/ Lisa Katayama / 12:31 pm Tue Jul 6, 2010

Invisible homeless man

invishomeless.jpg World's greatest homeless sign ever (Thanks, Joe Sabia!)

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  2. This is more symbolic than you might think at first. Discouraged workers (those who have given up looking for a job or who have been unemployer for over four weeks) are not counted as part of the labor force…

  5. I wouldn’t give him anything. He should pull himself up by his invisible bootstraps. Work as an undercover cop, super hero, CIA spy, stagehand, ventriloquist. The possibilities for employment are endless!

    Actually, maybe I’d invite him to live with me and just pretend he is a ghost for the lulz

  6. Invisible or not, giving handouts to the homeless just encourages them to continue to indulge their addictions.

    Give your money to worthy charities, such as the Revisibilization Society or the Seethrough Army.

    1. “giving handouts to the homeless just encourages them to continue to indulge their addictions”

      Because all homeless people are addicts?

    1. People are remarkably lax about replacing the batteries on their ironimeters.

  10. There’s no way that guy is actually invisible. It’s some kind of con so that he can panhandle in 2 places at once.

  14. If anyone’s interested, this was made last September by Boston-area art student Sean Haire, and it was placed by the Reservoir T-stop near Cleveland Circle.

  15. Is this the result of city councilors everywhere wishing the homeless problem would ‘just disappear’?

  16. Geoff, you kind of beat me too it, but here goes:

    So much for making the homeless problem more visible.

  17. I’d give him invisible money (enough to retire on, while I’m at it.) When you think about it, $ does have the tendency to disappear…

  21. Last night I saw upon the stair
    A homeless man who wasn’t there
    He wasn’t there again today
    Oh, how I wish he’d go away

  23. “Frank Jenkinson”?! My ass!
    That’s Vinny, and he’s a wanted man, a sex maniac, I tells ya!

  25. My impression is its mocking the homeless. Not funny, thought-provoking or interesting.

  28. “Where magical invisibility is concerned, the issue may arise of whether the clothing and items carried by the invisible wearer/carrier are also rendered invisible. In general, they are, but in some instances, clothing remains visible and must be removed for the full invisibility effect.”

    Per Wiki so it must be so…

  30. When I was homeless and panhandling for a living, I found there are only two techniques that really work well. One option is looking really haggard and harassing people until they pay you to leave them alone. The other is to employ a novelty such as this.

    You can make anywhere from fifty cents a day up to a hundred bucks an hour panhandling. Sitting there with a short honest sign explaining your predicament will get you nothing — maybe a dime every couple hours. Putting out a sign asking for beer money, or “ninjas killed my family spare change for jujitsu lessons” or putting a cup on the end of a string and tying it to a stick with a sign saying “fishing for change”, might make you a good fifty bucks over the course of an hour or two.

    If you’re genuinely looking to buy a cheap dress shirt, admission to a pool so you can use their shower, two bucks to print some resumes at kinkos, and four bucks to rent a locker at the greyhound station to store your stuff while you apply for jobs, you’re pretty much fucked. You really do need to stop shaving, stop bathing, lose some teeth, then walk up to people, put your face three inches from theirs and follow them, continuing to say “spare change” till they give you money. Otherwise, you need to get creative like this invisible fellow did.

    Apropos captcha: “freedom letter”

    1. It’s interesting, as the two approaches roughly break down into “Provide a service that the community you’re working in values (a moment of light entertainment on the street with your creative pitch)” and “Evoke as many negative emotions as possible until you can bully them into making it stop”.

  32. Here in Finland, the government is preparing a law that would make panhandling, even silent, illegal. In the end they’d like to make all the homeless, unemployed, and poor people invisible, so as not to interfere with their shiny, clinically clean capitalist welfare fantasy.

  34. Don’t smash the unemployed and homeless as you may one day have to walk with no shoes.

    Where were all you naysayers when the government handed the rich billions of dollars to pass around there company. If you asked me…Wall Street has panhandling down to a science.

  35. i see that human kindness knows no bounds. that’s human nature for ya. MINE! MINE! MINE!

  37. Hey, how about the copyright of this idea?
    May as use that in city in Europe, for example in Spain ?

  38. I’m really touched by the plight of the poor homeless with invisiblemanitis. I always make an invisible donation of several hundred invisible dollars when I don’t see them reduced to begging on the street.

    Why they don’t just slip into the best restaurants and help themselves is testimony to the widespread decency found amongst them … a quality often invisible in the wider community.

  40. I think he is making a statement of how our society view homeless people.

    At first we see them everywhere then slowly over time we notice them less and less (they are still there) we just become so bitter and so unsympathetic that we stop noticing them and they eventually become invisible to us.

    And for the poster that thinks it adds to there addiction I feel sorry for you by most standards 50% of every person is just a few paychecks from being homeless.

    Loose your job and see how fast your world crumbles especially in this economy.

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