What Would Happen if my Milkshake DID Bring all the Boys to the Yard?

I was emailing with a friend and wrote, “I want to get paid to just look good.”  And then I had to follow that up with, “Of course, that requires work of its own, and would mean hitting the gym/pavement/pole dancing class, avoiding carbs like my life depended on it, and (let’s face it) botox or bangs.  Bangs are cheaper–but I just grew mine out!”

There really isn’t a free lunch.  Jennifer Anniston works hard to keep it tight, and that’s why people are still interested.    Looking good is her job.  You look good enough (Jessica Alba) and no one even cares if you can’t act–as Paulette Goddard, Dorothy Lamour, and Veronica Lake lamented in their smash hit A Sweater, a Sarong, and a Peekaboo Bang (see? Bangs.)  Looking like Hollywood is a full-time job.

I already have a full-time job, so you won’t catch me looking like Hollywood.  But I wonder what would happen if I treated “Looking Good” like a part-time job?

Part-time work is generally under 20 hours a week, but I am also a parent, so adding 20 hours to my current 40 isn’t feasible.  What if I took a 5 or 7 hour a week “part-time job” at the offices of “Looking Good”?  What would happen?

Conceivably, I would get paid more.  I should see an increase in my incentivized full-time pay based on how much people wanted to look at me (like Jessica Biel does, bless her heart), and the better I look, the more I should see my incentivized pay increase in my full-time work (like how the prettier your leading lady is, the more people go to see the movie.)

But how would I calculate that?  What factors would I need to consider? 

Well, it takes a while to get good at any job, so I shouldn’t expect my work at Looking Good to start making an impact for between 60 to 90 days.  It takes at least a year to be fully grounded in a job, and to have experienced a sampling of the seasonal issues one might encounter, so it would take a 12 month period before I could really start to make calculations.

After a year, though, working at “Looking Good” for 5-7 hours a week, I should start to see enough significant difference that I could account for it in my full-time job, and note the intangibles like better service, free drinks, and getting out of speeding tickets.

However, I have to take into account my age and some factors I cannot manage without paying to have them fixed.  I am always going to be whiter than a Trace Adkins concert–I can’t tan, and my skin is fish-belly white, so my ability to Look Good is relegated to a pasty subgroup.  I am relegated to further subgroup by merit of being (almost) 42-years-old–gravity is doing her work.  There is also the matter of fact that at my thinnest, I’ve still got child-bearing hips, massive thigh and calf muscles, and broad shoulders.  I have freckles, thin hair, and discolored teeth.  Factoring in all that, my Looking Good pay scale goes from, say, $10 an hour, right down to minimum wage of $7.25.  And that’s if, in the course of Looking Good, I drop about 60lbs.

But, the better a job I do at Looking Good, the more my confidence will increase, drawing people to me, and the less I will need to do to maintain it at a certain plateau.  I should be able to divert some of my Looking Good job hours into workarounds for the factors set above, so that after two years of my part-time job, I should see an increase in pay of somewhere around $1.50.  And more offers of free drinks.

Of course, I have no intention of doing this.  I can buy my own drinks.  The most workout I am interested in right now, is the one my fingers get while I’m typing.  It’s just the idea that if I devoted myself to it, as though it were my earning potential, Looking Good would be a lot more important, and perhaps easier to do.