UNCONVENTIONAL JOBS.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20288, 22 December 1927, Page 20

UNCONVENTIONAL JOBS.

Most men and women out of a job are automata. They have not the enterprise to make a job for themselves. This state of mind is not peculiar to any class or community. It flourishes among youths leaving Eton and Harrow even more noticeably than among lads leaving the council school of a city slum. “ What herd of workers shall I join?” is the obsessing question—ii«t “ What unconventional sort of job shall I make for myself? ” Unconventional jobs are scattered around by the • million, merely awaiting adoption by men and women of any age or social position who have the gumption to see them. You do not have to go to Australia or Canada, or to have the physique of a carthorse, in order to make money out of agriculture. I know a man who is making a good income by calling on owners of untended, mangy-looking little city gardens, pointing out that they can easily raise fine crops of lettuces, and selling them lettuce seedlings there and then at the attractive rate of 10 a penny (writes a traveller in the Manchester Guardian). A thousand seeds he obtains from a country grower for a penny. Resows them in a tiny garden in among the factories where nobody ever bothered to grow anything before. And he turns every invested penny into about Bs. There are several men and women in England who are paid to eat and drink in hotels, restaurants, and tea shops by hotelkeepers and restaurant companies so that they can pick up as many “ wrinkles ” as possible about how other concerns are going ahead and the new ideas that are making a hit. Other men are roaming the country looking for white horses, which are becoming increasingly scarce, and buying their tail hairs for violin and ’cello bows. A London singer lost his voice last year—but did not lose his courage or initiative. Noticing what a large number of iron door-knockers were looking the worse for wear in the shabby parts of London, he called on householders and offered to paint the knocker for a penny. Not much? Yet that man,' with his penny charges, makes more than £2 out of a ninepenny pot of paint, and he is offered lots of other touching-up jobs, too. Often, moreover, people are so pleased with his low charge that they pay him Cd or Is. He earns as much as many a manager of a small branch bank.

For a fortnight before the boat race there were two Londoners selling “ favours ” on the kerb in different parts of Oxford street. One sold the usual rosettes, and did badly. The other, himself, carved little pairs of sculls from bits of broken boxes, tied the blue ribbon around them—and promptly sold all he could make. An ex-officer was making £lO a week in London last year visiting offices and cutting alphabetical thumb-slots in cumbersome books of reference. A man at Wembley Exhibition set himself up (outside the gates) as “Wembley Official Dog-minder”; he did pretty well, and deserved to. .... A small New York family, with apparently no qualifications at all for the job, practised keeping still. They mastered that task, and now they are in brisk demand with clothiers, who pay them a good fee just to sit still in the window, among the wax dummies, and keep the crowd guessing which arc real. Pet farming is rarely taken up outside a few of our biggest cities. Yet it is an interesting occupation, and pays well; parrots, piebald mice and rats, lizards, rabbits, snakes, pigeons, and puppies are eagerly bought wherever there are boys and girls with pocket money to spend. The London Zoo is usually in the market, I believe, for grass snakes, which are fed to certain of the bigger snakes. There is room in every city for trade in wellscoured worms of just the right size and port for anglers—not a soft job in itself, of course, but a useful side line for a pot shop, which could deal, too, in fishing lackle and natural history books a'nd gear. Of two men, one will remain unemployed, the other teach parrots to talk. “ How will ho get the job? ” He finds out. One of the best fields for enterprise in Britain to-day is for small groups of actors and actresses to tour the villages and small towns by caravan, giving little plays with the minimum of talk and the maximum of action. A good living could Ho made by scores of groups, on a profitsharing basis. Dolls' bouses have been becoming more and more expensive of recent years, so parents have stopped buying them. But little girls arc just as fond of them as ever. Any woman, of the tens of thousands of country dwellcrswho are always bemoaning their “ lack of opportunity,” could tackle the simple carpentering that is needed, and work up a snug trade in these popular toys with neighbouring towns.