THE GOOD OLD DAYS: Pastime PI brings them back. |
It’s easy to lose track of the things you once loved: high school buddies, significant others, video games. Josh Samuels wants to help with that last one. He’s starting a new Portland service called Pastime Private Investigations to help you track down those material items from adolescence that somehow got lost along the journey to adulthood.“I love trying to find stuff,” explains Samuels, 23, who also works at Bull Moose Music. He often hears from customers at work looking for obscure music. After referring enough people to the library or the Internet, Samuels realized he could help people like this in his spare time, for a profit.
“Really, I’ll look for anything,” he says.
He’ll accept queries for things like The Babysitter’s Club books (or the board game), a Mega Man 2 game cartridge (and back issues of Nintendo Power to get the cheat codes), or a The Feelies concert T-shirt (he’s already found one of their out-of-print CDs). Memorable items from time spent outside the United States aren’t off-limits either.
The Pastime P.I. charges a $10 commission per item, but can operate on a sliding fee scale, too. And of course Samuels accepts tips.
Samuels typically starts the search by asking clients if they have a price ceiling for purchasing their out-of-date desires. He then scours the Internet to look for clues. “I end up following threads,” he says, which sometime lead him offline and into local second-hand shops.
A recent client asked for the nearly impossible: the CD version of an ’80s LP, Phantom, Rocker & Slick, which Samuels discovered was never actually released on disc. But the job didn’t end there. Instead, Samuels copied the music from the record onto a CD.
Being a Pastime P.I. isn’t Samuels’s only recent business idea. His next plan is to advertise his services as an amateur professional listener. He would be available for people who want to rehearse a talk or who need to get some things off their chest. “I have no credentials, but I’m a neutral party,” he says.
Samuels started these low-overhead services as a way to earn a little extra money outside his day job. But he also wants to keep them affordable, to make his help open to anyone who needs it.
“If I could make some sort of a living working for myself via these enterprises, that would be swell. But as it stands right now, I’m just trying them out to see what happens, sort of as an experiment more than anything else,” he says.
So if you’re having trouble living without a red Wham-O roller racer, episodes of Canadian-hormone-fueled Degrassi Jr. High, or anything that caught your eye on VH1’s I Love the ’80s, Samuels is ready to search for it.
