no fucking way (the “boozeless bucks” sixer)

i don’t remember what the seven signs are that the world is coming to an end…

…but i AM sure one of them has to be the following phrase:

“sean, you don’t drink enough…

(read that again)

i have a buddy at work that makes decent scratch on the side doing marketing surveys. here, try this…write about it…here’s a $100 in cash for your trouble. that kinda thing. that worked for me. when one came up recently that involved writing a blog he gave them my name and number ’cause he knew i wrote here – and had been for a while.

then they changed their focus group to just women. while i needed the benjamin, i wasn’t willing to “take one for the team” on that level to get it. but they said they had another they might want me for…

…and it involved drinking.

so i get the screening call. all kinds of questions about how often i drink, how much i spend (tallying that one up produced a scary number), etc, etc. but when it was all said and done, after THREE different “pre-screening” phone interviews, i was denied based on the fact that i don’t drink enough…

…what the fuck?

so here are a sixer of jobs, real or not, i never thought i’d get denied…

6. cigar taster – with fifteen plus years of experience and a tendency to have higher brow tastes, this was a no brainer, right?

5. secret shopper – i get the emails all the time, but they never seem real. a girl in tulsa i knew used to do this and got all kinds of free crap…and it’s not like i don’t shop enough anyway. i put some girls to shame, for christ’s sake!

4. fodd critic – see my waistline.

3. music critic – replace “waistline” with “music collection”.

2. web writer – duh.

1. whiskey taster – seriously. this booze marketing gig was for sitting around a bar drinkind whiskey for an hour and getting paid $100. how they denied an irish kid this i’ll never understand…

side note: i ended up getting an email a short time later inviting me to the same survey, i applied and got in. i’ll do a bit on it later ’cause it was pretty interesting – the downside? no booze actually consumed. the upside? pay went up to $150.00. not bad for ninety minutes work…)