The joke among the three harvesters here, each paid nil, was that every time they missed an olive on the tree they were twerking and I spotted it, I fined them a Euro. At the end of their stay I’d present them with their bill. It was, of course, a joke. But then harvester B stumbled on something on the internet.
Apparently there are folks out there who pay £300 (£350 if with private room) for a three day holiday near Kalamata where they get to harvest olives. I suspect they think they pluck the fruit from the trees one by one and that Southern Greece is bathed in a warm sunshine all year round. Boy: would they be in for a shock and after a couple of hours of pulling mats in a cold rain that bits into your bones they would be off. Maybe they’d last the three days but you can bet that they’d be useless enough that even in a rotten year I could string out the harvest, taking in very marginal trees at the far end of my land, to last a month.
I shall sleep on the sofa upstairs so have three rooms each capable of sleeping two. 10 * 6*300 = £18,000 plus, with every olive on my land harvested, I could not fail to take in £20,000. Are there 60 folks in Britain dumb enough to fall for this? I reckon there might be. If there are more, I couldextend the harvest by renting out my “labourers” to my neighbours with an offer to harvest their trees for free? The neighbours get to fire their Albanians and I get even more money.
I have run this by lovely Eleni at the Kouronis taverna who also has rooms to offer. So I could scale up and earn enough in one month to spend the rest of the year doing nothing at all? She finds it hard to believe that there would be anyone foolish enough to fall for this but then she has not lived among Londoners.
Now tell me what is wrong with this cunning plan?