Danny Vittore
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They say you can't make every problem go away just by throwing money at it. But by God, society is doing its best to make that a lie.
Wherever there is money and even the slightest demand for a service, there is someone out there willing to provide it, no matter how bizarre, pathetic or borderline illegal. That's why for the right amount of cash, you can get ...
If you want to experience what it's like to be famous for absolutely no reason, you can actually hire paparazzi to follow you around for an hour or two and harass you, because this is clearly the most appealing part of being famous. The company, Celeb 4 A Day, has branches in L.A., Austin, New York and San Francisco, and it can provide its services for birthdays, corporate events, or shits and giggles.
"My friends think tragically little of me!"
Basically, you schedule a time and place, and the company sends its photographers out to call out your name, barrage you with questions and take endless photos of you. It has packages starting at $500 for 30 minutes of irritation and going all the way up to a heroic $2,500 for two full hours. With that package, you also get a freaking bodyguard to protect you from the fake paparazzi, a publicist to field the fake questions for you, a goddamned limo, a fake gossip magazine with you on the cover and after the whole thing is over a DVD with a handful of the pictures that your pretend entourage took of your sad bastard ass.
This, right here, will cost you two and a half thousand dollars.
We'd like to point out that all you are managing to accomplish with this service is giving away a large amount of money to get shouted at. Though if you could write the paparazzi's questions beforehand, it might actually be worth $500 to have a group of people hound you in the parking lot of the mall demanding to know whether the rumors are true that you're actually the Batman.
Let's say you're showing up late for work because you spent last night drinking 17 beers and half a bottle of vodka and woke up in a hotel where you may or may not have had sex with someone in a donkey suit. You hope it's a suit, anyway. Normally, you would have to try to make up some excuse on your own ...
"Yeah, um ... my grandmother died."
... but backing up your massive whopper is not the easiest thing to do. You were sick? Where's your doctor's note? You were in a car crash? Why is your car in the parking lot with no damage? Well, fear not, because now you have the Alibi Network.
The Alibi Network bills itself as a "cutting edge full service discreet agency providing alibis and excuses for absences as well as assistance with a variety of sensitive issues." Essentially, it is a company that makes shit up for you and backs it up with convincing documentation and other necessary things to prove your alibi.
"That's right, Mr. and Mrs. Harris. Little Timmy needs to play at least four hours of video games every day until his dropsy improves."
It will come up with some crazy story like how you were actually going for a secret job interview, but on the way you were in a car crash and the hospital had to remove your kidney to save your life, and you're groggy from all the morphine -- and you will have all the documents from the "hospital" and "job interview" to prove it. It's as if Machiavelli ran a drive-thru.
Pictured: "Job Interview"
You can even get the company to help you fool potential employers into believing that you have attended certain classes and seminars to boost your resume. The prices run $75 and up, depending on how much effort is required to back up your story, though apparently the price to help you cover up an affair is negotiable depending on the situation. Before you decide to go and murder someone, though, please note that the Alibi Network refuses to help when criminal activity is involved.
Sometimes you just have to end relationships, whether it be because you've grown apart from your boyfriend or because your girlfriend caught you masturbating to ThunderCats. That conversation, be it on the phone or face to face, is one of the most difficult things you will ever have to do.
Next to shooting Old Yeller.
But what if you are shy or scared or don't know what to say when the time comes? The company iDUMP4U has decided to capitalize on your pain (or happiness, depending on which side of the breakup you're on) by offering its services to dump your significant other. It charges $10 for a basic breakup, $25 to call off an engagement and $50 to announce a divorce, and it records the whole thing to play on its YouTube channel, because anything worth doing is worth doing for Internet fame.
On the application form, the company specifically states: "Remember, we are ASSHOLES ... we dump people for a living. So if you feed us fake information, or wrong info, and waste our time. We will make fun of you on the web. That is what we do ..." We'd like to take that threat seriously, but we're wondering just how effective making fun of someone's fake identity is going to be, since, you know, it's a fake identity. Imagine taking the time and resources to dedicate an entire YouTube clip to berating a client whose only known handle is "Captain Bonertopia."
