While I make coffee to pay my rent, I also freelance for a firm that provides content for websites such as eHow and Answerbag. This has turned out to be an ideal solution to the current economic woes facing this recent college grad, because as long as people are lazy morons who ask stupid questions, I will have a job. America has few self-renewing resources, but thankfully stupidity is one of them, and as long as people keep Googling "Why do pennies get dirty?" I will have a steady paycheck.
(Yes, I actually wrote an article on that very topic. Yes, they paid me for it. Yes, I laughed and sobbed the entire four minutes it took to put together.)
Our prospective assignments are generated by data gathered from various search engines. It's completely anonymous; I don't know if Phil in New Brunswick or Sheila in Barstow is asking me how to gain the trust and respect of Capricorn men, and frankly, I don't care. The title guys - those in charge of classifying and approving prospective articles - have a job for which they are completely unqualified, which constantly delights and amuses me. I'm pretty sure that articles about pancake flanges do not belong in the "Food" articles division, any more so than articles about electronic wiring belong in the "Fashion" section. You choose your assignment, write it (with references), and have it copy-edited and fact checked. It's a simple gig, and believe me, I'm grateful for it. The fact that it is an inexhaustible source of amusement for me is merely a bonus.
Some questions are maddeningly vague..."How do you fix a watch?" and the like, while others are mind-bogglingly specific..."The History of the Hotel Pennsylvania Silver Crest" was a favorite of mine; I researched God-knows how many documents and files before discovering that there is no written history of the silverware's crest because nobody gives a rat's patoot.
You can tell what people are up to outside of their computer lives; there are always questions that read exactly like the prompts from a college sophomore English class (no, I'm not going to tell you six arguments for a Colonialist reading of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice; that's why God and the obscenely rich university donors gave you a library, dillweed), while some questions I am more than happy to NOT answer (why are there multiple questions in a row on cleaning blood from a carpet and collecting life insurance policies?). It's like Double Indemnity for the Facebook generation...if Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck had only had Google, they could have chatted with Gmail instead of skulking about in grocery store aisles to plan their crimes.
Indicators of larger world issues are at play, too. There have been a dishearteningly high number of questions lately about how to extract gold from various substances - computer chips, teeth, quartz, scrap electronic wiring, ocean water. My guess is that there are a lot of folks out there who are looking for anyway to get by, and while I'm glad to share any information I can, it saddens me that this is what we've come to, and that for many this is the only hope of finding the next month's rent or tomorrow's dinner.
...and then there are the questions that have no bearing on reality whatsoever, such as whoever wanted me to tell them how to build robots out of everything from concrete to wood to tissue paper. Sorry, no can do there, but it did sound like the makings of a great children's book...The Three Little Robots and the Big Bad W.O.LF. (Wolverine Operative Lethal Force). "One made of straw, one made of sticks, one made of bricks...And he zapped! And he zapped! And he zapped that stick robot to smithereens! But the engineer, who made his robot out of bricks, knew that it could withstand the blasts of the Big Bad W.O.L.F's humanoid and plasma uranium fragmentizer fields (his H.U.F.Fs and P.U.F.Fs)."
Oops, sorry about that. Where was I? Oh yeah, random questions that people ask. Clearly, random is a topic about which I know nothing.
Anyway, it's a good gig that I'm glad to have, and honestly enjoy quite a bit. I learn about things I've never even heard of before (moldavite, anyone?), and I earn a bit of cash on the side. It doesn't pay the bills, but it does keep me in shoes.
Shoes that you'll see me wearing with my jeans and sparkly top, of course.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment