Odd Job: a Q&A series about the weirdest ways people make money

Doing your taxes is frustrating, but doing your taxes when you’re accumulating paystubs in a variety of states, precincts, and countries can make an annoying process downright draconian. Uncle Sam might not ask for anything more than a W-2 from Americans who only work for one company, but pro athletes rarely have that luxury. John Karaffa saw this firsthand when he played professional basketball overseas for 12 seasons. Between federal demands, regional idiosyncrasies, and international inconsistencies, sometimes an athlete’s tax return can be hundreds of pages deep.

So, in 2009, Karaffa started ProSport CPA, an accounting firm that offers tax services and financial planning to athletes all over the world. Today, he says the company works with almost 1,000 clients, including pros in every major sports league in America and the rest of the world. Karaffa explains that ProSport understands the tax situations athletes might come across in the murky waters of contracts, royalties, and endorsement income. But more than that, he hopes to be a steadying presence in an industry that eats its young. (For example, Karaffa advises against opening a restaurant while you’re on your first contract.)

Six months ago, very few people were making real money on TikTok, the video app and social network du jour for young creators and aspiring influencers. Brands hadn’t really begun to descend en masse, and the home feed was mostly free of anything hashtagged #ad. The main perks to being TikTok-famous were high viewership numbers, lots of likes, and maybe sometimes getting recognized in public.

It was only a matter of time, though, before companies and celebrities wanted in on the potentially more than a billion eyeballs scrolling through the app. By the fall of 2019, major campaigns from brands like Chipotle, ELF Cosmetics, and MAC became commonplace at the same time as A-listers like Will Smith hopped on board. Meanwhile, TikTok stars were landing lucrative talent deals and topping the music charts.

Onstage, the comedians at The Laugh Factory weave anecdotes about breakups, problem relatives, and bad first dates for laughs. But Ildiko Tabori always gets the real story. When comics are sitting in Tabori’s office, traumas are presented without a punchline. That’s her job: to help funny people deal with the problems that stick around long after the crowd finishes laughing at them, like a real-life Dr. Katz.

Tabori has been The Laugh Factory’s therapist-in-residence for nine years, and in that time she’s worked with dozens of different comedians who’ve made their way through the Sunset Strip institution. Her clients can either meet her at her own Los Angeles practice, where she works with her other civilian patients, or if pressed for time, at an upstairs enclave in The Laugh Factory before they go on in the evening. The first six sessions Tabori has with a comedian are pro bono. Any additional sessions are arranged with a copay. After nearly 10 years in the business, she says she feels like a full-fledged member of the comedy family — fluent in its jargon, culture, and neuroses — despite never performing herself.

Kristen Sotakoun had to learn Pocahontas’s signature. It starts with a strong crisscrossing “P” and ends with a scythe-like “S” that swoops below the base of the script. Compared to Cinderella’s frilly cursive, Tarzan’s closed-fist scrawl, and the paw print serving as an “O” in Pluto, Pocahontas’s autograph looks as though she painted it with all the colors of the wind.

Sotakoun worked at Disney World for four years, starting in 2008 when she was just 18. Today, at 30 and with a job in the video game industry, she says she looks back at her princess era with only good memories.

Anthony Falco turned 40 in a white apron, deep in Argentina, working on a Buenos Aires pizzeria’s soft opening for friends and family. It is the third year in a row he has spent his birthday in another country’s kitchen, and 2020 will mark his fourth year under his own self-made job title: “International Pizza Consultant.”

Falco was originally one of the masterminds behind Brooklyn’s Neapolitan institution Roberta’s, but since going independent in 2016, he’s made a living exporting what he’s learned about marinara sauce, air bubbles, and ricotta dollops to anyone who wants to pay for his wisdom. Thus far, Falco tells me he’s taken on about 35 different clients in countries like Brazil, Portugal, and Kuwait. He describes the job as a comprehensive pizza crash course, drawn from a decade’s worth of experience in front of one of the world’s most famous wood-fired ovens.

Here’s a little-known fact: Vending machines are independent entities. They aren’t leased by PepsiCo, the Coca-Cola Company doesn’t send drivers out every evening to restock soda cans, and Wrigley never receives the four quarters you plunked into the bowels of your laundromat’s confectionery display for a months-old bag of Skittles. Instead, the vending industry is the provenance of people like Jaime Ibanez, a 19-year old who owns 25 machines in eight locations around the Dallas-Fort Worth area, all under the banner of his own company: Vending Bites.

