Alternative Job Hunt

Disaster has come, swiftly followed by ruin. You have lost your job. What to do now? You might try doing something that others are not doing. After all, surely those others are all queued up for that one job that everyone knows about. You want to be in that other queue. The queue that only you know about. Is that possible? Oddly enough it is.

There are only two ways to get a job that only you know about that I have heard of. The first and most obvious is to create the job yourself. That observation you might point out, is hardly useful. After all, if you knew how to create your own job you'd not be here reading this. Read on and I shall elucidate.

In the category of jobs you can create yourself, there are two rather obvious kinds. The job that is so obvious that no one thinks about it and the job that is so odious that no one wants it. Any body who is willing clean up dead things by the side of the road, clean up crime scenes, clean up all manner of filth and or engage in hauling said filth to it's final reward is hereby excused from class. You have everything you need to get the job of your choice. Namely a willingness to do what no one else wants to.

Now as for those jobs that are so obvious that no thinks of them. They are right in front of your face. I recently saw a television program wherein some guy was putting worm poop in used bottles. Turns out the worm poop makes good fertilizer and the bottles used to be just trash that he is now recycling. If I recall the program correctly, this guy is now a millionaire.

So your first order of business might be to root through the trash. Or even root through everyone else's trash. Find something that everyone throws away that can be reused and create a process that reuses it. Here's a free idea since some of you lot or either too lazy or just not creative enough to think of one on your own. Lots of people are having to downsize their living arrangements due to foreclosures and the like. This means that the place they are moving into is likely to be smaller than the place they were moving out of. In addition, they may not have the actual cash to store the extra stuff at a storage place. Suppose you advertised a free service that would go around and haul away stuff that people had no more use for. You paw through the stuff and sell what is immediately worthwhile on Ebay. Use your imagination on what to do with the rest. You may actually have to take some of it to the dump but with any luck you will be struck with a cool idea like worm poop in pop bottles one day. By the way, one of the things people often have to get rid of when they move is house plants. Suppose you volunteered to find a new home for used, well care for house plants. Charging a small fee for expenses of course...

So we've covered the jobs that are too stinky so no one wants them and the jobs that are too obvious so no one sees them. What's left? How about the six degrees of separation jobs? The ones that only you know about because you are the only one in your circle of acquaintances with the nerve, pluck or shear desperation to ask. Go to each and everyone of the busiest people you know and ask if they need help. Be prepared to sell yourself and to tell and show these busy people why they should be able to depend on you to help them out. When I say busy people I am in particular referring to people who have to turn customers away. If you can actually help them then their business will grow.

A far more speculative line of job research involves going to everyone you know who is an employer with a shop that is open for business and offer to make them busier by say, getting them a presence on the world wide web. I call this approach more speculative because if a shop is not busy, how will they be able to afford to hire you? But beggars can't be choosers so if that's all the Kevin Bacon Effect can get you, ya gotta dance with the one what brung ya.