Fart Bucks

People work to get paid. That’s pretty straightforward, right?

People talk about how much money they make in terms of time. It’s mostly in units of years and hours. For years, it’s something like 40k, 20k, 100k, etc. For hourly, there’s $10 an hour or $7.25 an hour.

So, one day I thought, wouldn’t it be interesting to calculate people’s salaries based on seconds not years or hours. Just doing the same thing everyone does, but using a unit of time that people really don’t operate in for the most part. (Sure, you may say, “wait a second” but it’s really longer than a second.)

And that’s when I thought, if I’m stretching the concept of how much you make per a second, I would need some other symbol to help represent that unit of time. It would be okay to create a JavaScript-powered clock that would display how much a second of work time means to you, but who would seriously check that out? It’s a clock.

So, I needed to something that took place in a second of time, but was somewhat universal in nature. Something that everyone did or could easily understand… Bingo! 

That’s when I came across the idea of using farts.

Farts can last a second or even longer. In fact, I would say farting is a great social equalizer. Everyone does it. (Except you. I would never say or think you would ever fart.) 

But then I thought, hey, you know celebrities make an awful lot of money. And so do politicians. Why not showcase how much they make per second by way of fart noises? It would be such an absurd, almost surreal thing to see! 

I threw together some quick Photoshop mockups and tried to learn some Flash to pull it off. Thus Fart Bucks was born. 

screen capture of Fart Bucks

Some time ago I stopped working on Fart Bucks, but I always felt it could have been so much more than what it is. I even made a list.

The following is the list of items I felt could make the project better:

  • Musical score, especially during the introduction. Maybe the addition of some original, ambient-spacey music could be created with GarageBand. 
  • Incorporate non-celebrity people and their jobs. Comparing, say, a waitress’s salary with that of a Kobe Bryant might be an interesting contrast and might people some pause. Or maybe not. 
  • Place yourself or a friend within Fart Bucks. Files this under Web 2.0, but I always thought Fart Bucks would be closer to what I had envisioned if people could upload photos of themselves or friends, loved ones, victims. It would be an instant personal farting machine. Sure, it might be used by mostly by guys (teenage boys, college dudes and guys bored in cubicles), but I’m sure that’s a big demographic, right? I’m looking at you, Trey and Matt, to back me up. After you would load up an image of yourself or someone you would know, you would be able to get a link of the Fart Bucker™ to bookmark and/or email it.

If you feel like you want to add to Fart Bucks, please do. Feel free to download and modify. I’ve placed the contents of Fart Bucks I’ve made under a Creative Commons license.

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