Ibanez tells me that working in vending machines is comically hermetic. He wakes up early and checks an app on his phone called MoMa, which gives him a snapshot of the specific items that have been purchased from the card readers on his machines. Then it’s off to Sam’s Club, where he buys chips, pretzels, and candy bars in giant shrink-wrapped multipacks. Ibanez hauls the goods around in the back of his car along the eternal highways of North Texas until his vending machines are restocked and the money reclaimed. All of this labor is undertaken by Ibanez and his girlfriend, Lizbeth Galvan. (He doesn’t pay her a salary, but the vending machines pay for their shared rent and bills.) The couple makes each trip together, and usually, they’re back at home around 4 in the afternoon.

Warning: This story contains graphic imagery.

In 2006, Stu Pearson, a Scottish soldier in the British Army, stepped on a mine in Afghanistan. In the ensuing chaos, Pearson’s left leg was destroyed. He was on the battlefield for six hours before he was extracted to a military base, where doctors managed to clean the wound and save his life. The ordeal became a major part of the mythology surrounding the UK’s involvement in the war in Afghanistan, so much so that it was adapted into a feature film called Kajaki.

53-year old Jon Dalman and 28-year old Alex Haynes divide their bounty hunting labor according to their abilities. Haynes handles all the digital research: She runs names through a network of tracking data, allowing her to pin down the exact address where a bail-skipping defendant might be lying low, so they may collect the sum offered by a bondsman for their apprehension. Dalman, who is ex-military and previously worked as a security professional, is the one who opens the door and escorts the fugitive off to prison. Dalman tells me that his ideal bounty is wrapped up in five minutes, with as little excitement as possible. No guns, no tough-guy profanity, no rolling around on the floor — just a quick conversation and a dignified walk to the backseat of his car.

Thanks to piles of vengeful cowboy fiction, the planet Mandalore, and the continued carceral mythology of Dog Chapman, the pop-culture image of a bounty hunter remains an above-the-law renegade with a license to kill. Dalman and Haynes, who are in a relationship and have been bounty hunting for five years, happily volunteer that they think their job is pretty cool. But the realities of how they do their job might deflate the world’s 14-year olds and cop aficionados. Nearly every defendant they’ve processed has come quietly, and Dalman tells me the best tool in his arsenal is to treat each person he apprehends with respect. Together, they spend far more energy researching, travelling, and staking out the residences of their marks than they do during the arrest. Violence is specifically avoided.

No one has more best friends than Jen Glantz. The 31-year-old entrepreneur works with anywhere between 20 and 35 brides per year since breaking ground on her business, Bridesmaid For Hire, in 2015. The gist of her pitch is remarkably simple: Glantz is not a wedding planner, she will not schedule the father-daughter dance or color coordinate the unruly groomsmen, but she will serve as the emotional fulcrum on the biggest day of your life by being the best bridesmaid she can be. Sometimes that job is easy. Sometimes all it takes is eating cake and breaking in the dance floor. But other times it means extinguishing long-simmering fires that flare up between newly ordained in-laws, or arriving in the clutch when a maid of honor drops out after an ugly meltdown. Consider it contract-based female solidarity, for around $2,000 a client.

Glantz tells me that Bridesmaid For Hire originated as a Craigslist ad, posted after serving as a civilian bridesmaid for countless friends. The hundreds of emails she received in response to that ad validated her suspicion that, within the titanic $72 billion wedding industry, there was room for a service that focuses entirely on the well-being of a stressed out, overwhelmed bride. Today, the business is how she makes a living. Glantz works with her clients anywhere from three months to a full year before their wedding date, after establishing a rate with them that hinges on what they want out of the service. She’s trained other women to be part-time bridesmaid engineers, written two memoirs, and has diversified Bridesmaid For Hire into a number of distinct verticals and financial plans. (If, for instance, you only need an hour of her expert counseling, you can schedule a “1-on-1 wedding vent session.”)

