Laid off – looking at new career options

The freelance writing work has mostly dried up for me these days which didn’t bother me since I still kept my part-time gig at the call centre to see me through but as most of you know by now, I’ve been laid off from there, so really, it’s time to consider a new career path. Here’s a list of options I’ve come up with:

1. Death of Newspapers Blogger

I’ll face heavy competition from the likes of Jeff Jarvis and Clay Shirky on this front, but the Huffington Post recently ran a nice How-To guide on getting started in this industry.
Of course, I’ll have to write a book to really get going with it, but after that, I’ll make big bucks going on speaking tours and get plenty of opportunities to really lay out my bitterness toward the industry I’m trained to work in.

2. Ghost Twitterer

Twitter is hot! Even big-time celebrities are getting into micro-blogging, providing bite-sized 140 character updates on what they’re up to at any given moment. But of course, not everyone has time to enter a whole 140 characters at regular intervals and that’s where Ghost Twiterers come in. I could make some decent scratch by updating Twitter on someone else’s behalf, informing everyone that they’re in the process of consuming and ham sandwich and then later posting that the ham sandwich was tasty.

3. Social media expert

I could get paid to teach business types how to sign up for free Facebook and Twitter accounts so they can grow their brand and take advantage of the "social graph."
(No offence intended to all the actual social media experts I know, I’m trying to be funny here. Plus, I’m drunk.)

4. Lexicographer

I read an article about this profession today. Apparently you get paid to make up words. It’s a growing industry thanks to the economic crisis we’re in that desperately needs new words added to our lexicon to explain what’s happening. Stuff like "Ponzimodium" and whatnot.
I can do that!

5. Web 2.0 .com start-up founder

Finally, I could always start my own web business, creating an interactive AJAX web-app that’s a mash-up of various open-APIs and provides Twitter integration (it HAS to integrate with Twitter!)
I have no idea what it does, what purpose it serves and definitely have no clue how it’s supposed to make money, but I’ll just aim to get round after round of venture capital funding to keep myself fueled with beer and cheeseburgers so I can…I have no idea.

So, those are the options so far…