Brains working towards machine consciousness

 I don't know why, but I was just reminiscing about the first round of pay negotiations I was in.  I had just turned 10, I think it was, and the pay master general (aka my Mum) told me my pocket money was going up to the princely sum of £5 a month.  I was over the moon - this was a sum previously undreamed of!

Then, the blow - apparently my sister had had the same deal, and had had to buy her (non-school) clothes out of the riches.  A pair of jeans, at the time, was about £15 to £20 if I recall correctly.  Fortunately, I had enough knowledge of current affairs to know that inflation had been running at up to 24% in the intervening 6 years, and that my pay deal was worth less than half what my sister had received.  I kept the same income, but wasn't expected to pay for my clothes, as a result.

At senior school, in my first year (which was actually a 'prep' year, I left junior school a year early), I sold ball point pens from a charity to kids at school who needed them.  I was totally up front about the fact that the charity charged 10p for them, and I was selling them for 25p and giving the charity 15p.  The charity did better than they had expected, I made a nice little sum, and people who were disorganised enough to need a pen could buy one from me.  

I also started taking orders from people who wanted things from the tuck shop, but who couldn't organise themselves to get to the front of the queue.  For a charge, naturally.  Eventually, I tired of all the queuing and paid someone else to do that bit, along with placing an order beforehand with the master who ran the tuck shop.  I got a small discount, and took a cut before paying some sap to queue for me.

Later, I changed schools (and no, I wasn't thrown out!), and developed a market in empty syringes.  Not with needles, you understand, just the plastic casing and plunger.  They make great single shot concealable water pistols, you see, so they were in demand.  The best bit, and I can't claim credit for it, is that when they inevitably got confiscated from the purchasers, one of the masters used to return them to me "I believe these are yours, Mr Parslow".  He also told me not to bring them onto school premises again, and, to be fair, I didn't.  I took those ones home, and brought other ones back, and thus the trade continued.

I briefly gave tourists guided tours around the historical town I lived in.  They seemed to think our school blazers were tour guide uniforms, and they tipped pretty well, even if many of the historical details they were treated to may not have been entirely accurate.  History, to be fair, was never one of my strong points.

Funny thing is, I am not sure I would want to be a salesman.  I have to believe in the product I am selling, or I feel like I am lying, and I don't like that.