Cautionary tales: 3

In a rare bout of optimism, she was foolish enough to think that she could change careers late in life to one that paid more than the minimum wage. She chose something she'd been good at when she was younger but whether through age related atrophy or early onset dementia she wasn't good at it any more. This left her so lacking in confidence that she was unable to manage any kind of work so she survived first by selling furniture, then by selling the cats to a Belgian waistcoat manufacturer and then by selling her flat. She moved into a dustbin where she shortly died, crushed under half a hundredweight of unwanted flyers for an amateur drama group who failed to sell any seats for their performance of Macbeth (the three thousandth production of that play that year at the Fringe).