Belated Question of the Day: January 7th, 2019

questionoftheday asks: What is the worst bullshit you have ever put up with for monetary gain?

My answer: Incredibly tedious romance-novel-marketing gruntwork, which required just enough brainpower that you couldn't listen to something more entertaining while you were doing it.

Honestly, even that would probably have been okay if they'd actually paid consistently. Even the same (very low) amount of *average* pay, just with a lower variance! I know there's all that psychological research on gambling, rats pulling levers forever to try to get a stockpile in case of a run of bad luck later and all that, but personally I feel much more motivated to pull a lever for a guaranteed penny than for a 1/1000 chance of $10, and much more motivated by a 1/1000 chance of $10 than a 1/100000 chance of $1,000.

(Edit: although come to think of it I do grok the stockpiling aspect, so I suppose that's a bad example. But, like, there are clearly people who fixate more on the large value of a possible reward than on its small odds, and I am very not one of them, is what I am trying to say. I have to talk myself into gambles by walking myself through their positive expected value, and it's often not easy to do that.)

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A different person might say it's the short-notice changes in schedule at my current job, but for me, when that happens I pretty much never feel resentful at all: my brain just goes "yes, this is why they are paying us such ridiculously large quantities of money, I knew exactly what I was signing up for and I regret nothing".

(To clarify, it pays minimum wage. But I have very low standards for what constitutes a ridiculously large quantity of money, and it *is* true that "must be able to handle short-notice schedule changes" was an explicit condition of the job opening I applied for.)