Not to offend anyone in who might hold a job in the jobs to be mentioned, but what is it about the janitorial career that attracts very odd creepy men?
That said, most of my rural route carriers ( I have three, apparently) are all grumpy and non-friendly.
YMMV et al, but anyone else notice this?
*I’m a janitor! A janitor!
I start work early each morn.
I have a drinking problem
And a large collection of porn!
He’s a janitor! A janitor!
please don’t sell him short.
If you get him too mad
I’ll show you my disgusting wart!*
-MST3K
The janitor at my building is a very short-statured man (he might be 4’5") who is apparently stuck in the 70’s. He wears funky necklaces, and has an afro. He’s pretty cool.
Now, some of the people I work with in the psych hospital…that’s another story entirely…
I was an all-night cabdriver for a few years, and there were a few of my colleagues who were tuned to alternate frequencies.
Hey! It’s Disco Stu! 
I don’t think I’ve ever met a guidance counselor who wasn’t laughed at or reviled in some way… especially the one we have in our school currently.
Or maybe it’s just the students…
Most managerial positions, in my experience.
I’ll second that, Audrey. I’ve worked for several who have instituted rules and proceedures that defy all logic but their own, if the bother to do anything at all. Why, oh, why do these people exist?
As far as janitors are concerned. the only one that sticks out in my mind was the one at my elementary school. A few years after I graduated from high school, I went to look at an apartment. It turned out he and his wife were the managers and he recognized me right away, dispite the fact that he hadn’t seen me in about 10 years.
And can I just say that there are some STRANGE teachers in this nation’s public schools.
True, I’m one of them, but that just puts me in a better position to know how truly odd they are.
Librarians can be a bit odd–and they’re magnets for the strange, too. But there’s that really strange, sub-culture in the library world…Catalogers! Now they’re a frightening group! And I should know, I used to be one of them 
Psychology/Psychiatry
And no, I don’t mean attracting patients
Can you expand on the “Cataloger” thing? I’m unfamiliar with the term and/or obsession.
Well, there’s a REASON people use the phrase “going postal” as a synonym for losing your mind!
Look, I’m sure most people who work for the Postal Service are perfectly fine people… but I also know a few such people who’ve told me themselves that they’ve turned down opportunities for promotion, precisely because they think a large percentage of their co-workers are psychopaths, and they fear the consequences if they ever had to discipline or (gulp!) fire one of them.
Catalogers are the people who decide where the books are going to go in the whole Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress scheme of things. They created the rules–and there are lots of rules right down to how everything should be spaced on the catalog cards (moot now since most have online catalogs.) Essentially this is a dream job for anyone with severe OCD or who has been referred to by his/her friends as “controling, but in a quiet kind of way.” I think the library school motto is “give us your meek, your strange, your anally retentive and lo we shall make catalogers out of them all!”
In my building the 3 floors beneath me house GSA offices. These people seem to be from their own dimension. Their clothes are at least 10 years out of date, their hairstyles either reflect the height of 1989 mall hair or don’t match their gender (there’s a regular looking corporate guy with woman hair – shoulder length bobbed hair with curled-up bangs), and there are some really BIZARRE personalities. We call one guy “Humpty Dumpty” because he looks like an egg with legs, sits cross-legged on the benches on the courtyard and shooes anyone away who sits near him, eats the BIGGEST pile of scrambled eggs from the breakfast bar at our deli for breakfast everyday, and does his daily walk at lunch which consists of walking up and down the same stretch of 100 feet of sidewalk in front of our building – back and forth for 20 minutes – while we have miles of sidewalks that go into nice neighborhoods and parks all around us.
If I’m in the elevator with someone who looks strange or acts strange, I’d always bet my life that it’s a GSA person and I’d always be right.
I have been all over and have never met a more consistantly strange group than expat English teachers.
Yes, I am one of them.
Herpes Virologists.
I’ve never met a larger group of loonies in my life.
A few years ago (3 or so) there was large meeting of Herpes Virologists and someone was talking about a new animal model for their pathogen.
He was then sucker punched by a peer who rushed the stage.
The people I work with are pretty bizzare too.
People who work in independent or second-hand book shops are a strange bunch. I’m sure some of you in the DC area remember the late, lamented Goodwill Used Book Sale, which was an excellent place to see some of this strangeness in action–there was a dealer there one year who got her arm broken in a fight over a book. My boss actually had a tape of organ music that he used to play to get people to leave the store if he wasn’t in the mood to actually have customers around.
Nurses, honey!
Nursing is full of the most damaged people you ever want to come across. There’s something about being co-dependent, sadistic, enabling, and in an abusive realtionship that makes people want to be nurses.
And why not? The have totally screwed up their own life, so why shouldn’t they tell you how to fix yours?
And yes, I am one, but one who is rapidly cultivating another career!
No one’s mentioned message board moderators yet?
C’mon, you know you were thinking it.