Dave Barry's Money Secrets (9 page)

ME:
Really? How?

SUPPORT PERSON:
Well, I can’t say for sure without my reading glasses, but I think you have to use a computer.

ME:
Oh God.

SUPPORT PERSON:
I know! It’s crazy!

ME:
All I want to do is listen to this one song, “Chain of Fools.”

SUPPORT PERSON:
Aretha!

ME:
Yes!

SUPPORT PERSON:
I love that song! (
Singing
). “My father said, ‘Come on home . . .’ ”

SUPPORT PERSON AND ME SINGING TOGETHER:
“My doctor said, ‘Take it eeeeeeeeeEEEEEASY . . .’ ”

ME:
Damn, that woman can sing.

SUPPORT PERSON:
I
know.
You hear these women singers today, like whatshername . . .

ME:
The one with the cleavage?

SUPPORT PERSON:
Yes! What
is
her name?

ME:
I don’t remember. But she has no talent.

SUPPORT PERSON:
I know! Take away her cleavage, she’s nothing.

ME:
She’s selling Frappucinos at Starbucks.

SUPPORT PERSON:
Aretha has talent
and
cleavage.

ME:
Oh God yes. You could lose a backhoe in there.

SUPPORT PERSON:
Try telling
that
to these kids today.

ME:
Isn’t
that
the truth. Well, listen, I’m sure you have other people waiting. Thanks so much for the help!

SUPPORT PERSON:
It’s why I am here.

Wouldn’t that be a great service? Granted, you won’t solve your technical problem, but let’s face it, you’ll never solve it anyway. The reason your kids gave you the music player in the first place was that they knew eventually you’d give up on learning how to use it and give it to them.

But the point is that Technical Support for Boomers could be a very successful business. And not just because of digital music. There’s also the whole issue of digital photos. There are millions of Boomers out there taking pictures with digital cameras, and the majority of them
do not know how to get the picture out of the camera.
The only way they can see their pictures now is on the little screen on the camera itself, which means when they get home from their once-in-a-lifetime trip to the Grand Canyon, their visual souvenir of one of nature’s most spectacular and majestic vistas looks like this:

Photography Credits

A person frustrated by digital photography would definitely benefit from Technical Support for Boomers, which would offer timely and specific advice (“What I do is buy postcards”).

I’ve given you some good Boomer-related ideas. But the truth is that
any
business you come up with that targets Baby Boomers will probably be a big success. You don’t even necessarily have to have a real business. You could just select Boomers at random from the phone book and send them invoices for “services rendered,” and a lot of us Boomers would pay them. We’d just assume you had provided some service to us, and we forgot what it was.

Speaking of cluelessness, another prime target demographic group for your business could be:

Pet Owners

It is a known fact that modern pet owners are completely insane. There was a time when dogs and cats were considered to be, basically, dogs and cats. We were very
fond
of them, of course, but we understood that they were animals, and we did not confuse animals with humans, except sometimes late at night in parts of the South.

That line has long since been crossed. Many modern pet owners consider their pets to be
much
more important than the actual humans in their lives. These pet owners will cheerfully pay for any service or product that they believe will make their pet happier, including gourmet pet food, spa treatments, trust funds, plastic surgery, designer clothes, footwear, physical therapists, psychologists and—I am not making this up—pet psychics. That is correct: There are people out there who will pay somebody good money to
tell them what their dog is thinking.
Let me just say, as a person who has owned a number of dogs: If you can’t figure out what a dog is thinking, you are, with all due respect, dumber than ketchup. Without even knowing your specific dog, I can tell you right now what it’s thinking. It’s thinking one of the Ten Basic Dog Thoughts.

T
HE
T
EN
B
ASIC
D
OG
T
HOUGHTS

SOURCE: PETA

If you can come up with a product or service that pet owners will think their pets need or want, you
will
get rich. One idea I had, which you are welcome to use, is: Dead Squirrels by Mail. There are few things in the world that make a dog happier than getting hold of a squirrel, and yet very few dogs ever get to enjoy this pleasure, because the brain of a standard squirrel is nearly one molecule in diameter, which means squirrels seriously outclass dogs in the tactical thinking department. Go to any park, and you will see dogs racing around at top speed, nearly insane with frustration, ramming headfirst into trees at speeds upwards of 30 miles per hour in their fruitless efforts to catch squirrels, while the squirrels themselves are safely up in their trees laughing so hard that the ground beneath them is damp with squirrel drool.*
 
²⁸

So the idea is, to make these dogs—and of course their owners—happy, you would start a business that would, each month, mail your customers a dead squirrel. I guarantee that the arrival of this package would be WAY more exciting for the dog than any dog-spa treatment. There would be urine
everywhere.

The reason it has to be a dead squirrel, of course, is that if it was alive, it would easily elude the dog. Another possibility would be to mail live squirrels, but hobble them by putting tiny shackles on their paws so the dogs could catch them. The problem there is that the dog might be one of those mutant miniature breeds that look like the result of a biological experiment to see what happens when you mate a gerbil with a ball of lint:

Photography Credits

Even a hobbled squirrel would take about four seconds to reduce this dog to Purina Squirrel Chow. No, dead squirrels are definitely the way you want to go. Fortunately, there is an abundant supply of them occurring naturally all around you, if you just look.

Photography Credits

Another potentially huge moneymaker is cell phones for pets. You know how you often see businesspeople walking around in public talking on those cell-phone headsets, which enable them to harness the awesome power of global communications technology to look like total assholes? It is only a matter of time before pet owners start wanting these things for their pets:

Photography Credits

If your pet was wearing a cell phone with a headset, you could always stay in constant contact with it and find out exactly what it was thinking (“barkbarkbarkbarkbark”).

Yet another pet-related business you could make big money in is pet cloning. I found out about this from the
New York Times,
*
 
²⁹
which had a story about this person who loved his cat so much that he was planning to pay a pet-cloning company $32,000 for a new one. That is correct:
$32,000.
For a
cat.
We have to ask ourselves, as a society, what has happened to our priorities and our values when—at a time when many young people in this country cannot afford to go to college—a person is willing to spend, to replace a cat, an amount of money that could be used to buy—and this is a conservative estimate—9,000 gallons of beer.

This is a horrible misuse of resources. You definitely should cash in on it. What you do is start a company called Discount Scientific Pet Cloning. Your competitive edge would be that you’d charge
half
what the “big boys” were charging for pet clones. Here’s how your business would work: You’d tell your customers to mail you a photo of their pet, plus a plastic baggie containing some of the pet’s DNA, which could be in the form of a hair, a saliva-soaked tennis ball, a tapeworm, a poop, some fabric from a piece of furniture that the pet was fond of attempting to mate with, etc. You would take these items into your Scientific Cloning Laboratory, which would be your garage. There, using a pair of sterile tongs, you would throw the baggie away. Then you would go to an animal shelter and get a replacement pet. This is why you need the photograph: You want the replacement to look at least vaguely like the pet that it is replacing. At the very least you want it to be the same species. Like, if the original pet was a cat, you don’t want to be sending the owner a llama. For one thing, llamas are really hard to mail.

Perhaps you are thinking: “Wait a minute: If you’re not actually cloning the pets, isn’t that
. . . fraud?
” Well, if you want to use a picky legalistic definition of “fraud”—i.e., committing an act of fraud—the answer is, technically, yes. But trust me: Once your customer receives the “cloned” pet, he or she will immediately fall in love with it, because (1) all animals are capable of touching the hearts of humans on a deep emotional level, and (2) your customer is an idiot, which is why he or she is attempting to clone a pet by mail in the first place.