Do you have a gift? Are you good at gift wrapping? Or maybe your strengths lie in addressing envelopes? Or what if the only thing you know you do better than anyone else is clean out the gunk that lodges in your computer keyboard. Somewhere out there, someone will pay you to do it. I’m not kidding. All you have to do is come up with a little ingenious marketing and voila!….you have a new business and a few extra dollars in your pocket!
That’s just what craftsman David Rees did with his Artisanal Pencil Sharpening venture. All you have to do is send him one of your pencils and he’ll expertly sharpen it for you and send it back with the shavings and a certificate of authenticity. Of course, this doesn’t come cheap. At the grand old price of $15 for one pencil, you’ll have to be serious about wanting this done. Rees claims the age old art of sharpening pencils by hand has been lost and vows to change your mind about those electric devices that, according to him, just don’t do the same job.
I have to wonder how I would feel if, after having a pencil sharpened “professionally”, it broke while doing, say, the New York Times Crossword one Sunday afternoon. Would I be tempted to send it back out for sharpening? There are plenty of testimonials on his website that will vouch for the wonderful service Rees performs. You decide. I’m off to research shipping costs for my new Fold-the-end-of-the-toilet-paper-roll business!
