Great Franchise Opportunity – Call Today!

I used to be my own boss. I owned my own freelance PR and copywriting business and miss the whole being in charge thing. You may not have picked this up from reading my blog, but I have trouble conforming to the big corporate thing. Now, if a certain fictional paper company wanted to hire me I’m sure things would be different…

Last night I may have discovered the key to my next self-employed career. It kinda crept up on me, but now I am pretty sure about it. It’s an amazing career opportunity and does not involve real estate with no money down or selling things in bottles. It doesn’t even involve gathering ostrich eggs to make ginormous frozen prepackaged omelets, although I am writing that idea down for later. What is this amazing business opportunity? It’s Fancy Ironing. It all began innocently enough when one of the prongs from my iron’s plug broke off inside the electrical outlet the other day. I have to admit that I got quite a charge when removing it with pair of pliers. It was shocking, really. All of that led to needing a new iron, but the fancy high-powered fabric steamer beckoned. Besides, it had a crease attachment, which means no more three crease pants, unless I’m feeling really edgy.

So I bought the fabric steamer with pole and hangar attachment. Now I can iron anything and everything and it’ll look professionally done! Now I can take in people’s ironing and make money while basically playing with the steamer. After all, I have been told countless times that I could do something more productive every Sunday than watching my NASCAR race for 4 hours (6 if I watch the pre-race show). Of course I TiVo the race and can watch it in about 2 hours if I’m feeling really saucy, but there is still a little time to do some work there. Now I can make money steam ironing other people’s clothes while watching my races. The nice part about this is that the usual burning of clothes I previously experienced while ironing during NASCAR is gone. I figure if I charge $30 per garment I should do pretty well. That’s a fair price, right? I can also do curtains, drapes and other words that describe cloth-like window coverings.

I am very excited about this new business opportunity. I haven’t settled on a name for the new company yet, but am kicking around Michael’s Fancy Ironings, Sultan of Steam, Iron-ic, Steamy McSteamerson and Henry Wrinkler’s. If I go with the Henry one, the logo will be an ironed leather jacket and a thumbs up. My administrative professional, who I have not hired yet but better look like The Office’s Pam Beasley, will answer the phone by saying ‘Aayyyy.’

I can envision a chain of these fancy steam ironing stores or maybe an inverted pyramid scheme to throw off the feds. Oh wait, if the pyramid is inverted, how am I going to make money? Perhaps I’ll sell franchise licenses instead and try to negotiate to get one into every Starbucks or CVS or Wal-Green’s pharmacy. Maybe I’ll do all three. Then I could literally have a Henry Wrinkler’s clothes-steaming store on every street corner with a stoplight in America. Wow, I’d be ‘movin’ on up,’ but I really don’t want a penthouse in the sky. I will take a summer place on Martha’s Vineyard though. And yes, I know that the Jeffersons owned a dry cleaning business, please cut me some slack. But, did you know that they were originally on and a spin-off of ‘All in the Family?’ OK, I feel like I have asserted my mental dominance and am back in charge now.

All of this just might work. Heck maybe I’ll make enough money to pay for the Ab-Lounger Ultra I’ll never use that I bought at the same time as the clothes-steamer. Ohhh, that reminds me, I should probably open the box and try the clothes-steamer out before I move forward with any of this. Boy would that have been awkward when the first customer showed up during the race on Saturday night. By the way, can you steam iron neckties? They tend to get a little wrinkled when worn backwards around the forehead…


Worthless item of the day: I don’t know if you listen to country music, but I just bought Sara Evans’ Greatest Hits. I looked at the back of the CD case to see what songs were on it and all I could say when I turned it over was ‘uhhhhhhhhhh.’ I bet the CD sells very, very well.