I love the smell of scams in the morning

[unixronin]

So here I am, looking again at listings for part-time work-from-home to bring in a little extra money.  The past six years or so have convinced me that I'm unemployable full-time for anything I'm physically capable of doing at this point¹ (I could probably get hired to work retail at, say, Home Depot, but my knees and left foot would never stand it).  And it seems there's basically three types of jobs listed if you're looking to work from home:

1. Telemarketing.  'Nuff said.

   (I'd almost sooner mug old ladies.)

2. Unspecified get-rich-quick promises using all the pyramid-scam buzzwords.

   (Sub-category:  Unspecified get-rich-quick promises using all the pyramid-scam buzzwords plus a liberal showering of "Christian" and "Mentor" and the like, to take advantage of the pious who think that if it's Christian it must be honest, because surely no fellow Christian would ever try to cheat them... right?)

3. And "Get paid to take surveys on your computer."  I have a hard time believing there's significant money in that.  The sites I've looked at so far, it seems that to sign up, you have to agree to be spammed, opt in to a bunch of marketing crap, and sometimes even sign up for online college courses.  Can you say "just another scam"?  Sure you can.

Once again, I find myself wondering about a home-based PC repair business.  "The PC Doctor makes house calls!"  With places like Best Buy charging $70-$80 just to examine and diagnose a problem, there almost has to be a way to undercut them on repairs, and there may be money in support too.  (With the number of cheap-crap white-box PCs on the market stuffed full of lowest-bidder parts, there's probably little chance of making money building machines; anyone who knows enough to understand why it's worth using better-quality components probably knows enough to build their own.)

But how does one get started...?

[1]  Well, unless I were willing to uproot everyone again and move back to California.  Which I'm not.  It'd be chancing everything on a roll of the dice, and we'd be back into apartment-rental hell for the foreseeable future.

Comments

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Glad to hear that worked out well.

[genuine-snark.livejournal.com]

If it came off like bragging, I apologize--I didn't mean it that way.

I just meant that there may be opportunities you're not considering, because they're not the usual career path for our skills. I think the SOHO/home support idea is a good step towards exploring some new ideas.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

If it came off like bragging, I apologize--I didn't mean it that way.

Just as well I didn't take it that way then, innit?. ;)

I understand what you mean, yes. I just don't see at the moment what they might be. There's lots of things I know how to do — the big problem would be convincing people to pay me to do them, when I've never been paid to do them before. (Well, that and picking the right one in the first place.)