Walking through the park, basking in the midday sun, I also follow the winding path between flowers in mid-bloom. Bees buzz past me as they dart from flower to flower, each drone seeking pollen for the hive while the sound of bird chirp in distant trees.
It was a perfect day, warm and relaxing with not a care in the world. Or at least the cares that I had were pushed to the back of my mind, thoughts like 'How am I going to pay rent this month?' or 'Will I ever find another teaching job?' were simply left on the doorstep on days like this. My headphone lightly jingle with soothing classical music, the soft piano doing much to calm be down from my woes in conjunction with the brilliant scenery around me.
After over an hour of my strolling a heavy buzz erupts from my pocket, my hand moving towards it as I pause. Glancing down the trail I spot a small little outdoor lakeside cafe, a tiny dirt path leading off the track towards it invitingly.
"May as well..." I mutter to myself, plodding off to fetch myself a coffee before checking my notification.
After a few minutes I find myself seated by the end of a large deck, the shimmering water glistening with sparkles of caught sunlight. As I wait for my coffee to cool I pull my phone from my pocket, my heart skipping a beat and catching in my throat as I read the short line of text.
"You have new a message in your inbox - Personal Ad-option"
The Swap Clinic had largely been used as a marketplace for traits, both physical and mental, since its inception. People would often offer money or traits of their own in a web of trades in order to secure some skill of bodily feature they desired from someone willing elsewhere in the world.
While this service had served the Swap Clinic well, the company as a whole had often sought to expand into other ventures with mixed success. It was more than obvious when the Clinic as trying to inorganically try to force something on its customers, from Swap-Surance to Swa-Parties the Clinic had almost as many failures as it did successes.
What worked more often than not was simply co-opting some kind of community led efforts, stealing an idea wholesale or merely condoning and slapping the 'Swap Clinic' logo on top of an existing project. The former was how 'Personal Ad-options' came about, the staff at the clinic noticing a trend online and simply building a more direct interface for it to steal market share from the community.
People often did swaps with others in mind, wives adding a cup size as an anniversary present or desperate young men hoping a set of abs will finally get them their crush, but there were also those that swapped essentially to order. The first few of these ads for personal services were largely for fake children, wealthy middle-aged singles needing a darling daughter or strapping son for work events or to help win over a romantic interest.
This led to the common parlance for these type of adverts, the legal paperwork that followed leading to the name 'Personal Ad-options'.
The length of these arrangements varied based on the services needed. Some simply required a date for a wedding that would merely take a weekend, others were longer with company being needed on a family vacation or until 'the kid goes off to 'college' or something'. Others still went even longer, from surrogacy agreements that would go for months at a time to more permanent positions as a mother to help a single father or a child for an infertile older couple long past their prime.
Each would offer something in return for the service of course. Many simply offered cash upon completion of the task, honest pay for somewhat dishonest work, while others offered the chance to keep some or all of the traits purchased or borrowed in order to make the body required for the act.
As the Swap Clinic swooped into the deploy there own system, many of the homegrown communities and forums quickly began to dissolve. People trusted the Swap Clinic to govern these agreements with a little more rigor than some shady Reddit community or Facebook group. Before long even companies and businesses were getting in on the act, offering jobs and positions for those willing to match the right 'aesthetic'.
The site took two forms.
Firstly, there was the standard adverts that could have readily been found in any number of online discussions. Each laid out the basic information, from a catchy little title to a description of the job before going into more detail about any required traits and the payment that would be on offer. Users could simply respond with a message should an ad take their fancy, the poster of the Personal Ad-option being left to pick and choose a successful applicant.
Secondly, borrowing from dating sites a more personal section of the website was created. Those willing and ready to take part in one of these swaps could make there own little profile, the bulk of which was mostly a description of one's self along with skills and personality traits that may help someone understand just who they would be hiring. These profiles would be shown to customers as they filled out their advert, the system reading what was being written and suggesting potential users to contact directly instead.
I had signed up for the service not that long ago, the shrinking balance in my bank account leading me to look for more interesting sources of income. Setting up alerts and a profile had been easy enough, the only difficultly being deciding whether or not I include a profile picture given the rather drastic nature of many of these services.
An image of my tall and lanky pale body filled the profile picture, a weak smile formed on my lips as I shielded my eyes from the bright and sunny day outside. Discussing one's self in this manner was... a slow process, not difficult by any means but simply a chore in finding just what to include to hopefully drum up some work in the limited writing space.
Jordan Hughes
30 - M
Former college lecturer with three college degrees
Customer service and leadership experience
Nerd, lover of books and games of all sorts
Open to short term and long term positions
At that I had left it, safe in the knowledge that the system would simply notify me when anything happened. And so I waited, day after day for some kind of email or ping from the app only to be met with silence.
Little did I know at the time that the notifications were weekly, the app or website itself needing to be checked for any sort of immediate update.
As I tap the notification the app quickly boots up, the screen flickering as it jumps through a few screens as it delves into my profile and to my inbox. I raise my hand, shielding the screen from he harsh rays of the sun as I read the subject line...
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