In the late 80s I was staying with my parents for a while. Rent was free but I tried to do odd jobs around the house & yard to help out. One of the things I was trying to figure out was how to trim the palm tree in the back yard. It was too tall for our ladders. We didn't want to pay a professional tree trimmer.

One day I'm alone in the house when a guy on a bike rides up to the front porch. Skinny guy with a funky knife in his back pocket. Turns out he recently quit with one of the tree trimming services. He had noticed our palm tree and asked if we would consider hiring him for the job. So I hired him. Turns out his knife was a razor. He had cleats & rope and proceeded to "shave" the tree. Took him about 1/2 hour.

The problem was he couldn't have gotten many jobs that way. We hired him for some other "handyman" jobs occasionally over the next few months. Always came on his bike. Then we never saw him again.