I’m an artist. I was once commissioned to punt myself around a library on a ladder on wheels, while in drag while singing the One Pound Fish Very Very Nice song operatically.

If people looked game I hit them with my punting rod.

Got my first “real” job with a kind of mediator. Their customer wanted me for their project. I got my contract signed with the mediator as my employer. Then their customer was bought by someone and they cancelled their contract with the mediator about a day before I would’ve begun to work. I was already under contract though. The mediator tried to find another customer who could make use of my skills.

They failed to find one and had to let me go. But I was effectively employed by them for three weeks and got my first pay check literally doing nothing for it.

Cleaning the underside of rich people’s boats. I didn’t have access to actual scuba gear so I would snorkel around disgusting harbors, holding my breath and scraping/scrubbing barnacles off by hand.

Wasn’t bad money, but it was gross. People weren’t supposed to release their sewage in the harbor. But they did. Thankfully only did that a couple times before finding much better work.

When I was maybe 13 years old my younger sister and I got paid to clear out trash from the home of a family friend who was a hoarder. This person had enough self-awareness to know it needed to be cleaned out, but didn’t have the spoons to do anything about it and so just gave us the keys and full reign while they spent a week traveling. We dealt with lots of old food, stacks of ancient newspapers and magazines, useless decades-old kitchen gadgets ordered from the Home Shopping Channel and never removed from the boxes, dead mice and their poop, that kind of thing.

In retrospect that was a huge health hazard to be irresponsibly throwing kids into, the job should have been done by a team of expensive trained adults with protective gear rather than two idiot children with some yellow kitchen gloves and lawn-sized trash bags, but we were happy enough for the pocket money at the time.

Had the only printer in my dorm room of about 70 rooms and charged just slightly less than the university did per page so naturally people printed with my printer. Made some scripts that hooked into google cloud print to log users and had spreadsheet to track funds for users and send emails about what was printed and how much funds they had left. I made mony only because people forgot they had extra funds when they moved out and never asked to get it back. Its not a lot but stil strange to me why I put so much effort into a very low profit business.

Others people responses seem way better then mine. I used to burn pirated cds and dvds back in middle and high school. I also used to sell answers to a couple seniors during algebra 2 when they were desperate to graduate. But as an adult other then selling drugs i also sucked a dick for 600 dollars. I also helped a gf sell photos before onlyfans. So none of that seems very unusual now adays.

When I was still in school, I was the computer nerd. A doctor in town, who’s son was in my class, asked me to fix an annoyance he had with a software he used. He offered a generous compensation. It took me less than an hour to analyze and patch the program on the binary level. On a per hour base, I earned more money than he normally did…

I designed a board game as a personal challenge and posted my notes online along the way. As the game got close to being finished a publisher messaged wanting to help finish and sell the game. Royalties were enough for a couple small family vacations. That experience really helped cement board gaming (and designing) as one of my core hobbies.

I can fit quarters and €2 coins in my nostrils. I used to have a drunkenness level that would prompt me to assert this at parties or bars, and then I’d obviously show people.

Nobody wants their coins back after that, but it’s not very lucrative and I shudder to think now about the diseases I tempted.

I created an open source image gallery (floating image) in my spare time. Some company (Archos) wanted to embed it into their products, but wanted me to add support for 3rd party hosts (I had Flickr, they wanted Google, photo bucket and others). I earned about €3000 on the work and my project got better for it. Not completely unheard of, but probably the most unusual way I have made extra money.

I was commuting back to home from the city where I was doing apprenticeship.

I sat next to an elderly lady who initiated a talk with me and soon has asked what i believed her subjects were she used to teach at school. I believe i got it wrong the first time but right on my second try and explained why i thought so.

After we noticed that we both lived/exited in the same village she offered me a price money and asked for my address so she could send it to me.

I know this sounds super suspicious and writing it makes me wonder why i have given her my address, but i was young and there are probably a lot of details i’m missing which would make it totally reasonable. Some days later i got an letter with 5 € attached :)

Nice try, IRS.

When I was 15 or so I was hired from an ad on Craigslist for photo editing - just basic touching up, but like a thousand or so photos. The caveat was - softcore porn. I didn’t mind, money is money. My very Christian family who found out however - they did mind. My sister ended up finishing the editing for me.

It wasn’t much, but back in high school I basically worked as sort of a personal savings account for a couple weeks.

There was one dude I wasn’t exactly friends with but we were friendly, never hung out or really talked outside of school, but otherwise were on pretty good terms. We often sat at the same lunch tables, had some mutual friends and such, talked and joked around between classes, etc.

He was also kind of an irresponsible druggie. Nice guy, wasn’t out committing crimes or anything besides drug possession, just made a lot of dumb choices, came to school drunk, high or tripping balls a lot.

I kind of looked the part of a stoner back in high school- long hair, sort of a grungy style, listened to a lot of classic rock and metal, etc. so I was in a lot of the same circles as him, but I didn’t drink or do drugs and it was also pretty well known that I was a reasonably smart, responsible, and honest dude.

So a few weeks out from senior prom, he realizes that he’s going to need some money for whatever his post-prom plans were (I didn’t ask, I figured it was probably better that I didn’t know.) He also knew that he couldn’t be trusted with his own money, he’d blow it on drugs or something else stupid.

So he asks if he can just give me money to hold onto, and I agreed. He’d hand me a few bucks here or there over the next couple weeks, whatever he didn’t use from his lunch money or allowance or whatever, and I just held onto it.

But at the end of it, it added up to a pretty decent bit of money (by “high school kids 20 years ago” standards anyway, it was maybe around $100)

And the day before prom I gave it back to him and he let me keep I think $10 or $20 for my troubles.