I’m pretty sure I’ve ever done anything really dumb for money before.
I’m pretty sure…
But who knows?
Maybe something I did late one night for a few bucks is buried so deep in my brain that I’ll never recover it again. And that’s probably a good thing…
Have you ever been paid to do something pretty stupid?
Let’s see what folks on AskReddit had to say about this.
1. Ouch!
“I once burned a coworker with a spoon dipped in the deep fryer on the neck to cover up a Hickey he got from a waitress. $5.
There was some sort of love triangle involved…”
2. I can do that!
“I was told to retrieve a school chicken sandwich from the cafeteria.
I was paid $10 for my vigorous labor.”
3. That’s convenient.
“I got $45 per hour to be a Janitor for four hours a day for about a year.
Simply because I had the office next to the break-room. Meanwhile, the guy who was lot attendant was getting paid $10 an hour and chilled most of the day in the SAME break-room.
He wasn’t allowed to do it because technically he worked outside, in a lot of 40 employee cars. His job was to pick up litter, direct people, and be friendly.”
4. Please don’t sue us.
“Got $8k and a years unemployment not to sue my former employer.
They got rid of me after 7 years because the VPs nephew had the same qualifications as I did.
I had the best year of my life and I found a job that now pays double.”
5. Medical study.
“Got paid $3,000 to participate in a medical study for a medical research company. Had to stay at their clinic for 5 days so they could monitor my vitals as I took the prescribed study drug.
Awesome gig. It was super chill. They feed you well and 90% of my stay was just downtime. So I got to chill, watch movies, play video games, read, and sleep while the occasional cute nurse came by to check my vitals, give me the study drug, and ask if I had any negative symptoms.”
6. If you say so.
“Someone paid me $50 for every snake I removed from his shed.
I told him they were rat snakes and did more good than harm but he wanted them out. Made $200 in about 30 minutes.
Then he got a rat infestation…..”
7. Big money.
“Rich family paid me 500 dollars (minimum) a night to babysit their 8 year old son.
I was about 18 (certified for child CPR, first aid, and grew up watching my nephews from a young age). I never set a price, just told them to pay me what they thought was fair.
The kid was very polite and basically a young adult. I’m not sure if he took etiquette classes or something but his face LIT UP when we played pretend ninjas for the first time. He slayed three of them in one slash haha.
I was also there for his first skinned knee, and he took it like a champ. Just kept saying “Oh man, it hurts a lot!” But wound up extremely proud of it.
One night they called abruptly to have me come sit, paid me in advance, then left three hundred dollars “for pizza or whatever, you can keep the change, too.” Then took off for three hours. They wanted him in bed an hour after they left but I gave him two and a half to play DK country.
Overall, dumb, but such good money. 10/10 would babysit again.
Male babysitters have it rough, though. It got a lot of wierd looks.”
8. How do you like your eggs?
“$200 to fry 2 eggs.
Middle of service on a Saturday night and a customer wants eggs with his steak. We didn’t hold eggs in the service kitchen, would have to stop what I was doing, hold up service run across the road and get 2 eggs out of the cool room.
I say nonto the customer and he asks me how much to get the eggs. I throw out the number $100 each expecting him to tell me to beat it, he hands me $200 and I cook the eggs.
At the same venue applied an a**hole tax and charged a customer $180 for a bowl of pasta and bread.”
9. Don’t show up.
“Got paid 40K to not show up at work.
It was the financial crisis and there was a hiring freeze right before I was due to start work.
The company I was to work for couldn’t honor the employment contract we signed, but it was all very sudden and my would-be bosses felt bad enough about the situation that they offered me half a year’s salary as a gesture of goodwill.”
10. Nice and easy.
“I was paid $50 to assemble some brand new gym equipment for a friend because her husband had been dragging his feet for months.
I open up the box, pulled it out, and made the easiest $50 of my life because it was pre-assembled. I just took 10 seconds to unfold it and was done.
She was furious with her husband, and still paid me to spite him.”
11. Booyah!
“Hang a TV.
Then make sure that TV worked the following day and then take the TV down the day after.
Made $1,000.”
12. Not lifting a finger.
“I got paid fairly nicely for a couple of months to sit in an office and browse the web for 7 hours and 50 minutes a day and do mail merge for the other 10 minutes.
This was literally my sole duty.”
13. Random stuff.
“I worked as a part time gopher for this wildly rich artist for about a year. Circa 2017.
Did all sorts of random – and I mean f**king random – jobs for the guy. By far my favorite is he once paid me $350 cash to drive to Downtown LA to find him “the perfect piñata”. Aka a “donkey that looks like a unicorn”. Aka “an ugly unicorn”. He was also VERY color specific.
Had to be a specific mix of every color, but no red. I’m expecting an all day hunt. But, if you haven’t been to Downtown Los Angeles, let me tell you: it must be the Piñata Mecca. Massive warehouses back-to-back taking up whole blocks where you can browse any possible variant of piñata.
Buzz Lightyear piñata? Got it. S** doll style piñata? Got it. Giant snow globe piñata? Got it. Donald Trump’s head piñata? Got it. I found the piñata I was looking for within 10 minutes, browsed some more for my own curiosity, then brought the piñata back to this guy’s house. Whole thing took maybe an hour and a half. Got paid in cash.
