One of my weekend college jobs was working for a sailing club. They held races every Sunday and my job was to fire the cannon to start the race. I would actually get 6 hours of minimum wage to stand beside a cannon and fire it every few hours.
Another odd one was during my tenure at a UPS hub (still during college). Apparently their scheduling and shifts worked out such that a solitary 18-wheeler arrived in the early am, between shifts. They decided it was enough work for just one guy. So I arrived at 4 am to a huge empty building and my job was to do everything. Turn on the lights, start all the conveyor belts, open one of the big doors at the dock, etc. I would fire up a diesel truck and use it to back the trailer to the dock. Then I’d unload it onto the conveyors, rush around to the sort aisle and sort the boxes, and then load the relevant ones onto the smaller delivery trucks. Afterwards I was to turn everything off, bring down the doors and go home.
Those big UPS sorting facilities are huge, and it was always creepy to be there alone.
I am a paid coffee taster – coffee discrimination panelist, technically. I sit in a small booth in front of a computer screen. I get coffee sample coded with a number, then, on the computer screen, I assign a numerical value to about 20 different attributes for aroma, flavor, and aftertaste. There’s a two-minute break between samples during which we are to cleanse our palates with crackers and water. Each tasting session includes about eight samples. The pay is $20 a session, and I do three a week usually. Each session takes about an hour.
I used to be on another panel that did triangle testing: receive three coded samples of coffee. Two of them are the same; one is different. Taste them and then click the number on the screen of the different sample.
If you drink certain national brands of coffee, I’m the reason they taste OK!
I worked as a jizzmopper at a bath house in Hollywood, CA, for about 4 months. I hated the job with every fiber of my being. I use to fantasize about the ground opening up and swallowing the club. When the Northridge Earthquake hit (Jan 17, 1994 @ 4:31 am) I did a happy dance & almost spiked my coffee mug. Unfortunately the club did not descend into the depths of hell with me laughing maniacally, so I had to go back upstairs and tell stupid men to stop fucking and to go home.
Back in 1980, before we had nice big color plotters to print maps, I hand painted them.
Geomorphic Landsat maps.
Oil on linen. Paint, paint, and then blot with a Kleenex. If you where good, you could get about 1 sq foot done in an 8 hour shift. But some maps took a couple of weeks to complete.
They where VERY detailed, and very expensive. It was basically paint by number.
Was fun for about 4 hours, then became the most boring job I have ever had.
Back before the era of convenient cellphonery, I had a job driving around the Chicago area taking money out of payphones. I went with another guy, the company was pleasant, and the job was relatively easy. I used to joke that I hung out in more bars than anyone else I knew at the time.
I once interviewed for a project where they wouldn’t tell me anything about the project and most of my questions were answered with “we can’t answer that.” The interview consisted of a lot of bizarre questions along the lines of “how can you tell what a computer was doing on the other side of a brick wall if you aren’t allowed to see/touch the computer or access it in any way?”
After about 3 hours in a room with five unidentified people asking these types of questions, they all left the room. I sat there for about a half hour waiting for a hidden camera crew to come in and do the big reveal.
In the end, they came back, read me into a certain security program and my company got the gig. The coolest part of it was that the major five companies in the field had all declared the project impossible, yet my team accomplished the project goal in only six months.
Overnight shift for developmentally-disabled adult men in a group home. The men were high-functioning and needed minimal (e.g., no) supervision. I’d get there at 8PM, hand out medications (took ~15 minutes), complete evening notes (took ~5 minutes), joke around with the guys until they got tired and went to sleep. Then I went to sleep - in the bedroom provided for overnight staff!
My job was to literally be a warm body in the building in the event of an emergency.
~Also, not a strange job, but a strange job interview:
I had applied at a local church for a part-time position in their Christian Education department (I have a degree from Bible college, so I qualify). Shortly into the interview, it becomes obvious to me that the job won’t work for me, due to the weird hours. I politely tell the lady I’m interviewing with that I don’t think the job is the right fit for me, and I’d like to withdraw my application. She starts crying! :eek: Through tears she told me that they really really really thought I was the man for the job, and they wanted to hire someone soon.
My sister had a similar job when she was in her last years of college, but hers didn’t involve any medication. It was like a halfway house for mental patients, and all she had to do was show up, check in with everyone once, then go to bed. The kicker was that she got paid regular time if nothing happened, but OT rate if she was woken for any reason!
Relatively not that strange, but I packed orders for a company with three webstores. Two were adult toys, dvds, and costumes. The other was troll dolls. Their main business was as (kids) toy reps, so when I wasn’t packing I was scanning catalogs.
The juxtaposition always amused me. We had shelves of trolls on one side, and shelves of porn on the other.
My second job, (during one summer, while going to uni), was selling roses on the street corner. One weekend we sold helium filled, ‘Praise The Lord!’, balloons outside a Billy Graham speech at the Gardens. It was almost too easy!
Also worked as a carney, at Klondike Days in Edmonton, as a stop over, while hitchhiking to the Yukon. Different summer!
Aside from the numerous weird things associated with working in a zoo, I’ve also driven an ice cream van, and done a fair number of very short term odd jobs- like counting cars going into car parks in the red light district in Manchester and planting onions face down in a hammock pulled by a tractor.
ETA: Unfortunately, I chickened out last minute on applying for a job of jumping out of cakes in a bikini. Possibly unfortunately anyway…
I was a fabric spreader in a bikini factory when I was fresh out of college. Me and another guy had to walk back and forth on opposite sides of the loooong cutting tables, spreading the fabric evenly in many layers preparatory to the professional cutters cutting out the pattern pieces.
The only bennie was that I got to see the new styles being modeled by professional models - sweet!