Few people can claim a more fruitful career as professional identical twins than 44-year-old Gary and Larry Lane. The brothers have parlayed their matching features into countless commercial roles (most notably for Dr. Scholls, Snickers, and Virgin Airlines) and their IMDb credits include parts in Dawson’s Creek, The Patriot, Zoolander, Spider-Man, The Girl Next Door, and Jack and Jill. They’ve won $50,000 on a twins-themed episode of Fear Factor, they’ve taken home the top prize in a twins-themed episode of Wipeout, and the $150,000 grand prize in the scarcely remembered Jimmy Kimmel-hosted reality show Set For Life. The two were even named the “Vox Twins” for five years by the Danish spirit distillery Vox Vodka, though Vox Media itself has yet to name an official set of twins.

All together, this is the ideal career arc for Twins Gone Hollywood. Gary and Larry Lane will never be A-listers, but they’ve met show business on its own terms — happily marinating in the kitschy, silly, matchily-dressed work that the industry offers those who’ve shared the same womb. For over a decade, the brothers have scoured Los Angeles for any audition with decent pay and rhyming character names, and in that time they’ve built a small empire. Their appeal is obvious; the brothers are charming, handsome, and equipped with an approachably molasses North Carolina accent, which makes them a perfect fit for TV.

Between 2012 and 2015, 45-year-old Stephanie Arora drove for Uber and Lyft in her native San Francisco. She left ridesharing behind in the same way most everyone does: Eventually, the finances of paying for her own gas and making her own hours didn’t work with her bottom line. In the years since, she’s worked in telemarketing and tech sales, but in 2018, Arora made an unconventional return to the delivery industry as a professional driver for the California cannabis dispensary Caliva. Today, Arora’s work days are spent couriering weed cookies, flowers, gummies, and beverages to eager customers all over the Bay Area.

Last year, Caliva partnered with the marijuana delivery service Eaze, which provides Uber-like commerce and geotagging software that automates the cannabis order process. Every morning, Arora walks into work, and sifts through the addresses and receipts that are beamed directly to her phone. But unlike Uber, Lyft, or the rest of the gig economy, Eaze isn’t a decentralized platform. Each driver is a full-time salaried employee of the marijuana company that happens to be licensing Eaze’s network. Arora is a longtime advocate for cannabis, and while she uses her own car, Caliva provides her full benefits, sick leave, hourly wages, and mileage reimbursement, which stands in complete contrast to her time working for ridesharing apps. (Currently, Caliva says they’re paying their drivers anywhere between $15 and $17.50 per hour.)

As a rule, wedding speeches are either painfully awkward or hopelessly generic. It’s not easy to stand uncomfortably in front of the banquet table, doing your best to consolidate a lifetime’s worth of memories while editing out all the PG-13 bits.

Have you ever tried, and failed, to translate an arcane inside joke in front of all the in-laws you don’t know? Have you ever clenched your teeth as a maid of honor got a little too real? Have you ever watched a clueless father of the bride putz around with an endless Powerpoint presentation? Wedding speeches are easily the worst 10 minutes of what’s supposed to be the best night of a couple’s life, but thankfully, 52-year-old Den Pope has stepped in to disrupt the process.

Instead of an alabaster cave in Santorini, or a swank penthouse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, or a Beverly Hills estate dripping with intrigue, the most visited Airbnb in the world is a squat cabin with a bulbous, mushroom-shaped roof in the sleepy Northern Californian coastal town of Aptos.

The owners, Michael and Kitty Mrache, have held that title since joining Airbnb in 2009, one year after the short-term rental giant launched, but long before it became truly ubiquitous. Today, the “Mushroom Dome,” which features a tiny bedroom, two beds, a kitchen, and a wooden patio, is almost entirely booked up till January 2020. Each night costs $130, and the listing itself averages around three million views a year.

The Atlantic’s Megan Garber summed up the intrinsic quality of a stock photo like this: “To see a stock image is to know you’re seeing a stock image.” It’s a paradox. Stock photos are supposed to blend into the background like visual white noise. They capture the human condition at its most pleasantly benign: a world full of delighted women eating salads, patient tech support employees, and extremely conventional wedding ideas. Yet there is something about the carefully crafted anonymity of antiseptic stock composition that churns the collective uncanny. After all, nobody in real life ever looks that happy to be eating a salad. How does anyone capture the airtight nothingness required of a stock photo? How do you turn humans into vaguely human-shaped ideas?

Tony and Chelsea Northrup have seen exactly how the sausage gets made. Today, the couple work as professional photographers and host their own successful shutterbug YouTube channel. But eight years ago, they made some money by shooting and starring in their own stock photo venture.

