Getting Paid to Count Cars and Collect Worms

By Inpui.com Guest writer

If you stick around long enough, someone is going to offer to pay you to do a ridiculous job that you probably never knew there was a need to do. These types of jobs are usually never advertised like your more traditional jobs, but may be offered by an acquaintance or maybe posted on the bulletin board at your local supermarket.

Way back in either 1975 or 1976 when I was still going to high school and living under my parents roof I was approached by a local businessman and asked if I would be willing to spend an afternoon counting cars. At first I wondered to myself why would anyone waste 4 hours counting cars when you could use that time to do something much more interesting like watch TV or take a nap. The gentleman explained to me that he was thinking of opening up a restaurant on this certain street and wanted to know about how many cars passed by that spot every day. He was willing to pay me $20 for the count and all I had to do was sit outside in a lawn chair with a clipboard and paper and record every car that passed by in each direction.

Well, I was up to the challenge and accepted the job. It was so long ago that I can not remember how many cars passed from north to south and how many passed from south to north. I do remember it was a far lower number than I expected. I had imagined my total number would be in the thousands, but it turned out to only be in the hundreds. I do remember sitting in the hot sun and sweating while only one or two cars would pass by every 4 or 5 minutes. When my 4 hours of car-counting were up, I folded up my chair and turned in my tally to the man that hired me. He handed me the $20 as promised, told me thanks for the good work and we went our separate ways.

Months later I noticed the storefront he was considering for a new restaurant was still vacant. Apparently my honest but low count was so low that it discouraged him from locating a business where he had planned. His $20 spent doing a bit of informal market surveying probably saved him thousands of dollars in investing in a business that would probably have failed. I never did find out if he opened his restaurant somewhere else.

When I was even younger I had an even stranger job that I had fun doing. My father and a few of his friends liked to go fishing on the weekends or whenever they could find time and they "hired" me to collect worms for bait. I was charged with filling two Maxwell house tin coffee cans full of worms and for that job I was paid $1.00 per can. I think that worked out to about a penny per worm. It was such a great gig; I did that for the entire summer.

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