Thank God For Pizza Slices And Chinese Takeout

The ironic thing about the Amazing Technology That Is The Internet is that the basis for it is remarkably low-tech:

Daniel Rayas moved to New York in January from El Paso, Texas, to care for his newborn granddaughter, Eva Lucia. But he needed a job to pay his room and board, one flexible enough to allow for daily diaper-changing duty.

The unlikely solution: collecting take-out menus.

Allmenus.com, an online yellow pages for restaurants, sent him on a quest to reel in menus from eateries across the New York metropolitan area. Four months and one worn out pair of boots later, Rayas has snapped up 10,000 take-out menus.

“My motto is ‘No menu left behind,'” said Rayas, 55, who gets paid $2 for each menu.

It all began one March morning when baby Eva was taking a nap. Rayas — an accountant by trade who worked demolition in El Paso before his move east — was crunching numbers part time for a law firm to pay his rent. But it wasn’t enough. He answered a Craigslist ad: “Earn Money by Collecting Menus.” He sent an e-mail and thought it would go unanswered.

“But the same day I got a response that said, ‘Get started.'”

So Rayas set out from his Washington Heights home in his brand new rust-colored High Sierra boots.

He walked down Broadway. Then he walked up and down Amsterdam Avenue, St. Nicholas Avenue, Audubon Avenue and Fort Washington Avenue. “All the numbered streets, too,” Rayas said.

By the end of the day, blisters covered his toes and he limped into a Rite Aid on 125th Street to buy a box of Band-Aids. “I leaned against the wall, took off my socks, popped the blisters and taped up my toes,” Rayas said. “Man, it felt good.”

Months later, he knows to tape up his feet, tighten his shoelaces and check Google Maps before setting out on his evening and weekend menu hunts, which at his current pace would net him about $60,000 a year. His subway and bus maps are covered with yellow and pink highlighter markings, his legs no longer get sore, and he’s lost 20 pounds. Meanwhile, his boss started calling him “the vacuum” for his astounding proficiency in bringing in menus.

. . .

“Chinese people believe in menus,” he said. “Jamaicans don’t. I ask, ‘Do you have a menu?’ They point to the wall.”

Rayas is grateful he’s no longer knocking down walls and hauling bricks. And he’s grateful to the pizza parlors and Chinese restaurants that have given him menus. “Whenever you don’t think there’s a restaurant around the corner, there’s always a pizza parlor and always a Chinese restaurant,” he said.