09.20.13
The sharing economy
You know, that new sharing economy thing where sociopaths from America’s upper middle servant class or some miscellaneous toff uses innovation — TaskRabbit or driving around on Skid Row leveraging the destitute — creatively employing underutilized human meat assets?
Pasadena Police Lt. Jason Clawson confirmed that a fight broke out about 9 a.m. as a man left the [Apple store in Pasadena] with multiple iPhones. Several homeless people said the man picked up dozens of people at homeless shelters downtown, drove them to Pasadena and promised to pay them $40 — $20 for each iPhone voucher they were able to secure.
Clawson said the fight broke out when people who were in line and hired by the man began fighting with him because they said they weren’t being paid enough, Clawson said. Police escorted the man from the scene, he said.
“It didn’t go right. I stood out here all night,??? said Dominoe Moody, 43, who said he was picked up along with several vanloads of people at a homeless mission.
Many of the homeless who had been hired to stand in line — but later stranded at the store — lingered near the store after the arrests, some hanging out on the corner across the street and a few continuing to stand in line. One homeless man was escorted out by an Apple employee after wandering into the store with no money …
Apple and no money go together like oil and water.
Anyway, seems like there really ought to be an iTunes store app for this, called iBum, one that locates homeless missions or hang-outs near you when it’s time to find someone to stand in line for the upgrade.
“Customers waiting outside the Apple store on the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica on Thursday night were grumbling about a well-dressed man who had hired two unemployed men to wait in line for him,” continued the Times.
“The man, who said his name was Sam but declined to give his last name, said he worked at a ‘high-profile Santa Monica app company’ and needed a new phone immediately because he had lost his phone recently … [He] briefly considered hiring a line sitter on TaskRabbit — a website that enables people to hire others for small errands — ‘but it was too expensive.’ ”
Brings out the best in people while transforming our lives from gold into lead.