a couple of years ago i got laid off from a coding position a few days before christmas. no severance, get your stuff and flee, along with 60% of the other workers in the building. i stood outside the warehouse, quickly accumulating email addresses from the others who were leaving. notions of starting a new company, going back to school. we all had our boxes of office crap. i looked at one of the other guys and said, "man, what are we gonna do today?" he was like, "geez, i dunno." i said, "there's no way i'm going to go looking for a new job today. i need to get my mind off work for today." we joked about a couple ideas and finally decided to go panhandle downtown. we might pick up a few bucks. it was christmas, so plenty of people would be at the mall. and so we got some of those fingerless gloves and made signs out of cardboard: "starving haX0rs!" "overworked.. and then BAM!" whatever. sang some old spirituals and entertained the masses with hat tricks and rope tricks and gutter tricks. i saw people from some of my previous jobs, who made a few generous contributions. in fact, we were approached by an executive from the company where we had just been laid off! (he tried to tell us we were going about this wrong, but the look on his face truly inspired us.) the news camera came by, then the night died and the other homeless guys on crutches demanded their cut of our wages. panhandling can certainly be lucrative. so then i just got a call from a friend who wants me to do a commercial. he needs somebody to play a panhandler! my first acting job and i'm typecast already!