JOB WISE

     A go-getter is someone who follows you into a revolving door and comes out ahead of you. So it is with people who go into the same business situation everyone else does but comes up with that little something extra that gives them a bigger share of that market. or a better relationship with customers, which usually amounts to the same thing. Consider these examples.
     *CLOTHES MAKE THE GARBAGEMAN - Ray Valine, a Sacramento garbage collector, wore an ear-flapping bunny costume a week before Easter and passed out candy from an Easter basket to hundreds of children along his collection route. The week before Christmas he wore a Santa suit. Fellow collectors thought him a bit nuts. But his customers loved him. And the garbage he picked up was always neater than on others' routes.
     *DURESS DRESS ENGINEER - John T. Molloy of New York was calling himself a "clothing engineer". "Most American women dress to fail," he bluntly reported. "They think they have to be attractive, appealing, kittenish all the time, but sometimes those characteristics can be distinct drawbacks in business success." Molloy successfully dressed politicians, foreign government representatives, and corporate VIPs for 16 years. Then he turned his attention toward engineering the dressage of women customers seeking corporate success. His success followed.
     *STAND-IN ABSENTEES - Two Los Angeles area artists, Yuri Schwebler and Laurie Le Clair, began a firm called Dirty Works, Inc. It started when Yuri got paid for flying to D.C. from L.A. to stand in for a friend who was obligated - but didn't want to go - to a dinner there. So the two figured there must be a lot of people who, similarly, would pay NOT to have to do things they were obligated to do. Their first job had Laurie breaking someone's engagement for him.
     *PERFECT TIMING - When Rose Shade and her husband stopped for lunch, while traveling through California, they noted a meter maid busily writing parking citations on a row of autos. Right behind her was a young man placing small cards beside each ticket on the windshields, which read: "Maybe your watch was slow. Bring it in to us for repair and we will pay your parking ticket".
     *MAN-IKIN - Chuck Carl's best advertising, conversely, was doing nothing. In fact, that was what he was doing for a living. He was billing himself as "The Mechanical Robot" and touring the country posing. One specialty was modeling male fashions at trade shows, as a robotized "mime" manikin.
     *MUTILANT ART - Artist Christopher Burden, at age 29  was dubbed "the Evil Knievel of art" by Oui Magazine because he was using his body to make his living too. In his words, he "made himself the subject of his performances". But his art was like no other. For instance, he was paid $725 by the University of Maryland-Balrimore County to perform what he called "a body work" in its then-new fine arts dance studio, until a campus conflict arose over it. Administrators heard about some of his other body works and claimed there were moral issues involved. In recent years Burden had: 1) crawled stark naked through broken glass strewn on a Los Angeles street, 2) had an assistant shoot him in the arm with a .22 calibre handgun, 3) attempted to electrocute himself (non-fatally), and 4) been purposely kicked down concrete stairs in front of an audience.
     COUNTER-FETE-ING -  John Stark of New Orleans had to combat public controversy to practice his profession, too. He was selling $1,000,000 bills. He had to beat a counterfeiting rap to continue selling his double-sized novelty greenbacks. He claimed to be the "largest" money maker in the USA.
     Making money, thus, is shown to be an individual matter. But, if a person  has the ingenuity to make a job, that job may well end up making him, too.