour? You can't even buy lunch with that shit. Also the other ways to score quick cash without working for it start to look like a bad deal. Why quick-fix it and sell your plasma when the return on that isn't usually much more than twenty-five dollars a pop? You can make that in twenty minutes when you do a focus group without having to lay on a cot with a needle in your arm next to a toothless yokel who's scrambling to afford Hamburger Helper. It starts to feel like it's beneath your dignity. Very little is actually beneath your dignity. Just, you know, getting a fucking job.