Earlier Economy

[CAM]

For extra money, some of the guys at my high school used to swindle old guys out of their baseball card collections and then sell the best cards for cash. It was a private religious high school,except I wasn't religious. My classmates were, though. Nice "Christian" boys who steal from old guys. Wonder where they'll end up later, huh?

[CAM]

We got granola bars and a pint of milk.

Loose change was hoarded for the occasional pack of trading cards and a horrible litre of artifically sweetened orange soda which came in a glass bottle and tasted like stewed Japanese beetles for our walk back across the undeveloped fields between the house, highway, and deli.

The soda might have been tainted though. We burnt beetles with looking glasses and mashed them up into buckets of marigold heads then threw the pulp at one another as a game.

We used to get old binocular lenses from a factory that replaced old lenses. We'd use the lenses to play "laser tag" with ant colonies. Laser tag was focusing a beam of light from the lens onto the ants and watch them roast to death or spontaneously combust. One guy actually used a lens to focus light on one of the school's nuns habits and ended up catching her head scarf on fire! He got expelled, of course.

[Doc Durian]

Did you ever play solar chicken? Two kids focus the bead on each others arms. The first to retract lost whatever was up for grabs, usually change, trading cards, or smurf figurines.

[CAM]

No, didn't do that. We used to put rocks in the middle our mud balls, let them dry hard all morning and pelt the living shit out of each other. One time, I caught one of those mudballs right between the eyes and was unconscious for about 30 seconds. When I came to, my friends and I made a pact to never tell our parents that it had happened.

[Doc Durian]

heh..

We used to gather up as many paper matchbooks as we could find, cut the heads off into a bowl, and mix in grindings from sparklers so we could pack it into steel tubes (sawed off lil red wagon handles were preferred) then shoot each other with the flames.

Except the one time our screen door mesh safety grill on the end disintegrated and hundreds of sparkling matchheads stuck to some kids synthetic jacket. He might have been the first breakdancer I ever saw.

[CAM]

LOL Sounds like you had fun in school.

[doppelgaenger]

You know what's funny? A few years from now, Americans are going to be the ones working in the sweatshops earning 1 yen per day, lol.

[Doc Durian]

Check out parts of the US midwest. It's not too far off from that now. There are kennel sweepers with doctorate degrees.

[doppelgaenger]

I'm in the midwest and I don't know what you're talking about, buddy.

[Doc Durian]

There are professionals so desperate for work in some towns, they've been resorting to shovelling shit at vet kennels and delivering pizzas so as not to lose their homes.

[doppelgaenger]

Source?
______

[Asip4u]

There are professionals so desperate for work in some towns, they've been resorting to shovelling shit at vet kennels and delivering pizzas so as not to lose their homes.

Yeah there's stuff like that everywhere Doc. A lot of Engineers around here doing multiple jobs just to get by.

[Illusional]

My first job was to sweep and mop and six car garage and then sweep, mop, and wax the floors of my dad's showroom in his shop. A three hour job for which I received a quarter. If the floors turned out especially good, I got an extra dime. If the job wasn't satisfactory, I was made to do it until it was right or get no compensation.

A good lesson in hard work.

hey, atleast you weren't mopping floors at a peep show.

raverboy

[IndiReloaded]

Okay... I saved up my dimes for Mexican Jumping Beans! I think they were 0.30 a box when I was little.

Please tell me I'm not the only one that played with those... or hit them with a rock to see what was inside!

[IndiReloaded]

Check out parts of the US midwest. It's not too far off from that now. There are kennel sweepers with doctorate degrees.

Dunno about kennels sweepers, but there are way too many PhDs graduating for the jobs that are available. Blame the universities, whose business model depends on cranking them out.

There are jobs, tho one has to be willing to relocate and that's hard if you have to uproot a family and home.