When I jumped on a WhatsApp call with 41-year old Didi Taihuttu, he was a few days away from joining his family on CoinBank’s annual Mediterranean “Blockchain Cruise” — a combination vacation getaway and crypto symposium at which all the movers and shakers in the decentralized finance arena get together to discuss a hypothetical future where government-printed money is rendered obsolete, dropping by Mallorca and Marseille along the way.

According to Taihuttu, invitations to blockchain conferences and seminars have piled up ever since he liquidated almost everything he owned (yes, including his house and his cars) and invested his remaining capital in bitcoin. It’s a financial pivot that’s both irrational and dangerous to an outsider, but within the crypto nation, it can make you a legend.

There are 562 million items available for purchase on Amazon. Each of them is equipped with a breezy, bullet-point description of its dimensions, colors, amenities, and overarching purpose in the world. That is a sizable number — you could make the argument that Amazon alone is the largest digital publisher in the world — but when you add in the 2.1 million sellers on Etsy, the 279 million active buyers on Alibaba, and the thousands of movies and TV episodes available on Netflix, you’re looking at literally billions of product descriptions littering the internet.

It’s the sort of writing that e-commerce giants would’ve outsourced to AI years ago if the technology was available. But in 2019, you still need the human brain to compose the quiet prose that a product description requires. Becca Luna was one of the women behind the curtain, banging out the paragraphs to aide your consumption. Yes, it’s as tedious as it sounds.

I think all men have a natural distrust of the sperm donation business. We’re constantly inundated with their ads — usually in the index pages of dying alt-weeklies or in the margins of dicey websites — promising hundreds of dollars for about 10 minutes of our time. How could that not be a big honking scam? Why would a company ever pay me to jerk off? Seems too good to be true.

Thankfully, I have 30-year-old John Carpantier as my personal ambassador. About six years ago, he worked as a full-time sperm donor in Northern California. Carpantier was in a fortunate situation with his other expenses (he was living rent-free), but he remains one of the few men in human history to literally make a career out of what the rest of us make of our morning showers.

Armageddon, Ahmed Qoqas’ latest mod, warps the docile suburbia of SimNation into an epic struggle of superheroes and supervillains. A Sim’s eyes glows blue and it calls lightning from the sky. It is Avengers: Endgame, in Macintosh form.

The Sims is one of the most popular video game franchises of all time. You take control of a small family in a modest house and enjoy the thrills of ordinary life. Unlike other games, there isn’t a clear victory condition or story to follow. You will not shoot aliens, or level up abilities, or kill the warlord who set you on a quest for vengeance. Instead, you feed your dog, throw barbecues with your neighbors, and maybe get married to the cute girl or guy across the hall.

On Christmas last year, 31-year old William Neher posted a mosaic to his Instagram of all the apps he’s worked for during the three years he’s spent as a full-time side-gig hustler. There are ride-hail ventures like Uber, Lyft, and Via, food delivery platforms like Grubhub and Uber Eats, dog-walking services like Rover and Wag, and a shockingly diverse litany of electric scooter companies that have taken over every metropolitan sidewalk in America.

Neher, who is a bachelor, childless, and an American citizen, represents a seemingly unavoidable reality as we turn more people into “independent contractors.” He’s itinerized his app work into many combinations during his time as an iPhone-based worker, and now has landed on some semblance of a schedule: collecting and recharging the electric scooters that are left on street corners, with intermittent dog walks mixed in for good measure.

A bar chart made Nathan “BlackRain79” Williams famous. Neatly organized by the stakes he was playing, the table — which went viral in the poker world around 2009 — catalogs his online poker winnings: He’d made a $53 profit playing at a table with $3/$6 “blinds” (a term used for the starting bets of each poker hand); $40 on $0.50/$1. He had lost some, too: He was in the red $250 betting at the $0.25/$0.50 table, but that wasn’t as bad as he’d done in $2/$4, where he was down nearly $3,000.

But it is the bottom of that table where the legend begins. In games where the blinds were one cent and two cents — literally the lowest possible stakes anyone can play in North America — Williams had turned an incomprehensible $13,000 profit. In $0.02/$0.05 games, one notch higher, he had made another $13,000. If you’ve played poker at these stakes before, you know that the pots rarely breach the one dollar mark. That didn’t matter. Williams had built a small empire, one penny at a time.