Hello everyone,
For reasons I won’t get into here, I’m looking for a minimum wage job where I would still have enough downtime to self-study an online course I’m doing. I’ve been thinking something like this might be possible in a receptionist style scenario. Has anyone done this before? What sorts of jobs are good for this? I’m gessing it’s probably jobs where they are looking for a person to pay just to have someone on-site and on-call…
I’ve known people who worked at their school’s library and it wasn’t only just accepted that they studied while on the job, it was encouraged.
My nephew does that and loves it. He gets to scan old materials to preserve them.
Ooh this is a great idea! I might even be able to get into a university library because I’m student age.
Well, you can create your own job, if you like. It’s not for everyone, but it is flexible – there’s no employer looking to squeeze every ounce of productivity out of your hours. I can describe a little bit what that would look like in case it’s helpful.
I think most businesses at their core have one of a limited set of problems. For the people I encounter, it’s either content, marketing, sales, or customer service. Even though I operate a tech company, the problem is almost never technology (probably there’s a lesson somewhere in that). Sales and customer service often don’t leave you much downtime if it’s a busy company, so let’s ignore them.
Marketing: A lot of businesses just need someone reliable to set up Google Adwords and stuff. You won’t make a fortune, but it’s easy to learn how to do, and once it’s set up there is very little maintenance. We’re not talking Coca Cola here – small businesses that need some help getting local search traffic by paying for search ads. One of my clients just hired someone to do exactly that, who walked into their business and just outright suggested it – although they’ve been pretty awful at it to be honest. Anyway, the bar is pretty low and Google wants you to do this so there’s tons of learning material out there.
You can identify customers by walking down the street and searching for every small business, and seeing which ones are hard to find.
Content: Businesses that sell online often need a bunch of product photography and website updates that they don’t have time to do. Often this is non-technical work – there’s a UI you add the photo and description to, then press ‘update’. Often their business profile isn’t set up right on google maps and stuff and they need help fixing it.
Content can also be copy writing, video reviews, social content… but honestly I find all of these harder sells than just “your website is out of date, want to pay me a small fee to fix it, then keep it current?”.
Put together a list of services and print it out so you look organized. Don’t worry about looking like a fool – it’s OK to look like a fool sometimes, as long as you also sometimes succeed.
Try to avoid charging minimum wage. Start with a more moderate cost and work downward if you need to. The customers that pay the least, typically demand the most. I’d structure it as a setup fee and then a fixed amount per month, paid quarterly in advance, for maintenance. Send them a report of what you did every month (google adwords makes this easy).
I’ve got a couple of people I do this for and I bill 250$ a month, paid quarterly in advance, for 10 hours a month. You might earn less than this at the start and that’s OK – I’m just volunteering a data point. It’s not rocket surgery, it’s boring stuff, but it keeps my bills paid while I harass bigger clients to pay theirs.
Night time security shifts might work well for this. A buddy mine did that for a while and called it “money detention” for all the activity he did during. I think he mostly read comic books.
Ooh, I’m a night person. This might work out.
This was going to be my suggestion. But even day time is good for this. I did security for 12 years. The vast majority of jobs are sitting on your ass watching movies on your phone. Couple tips if you go the security route:
Security is different in each US state (if you’re in another country this whole thing is gonna be meaningless). In some states it requires a 40 hour course, in others a 10 minute training class. it varies widely, find out what your states guidelines are.
If you get certed for security, you’ll never want for a shitty, low paying job. If you get fired, there’s another job around the corner. But, contracts change a lot, so don’t get too attached to any one post.
Gate guard is primo. You normally get a shack, you’re normally alone, and you normally deal with people only during shift changes. That means 6 hours of an 8 hour shift are totally yours.
Hospital security SUCKS.
If you need extra cash, concerts and other events pay well, and you get to listen to live music for free.
If you live anywhere with Weather™ put a change of clothes, food, sleeping bag and other gear in your car. I once got stuck on a post, snowed in, for 4 days.
Keep shit in your car in general. A steam deck is awesome, a switch is good.
If you’re on a post with another person, like 2 guards in a tiny shack for 8 hours, make sure you’re upfront about if you’re an intro/extrovert. Most guards have been doing it for long enough that they truly don’t care if you don’t wanna speak at all in 8 hours, they just wanna know up front where their plans should be. Nothing more irritating than thinking you’re gonna have a friend for a day and end up bored because you didn’t bring your stuff with you (which is why you should keep it in your car), or thinking you’re going to have a day to catch up on school/video games/shows and you can’t get 5 minutes to yourself because the other guard won’t STFU
You are not a cop. Don’t act like a cop. You aren’t even Paul blart. You’re a person in a uniform made of old trash bags whose whole job is to get an insurance discount for the company you’re posted at
The guard shack almost never has cameras, and for some reason, people on tinder/Grindr are freaking wild about hooking up in a guard shack
ETA: only thing better than gate guard is posts where they want you to park your own car and sit in it for your shift. You just sit in your car all day/night. Which means your own sound system, and basically everything you wanna bring with you at your fingertips. It’s awesome.
