I’ve got an occasionally recurring cash gig over at Geiger Counter Guy’s place, and it’s the sort of thing that illustrates how I’m able to keep my pantry running.
Years ago, somebody at GC Guy’s family-run company worked out the details of how to turn the cap of a common squirt bottle into a gadget for using arsenic test strips. These caps come by the caseload straight from some plastics plant and require very few additional parts for their conversion, so materials-wise they’re incredibly inexpensive to produce. Unfortunately each conversion requires a very great deal of hand-work, some of which needs to be quite precise. So labor-wise they’re incredibly expensive to produce – or they would be if you hired and trained actual professionals.
You can’t just hand the whole thing over to some kid and pay him ten dollars an hour to snip and connect and carve and drill and screw, because you’ll get back a case full of unusable junk. No, this job can only be done by someone with a serious (if sporadic) work ethic, the ability to precisely follow directions, a willingness to work at a bench for hours at a time at an almost unbearably boring task, and an apparently total ignorance of minimum wage laws.
Who ya gonna call? 🙂
GC Guy’s been turning these things out since he was a kid, and I’m pretty sure his family’s company thinks he’s still making them. But after all that time and all those thousands of caps, he can’t stand the sight of them. He’d much rather make geiger counters, and having done both myself I don’t blame him.
I love the people with dull jobs they’d rather pay me for than do themselves. They make my life possible.
Capitalism at it’s best.
Gasp…a job Americans won’t do! Tar and feather….where’s the tar and feathers….that greedy capitalist must DIE for creating an income and exploiting a feline vexed hermit.
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