Then had the pleasure of watching this guy hang the piñata in his living room where he wanted to wack the s**t out of it alone. His reasoning: no clue. But I got paid, baby!”
14. Easy money.
“I got paid $1,000 to have giant balloons attached to me and hand out temporary tattoos of Fox animated shows (Family Guy, Bob’s Burgers, etc) at ComicCon for 3 days.”
15. Just kickin’ back.
“I did an event for a national association for deaf people at which they did every presentation in ASL.
I am an audio engineer, who specializes in live sound and concerts. I did nothing for 5 days of show, $450 a day”
16. Good company.
“When I was 19, I meet an heiress (I think she was in her fifties).
She paid me $20 an hour to go to lunch with her. She would take me to five star restaurants and we would shoot the s**t for 1-2 hours every week. That is literally all she wanted from me… to sit and eat lunch with her at a fancy restaurant.
It was nice, I was poor so that extra 20-40 bucks a week made a big difference and I got to eat some of the best food in Houston. She was a nice lady. I taught her how to pump her own gas and took her to a grocery store for the first time in her life. She taught me proper table manners and that not all rich people are narcissistic jerks.”
17. I’ll take it!
“$175 to do some kind of user study at Netflix.
II show up in the lobby and then they go, “actually we got the data we needed from the studies earlier today, you’re free to go!”.
Still got paid!”
18. Whatever you say!
“I got paid $10,000 to leave an apartment because the new owner wanted to move in.
I was the tenant under the previous owner. I had 4 months left in my rental contract.
This was in Barcelona.”
19. Wow.
“Had a WFH gig working sort of as a personal assistant for a rich guy on the opposite coast from me.
I did all kinds of wacky s**t for him. For example, one time I had to break up with my boss’s girlfriend because he was too wimpy to do it himself. Rly, weird s**t like that was literally my job.
One day, I bought him a new pickup truck. Meaning, I negotiated the deal and paid for the truck with his credit card. All in all, I’d say the process probably took about two weeks, for which I was paid my usual wage at six hours per day. No big deal.
Somehow, his dad found out about the new truck and he decided he wanted a new pickup truck too. He called me about a week after I bought the truck for my boss and said he’d pay me $2,000 to buy a truck for him. I called the same dealership back, spoke to the same salesman, told him what was up and basically said give me another truck, same price as before. The salesman was only too happy to comply.
It took ten minutes to make the phone call and then a day or two to get the title and other paperwork sorted out. So, depending on how you look at it, I made $2,000 for just ten minutes worth of “work”.
Somehow, my boss’s rich friend found out about all this. He decided he wanted a new SUV. “OhYeahThrowItAway, you have to buy it for me!” I told him the last time I bought someone a vehicle, I got paid $2,000. The friend was basically like “F**k it, I’ll pay you $3,000, just get it for me” and then he emailed me his wish list.
That deal took a little longer, maybe two weeks.
I made $5k extra in just two months buying vehicles for lazy (or dumb) rich people.”
20. Jackpot!
“Got paid $300 to shovel my neighbor’s front steps and driveway while she was away on vacation all winter.
It did not even flurry once.”
21. That was quick.
“I was paid $300 to move my car for a movie that was filming by my apartment.”
22. It’s a bet.
“Waiter said it was impossible to lick your elbow.
I informed him I could do it.
He bet me $5 I couldn’t do it.
I increased my net worth by $5.”
23. Don’t go in there.
“I got asked to do 2 hours of barrier watch (Guarding a barrier ribbon while a crew did x rays inside a power plant).
This was asked last minute after a 12 hour shift so the bonuses of staying happening to be a Sunday, etc I was being paid $110 to stand and play on my phone and make sure sure nobody tried to pass all the DO NOT ENTER DANGER DANGER signs during a time of day with minimal personnel.”
24. Sitting around.
“Twenty five years ago, and in Indiana, the law was that in order to operate nail salon, someone there must hold a full cosmetology license, not just a nail technician license.
A nail salon opened next to the hair salon I worked at and they all held nail technician licenses and the one who held a cosmetology license would be delayed in Korea for a week for whatever reason. At 18 years old, I was paid $25 an hour to merely to sit in the nail salon as the “holder of the license.”
I answered no phones, tended to no clients, did nothing but paint my own nails repeatedly and watch tv for an entire week. Was a sweet, sweet gig.”
25. Whatever you want.
“$1325
The guy wanted a drawing of his pony having s** with a bunch of balloons shaped like various cartoon characters in a massive collage. My rate charges per character per fetish, and he came to me fully prepared to dump $1500 on the complete commission after adding it all up himself.
I gave him a discount since even I felt like it was insanity. I probably should have charged the full amount since it did end up taking me 2 weeks to do on and off just from burnout at drawing the same style balloon over and over just in different shapes, but that was definitely the most silly/dumb commission I’ve ever had, or at least the most I’ve been commissioned for something dumb/silly.”
Have you ever done anything really dumb for money?
If the answer is YES, please tell us all about it in the comments.
We’d love to hear from you!