Also, midsize semi local security companies are better. Securitas and similar companies are kinda shitty, and the really small ones are always, like, weirdly militant. If you happen to be in Tennessee or Virginia I can probably hook you up with a company that’ll get you a good post.
Thanks for all this info. This is all very useful for me to know.
Where did you find these jobs? Were they just on normal job sites or is there a different method? (I’m in the UK but I imagine this will all be pretty universal)
Boeing QA department
Or be a unicorn breeder, because that job also exists.
Good one!
Might check into hotel reception too. I worked nights at one, and my main duty was making sure the building didn’t catch fire or disappear while waiting to do the audit and start morning coffee before I left.
How often did you catch it disappearing?
Thankfully never, not sure how I would have recovered from that one! Did catch it pretending it was on fire a few times. It was alerting the local FD our alarms were triggered when on site, it was quiet an no burning was going on. They called a couple different times about it and even showed up once… in case I was lying? Bet safe than sorry I guess.
At my last job, the fire system kept calling the fire department with false positives so often that they told us to fix it or the city was going to start fining the company LOTS of money. One of the dumbass HR people asked if we could just disable the fire system to prevent it from making false positives. The very patient fireman had to explain that no, we could not intentionally disable fire safety equipment in a populated building, and the company had to actually fix the broken detector.
The elevators also broke down a lot, one time with my intern inside. I called the fire department to get her out, and my boss’s boss said I should have waited longer before calling the fire department, for some reason. I forget why.
I never signed an NDA, and I think I’d be fine telling you the name of this global company. But to be safe, I won’t. I’ll just say that most of the people here have probably interacted with customer service run by this company before. I AM CERTAIN OF IT.
Oh wow! The places they deem fit to try and cut corners. My manager at that hotel spent some time stuck in one our elevators after he"fixed" it himself and then had to have Otis come out.
Some people will say it’s not on fire without checking if there’s any fire, so if the FD isn’t busy they’ll just roll anyway
I was grading seed at a grain processing/storage facility for a few years and it had enough down time during the evenings to do any schooling. I managed a full-time pre calculus to shore up my post secondary education requirements. My coworker ended up going back to college for programming and did a lot of his work on the afternoon shift. Our schedule was a 6am-2pm with little down time, and then an afternoon shift from 2pm-10pm with way more free time.
In my case, you didn’t have as much down time as some other quieter jobs but they paid ~$30 an hour so there’s value if you are looking for some extra cash. No prior experience required.
There was a 12hr night/day rotation for other parts of the facility where you’d swap every few days and get a week off somewhere in the mix but that schedule wasn’t for me.
Data entry is always a good field for this. Work from home (mostly), can figure it out easily, pays decently.
Hmm I guess. How many hours did you have to do this a day to scrape by? Did it get too repetitive?
Is it just the one class that’s online or are you fully remote from the physical school? I did computer lab monitoring for a while in college, also worked at the campus library for a stint. Super easy, work study, 95% of the time I was doing homework.
Nice. Yeah it’s the second situation for me. I’m studying in one place but I want to live in a different place
I worked awake overnight shifts in group homes before I got into my current line of work.
Plenty of time to study as the work is a little cleaning, a little paperwork, and some dealing with clients.
Most people just watched TV all night.
Computer support helpdesk at a university.
Any sort of service desk could work really. The front door security guy at my office spends a lot of time on his phone when he’s not signing in visitors.
My father told me that he worked on cars in a garage while he was getting his degree. He would stick study material under the cars while he worked on them. He also was able to get away with short naps under there. I doubt that’d work today, but just throwing out something I heard about.
I have an IT position that has an incredible amount of downtime. It’s a government org. I read books in between calls. You won’t be able to study if you get an IT gig at an MSP (Managed Service Provider). They have lots of clients and the work never ends. You want IT that’s in-house.
Good luck!
I don’t drive so I couldn’t confirm my theory, but if you do any jobs where you do a lot of driving around and you have a device that can read your study content to you, I imagine you can study while working because you can double-task while driving long distances.
my gf works reception at a small local museum and does this, something like that may be viable
If you can get into machining, which is harder to just get in than stay in, a lot of companies I’ve seen even offer tuition reimbursement for entry machinists to get whatever degree(they want you to get an engineering degree).
Security guard - with the right post it can be any time, but night shift is your best bet.
Any business where locations exist simply to increase territory/coverage. Here in Canada, this includes certain cannabis retailers, vape shops, certain gas station locations, that kind of thing. Places where the job is clean stuff at a certain cadence, then wait for customers, where customer volume is kinda low. Obv don’t rely on these being forever jobs - the cannabis and vape store that fits this will eventually close - but you can get paid to basically study until then.
