Posts Tagged ‘sweet little earners’
Cool ways to earn a living #2: Be Tony Robbins
December 7th, 2009 | 
Author: 
I bought my shiny, shiny teeth with the money of fools.
Imagine putting “self help guru” when you have to enter your job title on a form. How embarrassing would that be?
Self help gurus are widely lampooned in the mass media, often depicted as deranged, criminal, sad, pathetic, or all of the above. Some of my personal favourites are:
- Greg Kinnear as Richard Hoover in Little Miss Sunshine, a desperate, clutching man whose pathetic quotes fail to inspire his small, yawning audience.
- Patrick Swayze as Jim Cunningham in Donnie Darko, a seedy and despicable man.
- Tom Cruise as Frank T.J. Mackey in Magnolia, see above.
It’s only if you’re Tony Robbins that the job actually rocks…
Stupid ways to earn a living #4: top-flight footballer
“He could turn on a sixpence” goes an old and remarkably unrealistic football-related maxim. A more contemporary interpretation would go something like “he could turn on fifty grand”.
It all but knocks me out cold that Ben Haim of financially struggling Portsmouth earned something in the region of the abovementioned figure to benchwarm at Manchester City with his Nike Pro+ sweats. Meanwhile, NHS nurses fight over bean sprouts.
Exclusive exposé: the truth about your council tax
Major, major scoop! Ever wondered what exactly happens to your council tax, after it has left your bank account and entered the coffers of your local authority? Well one of our sources has managed to totally thieve get hold of a very important document from the Haringey Council – their 2010 budget plans. It is with great joy that we share this with you behind the cut:
Bottom line: working for a living, and why it sucks
The IWDTFM team during office hours
It will come as a shock to absolutely no one to find out that, every once in a while, when the moon is full and the leylines are aligned, I complain about my job.
This is not an uncommon occurrence. We spend a third of every day at work. Eight hours out of twenty-four. Apparently, the UK workforce is one of the hardest working populations in the world, putting in an average of £5,129-worth of overtime every year. I don’t really put in much extra time, although to my credit I’ve been known to stay late if something needs finishing. Most days, however, I’m out the office sometime between five-thirty and six o’clock with a spring in my step and my evening ahead of me.
So what do I complain about? The usual, really. Being tired, being busy, being bored, being hungry, wanting to go and play outside, wanting to stay and play inside. Wanting to be anywhere but cooped up in an office working for a living.
Top travel tip: go to Rome before the world ends
I just wanted an excuse to show off my awesome photo, so I wrote this article
I was in Rome last week. I’d never been on holiday before, let alone to Italy, because I’m poor and usually have to sell the cheesy nodules from between my toes just to buy food, so my girlfriend and I adamantly hauled our sweaty arses round every tourist activity we could find, checking them off one by one.
Coliseum? Check. Pantheon? Check. Eight million largely identical but incredibly pretty churches? Check. Ate a pizza? Check. Ran for our lives every time we tried to cross a road (or even go near a road, or look at a road, even through the corner of our eyes)? Check, check, check.
The Vatican? Oh, check with a cherry on top.
Where the elite have no shame
Only a truly self-righteous prick would want everything they own to be red.
Bono is widely accredited with being smug, arrogant and self-righteous. Not content with this public stance he continually goes on to prove everyone right by using the plight of the third world as a marketing outlet.
Project Red customises popular wares with a unique red fascia. Phones, iPods, t-shirts and what have you all come in red so that people just as bare-faced can simultaneously accessorise and brag about their tireless charitable efforts.
Purchasing the Motorola Red phone sends £10 straight to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, and £130 to Motorola. I daren’t suggest what proportion of this went to the Global Fund to Kit Bono out with a Limitless Collection of Ostentatious Commodities (GFKBLCOC).
MTV: happily eroding the attention span of an entire generation
Nelly: revered even though he deserves nothing but contempt
Don’t you just love the system? It has taken Rupert Murdoch and his equally odious contemporaries just a hundred years to mould the economy so that everyone’s money goes to him.
Gone is the traditional type of capitalism where everyone worked hard for a salary they genuinely deserved. Spend what you need and accrue some savings along the way? Out the window with it. Instead, we have a system where saving is pointless unless you earn megabucks, and wanton spending is encouraged, if not passively enforced.
Why go to the supermarket for fresh produce when you can eat rotten cabbage out of the bin?
Not a good look, but it suits him.
Western capitalism is a well-maintained perpetual motion machine. Its various cogs and gears are oiled regularly with the blood and tears of the workforce. However, the machine requires maintenance, and parts must be replaced or cleaned.
And then there are parts that don’t do anything at all: the gall bladders of machinery. They might not be moving parts or they might perform an auxiliary role in the whole system, but their mere presence at a reduced or non-existent level of functionality means other parts must work harder and faster to compensate.
Freegans are the ultimate example of this. They smugly condemn us rat-racers as crazy. These people freely admit to finding nourishment in the discarded produce of society.
Gyms: exploiting your self esteem for profit
Omg! There are, like, soo many buttons! This is soo hard.
I’m thinking about starting up a gym. It’s a can’t-lose business! I got the idea after talking to an employee at the gym I currently go to, who told me they never have even 2% of total members there at one time.
“Holy shit!” I said, looking around, and proceeded to do some slow, clunky arithmetic in my brain, “That means this gym is making a squajillion pounds every month!”
“Something like that,” said the gym bunny, nodding his pretty little head.
It’s a brilliant scheme and I don’t know why I didn’t come up with it sooner. Because here’s the thing, the beautiful thing — the one, undeniable truth: people hate looking fat but they also hate going to the gym.
All you need to do is suck them in when they’re feeling like crap, then gently encourage them to stay away after that. You probably want to draw the suckers back in every now and then — a gratis training session, perhaps, or a couple of free spin classes — just so they feel like, maybe one day, they might start coming back regularly and so keep renewing their memberships. In the meantime, you pillage their bank account every month for a princely sum — the exact price of their body image shame.
Tags: big business, exploitation, fitness, gyms, marketing, morons, sweet little earners | 
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Double bubble for living among rubble
Wanted: one witch, accommodation provided
An agency in Somerset is advertising a “witch” vacancy. The main responsibility of the role is to live in the caves at Wookey Hole, a tourist spot in Somerset.
The witch is expected to teach witchcraft and magic to visitors, and the criteria for hiring include being able to cackle, and not being allergic to cats.
The position pays a whopping £50,000 per year pro rata, presumably because the position requires the appointee to live in the caves.
