this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2025
30 points (96.9% liked)
Asklemmy
48687 readers
985 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Selling elevator keys.
The high school I went to was an old building that was built like a prison (seriously, look at that thing), it's 3 stories plus a basement (and the smoker's area - this was in the 80s - was out back from the basement), so I routinely had to go from basement to 3rd floor for classes. it sucked. The school had an elevator, but it was key-operated, and they only gave out keys to kids who actually needed it. I faked a knee injury to get a key and it was great not having to climb 4 flights of stairs. But after a couple days I noticed other kids were always waiting around for me so they could ride the elevator with me and such.
Thus, a brilliant idea was hatched: I went to a locksmith's shop and got 10 copies of the key made. Whenever anyone wanted to get on the elevator with me I would offer to sell them a key for $10. I sold out by the end of the 2nd day and word was beginning to spread. I went to a different locksmith and got another 10 keys made, but only sold 7 of them before somebody ratted me out. Still, $170 in my pocket less a couple bucks for the copies for 2 days of 'work' seemed like a pretty sweet deal to me, even if I did have to go back to climbing the stairs again.
The funniest part is through one of the classes I took I had been invited to join some kind of 'young entrepreneur's club' and they kicked me out when I got busted. Seems like I was doing things exactly right for that sort of crowd, I guess the lesson learned there is getting caught is the problem, not doing the thing that gets you caught. :P