Get Rich Quick!

Is any ad more enticing than Get Rich Quick?
Maybe lose 25 pounds overnight while you get rich quick!

I work daily online Sudoku and jigsaw puzzles. Often there are ads in the sidebars of these sites. One of them shows a smiling woman holding a paycheck with the headline: Google Pays Me $173 An Hour! Beneath her photo it says "Google has blessed me with a $5000 at home job" and indicates I should click on the arrow to find out how. No offense to Google, a search engine that I love and use daily, but I ain't agonna click that arrow!

While I always knew that if something sounds too good to be true, it probably isn't, I've tried a few enterprises that didn't work as I had envisioned. Many years ago, I sold Avon. Avon is a good company with fine products that I still use. My stint with Avon was back when they assigned an area to you. They tried to find one close to your own neighborhood, but if Susie down the street was assigned your block and the three streets either side of you, you really weren't supposed to cut into her territory. My area was two miles away, but it was an area that I knew fairly well. Door to door sales were hard work and this is back when more women were likely to be home during the day. Within a few months I began to worry about one customer who bought from every single campaign (26 per year) while her house was falling down around her. I suppose she bought from someone else after me, and if she lived on into the 90's, she probably discovered home shopping on TV. I'm not putting that down, I sometimes buy from QVC, but this woman was my eye witness account of someone with a shopping addiction. The decision to hang up my Avon brochures came when I fell off of two icy porches in one day. I was hoping to become pregnant back then and falling scared me.

My next venture came when I answered an ad in a church bulletin. I could be paid for crocheting in my own home! I could do this! The boys were little and I liked to crochet or knit while they napped or in the evening. I picked up the purse pattern and yarn. I thought the purse was butt ugly and the yarn wasn't much better. It was horrible to work with as it tended to split. After a few days worth of work, logging my hours per my husband's suggestion, I realized that I would be making about 19 cents an hour per purse. I'd rather make something I like and give it away than this, so I hung up my crochet hook.

Told ya it wasn't pretty!

One year I helped a friend at a craft show. I didn't have items for sale, but I knew the cost of her supplies and hours spent on her items. Some shoppers forget that the comments they make to one another can be heard by the vendor who may be standing closer to them than their friend. Some made incredibly rude comments while others just showed they didn't understand what they were looking at. If the quality of the raw material isn't recognized, much less the time spent on silk ribbon embroidery, smocking and garment construction, they will feel justified in saying "I could make that for $5". An appropriate response was not "No you couldn't, you moron!" so I knew I wasn't cut out for this either.

A good friend and her sister, often known by family and friends as Lucy and Ethel, once decided to deliver Yellow Pages directories. Whatever the number they were given to deliver, Lucy and Ethel did not realize how thick these would be, nor how heavy. Lucy's husband drove a pickup with a cap on the back. She traded vehicles with him on delivery day. At the second or third house, Lucy stepped off the curb wrong and sprained her ankle. She couldn't walk and Ethel couldn't deliver all of these books by herself, so they called on newly retired dad and mom to help. Before they were done, they had done damage to the truck suspension. Mom and dad wouln't take money for helping out, but Lucy and Ethel thought the least they could do was take them out to dinner. When the medical bills for the sprained ankle, the repairs to truck, two babysitters were paid and a dinner for six was paid, Lucy and Ethel were only out $85 after being paid for delivering the directories.

Lucy and Ethel didn't do well at the candy factory either

So back to Google and paying me $173 an hour, I have a proposition for you. If you want me to look something up for you, just drop me a line and I will gladly do this for a mere $75 an hour. This discounted rate goes on the clock the minute I read your request, go and get an appropriate hot or cold beverage, possibly (probably) visit the powder room, stop to clean my glasses, let the dog out (Oops! We don't have a dog...a few minutes wasted there!) and dally long enough to ensure that researching your query will take a full hour. If I can find the 33 year old perfume samples, I will gladly send them to my first 10 clients.

This will be me after I am rich. Note the flat belly, no glasses, no gray hair and no wrinkles!
Send in those queries today! I can't wait to get started!