Free Perquing
Metro,
August 29, 2002. Nicole Cohen
Rochelle Hutchinson tears her eyes away from the guy in the purple
shades to stuff a flyer into the hands of young passersby on Richmond.
She hates to interrupt her conversation, especially since this is
the cutest boy she’s met all night, but the street promoter
is on the job and has a stack of flyers to hand out to potential
clubbers.
“It’s not a glamorous job,” Hutchinson says,
“but the perqs are great.”
The 20-year-old, who will be taking classes at George Brown College
in the fall, earns $12-20 an hour for a few hours of work on the
weekends and gets free cover and drinks at the clubs she promotes.
“It’s the best job for a student if you’re into
the club scene and like talking to people. You don’t meet
guys like this working at McDonald’s,” she says, turning
back to Mr. Mysterious.
Glamorous is the last word you’d imagine using to describe
student jobs. Financing the mind-expanding years of post-secondary
education often means spending hour after mindless hour folding
jeans and blending hated cups of frappuccino when you’d rather
be partying, seeing concerts and indulging your material desires
(or maybe reading something).
But it doesn’t have to be that way. Like Hutchinson, many
students have found ways to earn a living while serving their collegiate
needs.
Peter, 26, has been a concert security guard since he was a third-year student. He started
at $8.50 an hour, now earns $9, and gets to see shows at venues
such as the Air Canada Centre, the Guvernment and Kool Haus.
Working as a security guard has given Peter the opportunity to watch
The Guess Who and Kim Mitchell from the wings of the Molson Amphitheatre
stage, get chased with a hose by Ozzy Osborne and learn first-hand
that Dave Matthews is a close-talker.
“I also get flashed quite a lot in the pit,” Peter says.
“Edgefest was basically a three-hour wet T-shirt contest.”
If dealing with drunk fans and flailing limbs isn’t your ideal
way to see live music, scoring a gig as a videographer could be
your ticket to free shows. With minimal experience gained in a first-year
broadcast class, Jordan Heath-Rawlings earned up to $12 an hour
filming live webcasts for IceBerg Media.
“They hooked me up with a camera and a nice place to stand
and said “shoot this concert,” he says.
Highlights of his brief stint as a cameraman included attending
a secret Rage Against The Machine gig at the Phoenix, seeing Supergrass
and sharing a post-show smoke with Joe Strummer.
Before he left to attend McGill University, FredSztabinski, 22,
found a job on the nt as a chauffeur for Canada’s Walk of
Frame. The gig was unpaid, but for Sztabinski the perqs were unprecedented
– a 24-case of Molson beer, lunch at Wayne Gretzky’s
restaurant, movie passes and a Walk of Fame jacket.
All he had to do was pick up filmmaker David Cronenberg and his
wife at their Rosedale home and cart them to ceremonies and parties
in a silver Mercedes-Benz S500, worth about $100,000.
“It was a novelty,” says Sztabinski. “I picked
up my friends and drove the car around all day.”
While it’s highly unlikely you’ll end up with an expensive
car, the best way to score free stuff (that you can actually keep)
is to become a secret shopper. Thousands of students across the
country are paid to go shopping and eat in restaurants, all in the
name of evaluating customer service.
“It’s an ideal job for students to make a few bucks
and it’s not a big time commitment,” says David Lipton,
president of Sensors Quality Management Inc., a company that pays
anywhere from $15-$400 a month for students’ opinions. Secret
shoppers get free merchandise and movies, nights in hotel rooms,
full meals, cheap airline tickets, and sometimes just get paid to
go to the bank or a car dealership.
Need a haircut? When Paula Gibson, 26, was a student at Algonquin
College she answered an ad in the paper for hair models and got
her long, blond hair cut, dyed an highlighted for free at a hair
show, saving her almost $100.
How about a winter vacation? Airlines hire students to be flight
attendants over winter and summer breaks, pay them well and fly
them to exotic locales.
Emile Amzallag, 21, earns $30 an hour working for Air Canada during
his time off from McGill. He often has scheduled layovers in Tel
Aviv, where he is put up in a nice hotel and given a few hundred
dollars in cash to cover expenses.
“I’m getting paid to go to a beach,” Amzallag
says. He has been all over Canada, to England and Trinidad. Some
days Amsallag will wake up in Toronto and go to sleep in Tokyo.
Exhausting, but worth it.
If you can afford to give your time away in exchange for experience
in the real world, there are some internships that will weigh you
down with free stuff.
Canada’s arm of music giant BMG hires a raft of interns for
various jobs in the marketing and publicity departments. Most interns
are paid a token $75 for about 15 hours of work a week but come
home with piles of free CDs and the chance to hang around the office
with Canadian music celebs Avril Lavigne, The Rascalz and Sloan.
So fear not, students; if you have to sell your soul to a corporation
or slave away for minimum wage, remember there are some jobs out
there with enough gratuities to make slogging the hours away a truly
perq experience.
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