Followed by a three-part expose on "Chronic_smoke112"'s history of drug abuse.
People wait in lines all the time -- at Food Lion, the post office, Starbucks or to get a damn iPhone.
They work it into their busy social lives.
But why spend the night wedged uncomfortably in a place where a hobo has probably pissed/bled just to get your hands on whatever PlayStation just came out when you can hire someone to do it for you? All you have to do is call this queuing agency in the U.K. called Q4U, and for 20 pounds an hour, you can get a full-time professional line-stander to hold your spot. Don't worry -- there are similar services in the U.S. and elsewhere (including Ukraine).
There are also freelancers who get paid up to $1,000 for the particularly desperate -- for instance, if you need tickets to the next Star Wars movie on opening night. Yes, people pay it -- some freelancers in the U.K. lined up for 1,000 pounds, hired by an investor who wanted first dibs on new real estate developments, presumably to get an early feel for lording over desperate people in low-income housing.
Who wouldn't be enticed by a slumlord's glamorous life?
On the other hand, if you don't want to bother with lines at all, you can always hire people to create a diversion with soiled diapers or wild animals so you can sneak your way to the front for your Nintendo 3DS.
Cat Cafes are places where you can go rent a cat for an hour or two. It all started in Taiwan in 1998, because apparently the people there don't want to own cats but still want to be able to stroke, cuddle and hold them periodically. The idea became popular in Japan, and now there are about 39 cat cafes in Tokyo alone, proving once and for all that cats are Japanese kryptonite.
Pictured here.
Essentially, you pay an hourly rate to come inside and sit with a cat. You can buy treats to feed to it, take pictures with it, play with it or just sit there and hold it in your lap, presumably for supervillain training.
Other places let you rent dogs, rabbits, ferrets or even goddamn beetles. All in all, there more than 150 pet rental companies in Tokyo, and the business keeps growing in popularity. How much does it cost to get a monkey to follow us around all afternoon? Wearing a tiny outfit that perfectly matches ours? Because we'll pay it.
Renting a person isn't a new concept (it's called "prostitution"), but in Japan, you can pay people to sit with you, pretend to be your mom or dad or distant relative, or even stand in as your spouse in social situations, because evidently Japan is teeming with the loneliest people in the entire world.
"I paid for eight hours of your time, and by God you're going to spend it playing pinochle."
One such person-renting exchange occurs in places called Campus Cafes, where grown men pay to come and hang out with college girls. There's no sex or groping involved -- the men are literally paying money just to talk to girls about whatever.
Hagemashi Tai (which is Japanese for "I want to cheer up") is a friend-renting agency. You can hire one of its actors to act as just about anyone for just about any situation. For example, at a wedding in Saitama, Japan, the groom's manager gave a heartfelt speech about how great a guy he was and how lucky everyone at the company was to have him. The thing is, this "manager" had never set eyes on the groom or anyone else in the wedding before. The groom hired him from the friend agency to the tune of about 20,000 yen. Although we feel that if you're going to pay someone to pretend to be your boss, you might as well have him give a speech about how you Chuck Norrised a bunch of terrorists in the face after they invaded the company picnic last spring.
"Of all the men I've ever seen gut a terrorist with their bare hands, Mark grunted the least."
It doesn't stop with fake employers -- you can rent people to play absolutely any part you want them to, for any occasion you see fit. You can hire a husband to tutor your kids and yell at the neighbors. You can rent yourself a father to walk you down the aisle at your wedding. You can pay someone to go to Disneyland with you. You can even get a wife to make yourself seem nonthreatening, presumably because that makes it way easier to trick girls into getting in your van.
For whatever reason, you can email Danny at dannyvittore@gmail.com, follow him on Twitter or check out his new home page!
You should pick up our new book because carrying it around will make you look like a student or a banker or something.
For more things that shouldn't exist, but do, check out 7 Great Products for Telling the World You're a Rich Dick and The 7 Most Useless Skymall Products (Reviewed Accordingly).
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