Mad Scientist: 
Dogsitter, not just a dog walker/tender. This was an indoor dog that didn’t like to be alone. In fact she would start howling this high pitched wail if left alone hence my employment. I would sit on the couch studying. The dog would sit next to me comepletely quiet and usually she would fall asleep. It was definitely some of the easiest money I ever made.
I lasted three days as a phone psychic. Supposedly, I was a sensitive empath and interpreted dreams.
No, I don’t actually believe I’m psychic. I don’t believe that anyone is psychic, because psychic powers don’t exist. But, for $10.00 per hour in 1995, and a schedule that fit around my college classes, I figured I could be psychic.
The guilt and super-restrictive management got to me quickly, so I ended up quitting soon after I started.
Chucker-in at a sex club in Amsterdam. Basically just hanging around the door trying to persuade people that it was the hottest show in town. Lousy money but I got to see the shows for free.
Jobs I interviewed for:
I had a great offer from a film company that paid really well and during the interview, I could see I had the job if I wanted it! I was quite happy and then the interviewer happened to mention the company had new owners - a very, very conservative Christian right-wing group. She must have seen my face melt. She tried very hard to get me to accept that job, but I just knew I would be fired in a matter of seconds if I ever met the new owners, so I declined. Plus, if I had ever told friends who I worked for, they would have tarred and feathered me on the way out of town.
I went through a rather lengthy online interview to get a job that wrote blurbs for gay porn films. My job would be to watch all the new porn films, write about 300 words describing the fun action (they liked a bit of wit and subtle humor) and it would be posted online, next to the link to see the film (for a hefty monthly fee). This job also paid really well, the owner was a young guy who was really rich and quite generous when paying his employees and had great health benefits as well as regular bonuses. Unfortunately, when the owner and I met - well, we didn’t hit it off all that well. He had the contract on the table, but he didn’t offer it and I didn’t reach for it. It just sort of sat there. Can’t describe exactly what happened, but neither of us could make that last step and I simply shook his hand and wished him well. I probably could have had that job, but somehow I knew it was not going to be a happy working relationship with him.
I think he knew it as well.
Jobs I have had:
As an ESL teacher in Berlin, it was pretty normal - but I did teach a Russian spy English (along with two other teachers in an intensive 6 week course) and the three of us went to his offices upon completion of the course to celebrate with copious amounts of vodka.
I had a job in NYC selling - sandpaper. Yep - sandpaper from Switzerland as a matter of fact. Huge ass rolls of sandpaper that they used in manufacturing (mostly for shoes/boots). My job was to translate the orders and specs from English to German - contact the Swiss - they would contact me in German and I would translate back for the Americans. I learned more about sandpaper than I ever thought possible - in two languages.
I was the seventh male telephone operator in Chicago - shortly after they changed the laws for sexual discrimination my roommates and I saw an add for MEN to be telephone operators. We went down there, almost as a joke, and all three of us got hired. Quite funny back then - people would hear a man’s voice and hang up, thinking they dialed “O” wrong! I had guys hit on me as well over the phone. However, it was a tedious job (split shifts) and quite stressful (no 911 back then, people just called the operator and you had to put them through to police/fire department) and I think I lasted the longest of the three of us by staying there for about 8 months. They actually had a “funny room” in the back when people would just stress out and need/be told to go lie down and calm down.
I worked for the Wildlife Service in New Zealand for three years, sometimes radiotracking giant flightless parrots at night in subantactic forest on Stewart Island.
I was a botanical artist in Madagascar for a while.
I worked for a summer as a grassland botanist in Wyoming. I got so I could identify every local species of grass from a single blade.
I worked briefly (less than a month) installing gravestones and assorted granite markers and decorations. Every Monday and Thursday, Phil and I would load up the truck and go around to many of the small rural cemeteries to install monuments. We would spend two or three days on the road, sleeping in crappy motels and seeing the nastiest dive bars in a three state area. There was some digging of course but it wasn’t difficult work and Phil was a blast to work with but I was only hired as a temp while the regular guy was recovering from an injury. Pay was lousy though so I would have left soon anyway.
QC for a food processor that made one product, in one size container. 55 gallon drums of tomato paste.
Thank god I was their second choice.
Insect colony manager. This was my first research-related job, a part-time gig in my senior year of college, raising fruit flies, blowflies and Aedes aegypti mosquitoes for research purposes (mashing them up and sequencing their DNA, mostly). I attended my graduation wearing long sleeves, because I’d provided the mosquitoes with a blood meal a day or two previously and my arms were still bumpy.
My last lab research job involved visual pigment research. To obtain pigments to study, I spent a lot of time dissecting cow eyeballs.
You worked with Kakapo!? Did you ever get to handle one? What were their numbers like while you were there?
I’ve dog sat for two or three different people. I also tortoise-sat on a couple different occasions. A neighbor had three large tortoises that stayed outside (in Southern California) and I’d go over, make them a salad, clean up, and then leave.
My first job was at sixteeh sitting in front of the beluga whale tank at the New York City aquarium making sure that no one was trying to sneak in without paying. The aquarium was across the street from my house.
Weirdest job overall? Probably my brief stint as a character performer at Walt Disney World.
Weirdest individual task? During my first summer out of high school, I was working at a scene shop that was known for building Broadway sets. While I was there, however, we worked on decorative pieces for the Mohegan Sun Casino of the Wind. I spent a lot of time gluing strips of glass together, and after each stack was done being assembled, the glass glue would need to be cured. Normal glue starts curing upon contact with air, but the glass glue we used cured only when exposed to UV rays, which was accomplished using a UV lamp. The lamp could only cure about half a square foot at a time; each section needed to be hit for 30 seconds before moving on; each stack had about 20 square feet of surface area that needed to be hit; there were at least 50 stacks to be cured. The result: I would spend several hours per day sitting on a bucket, staring at the back of a UV lamp, counting to 30, moving the lamp, counting to 30, etc.
Weirdest job interview? I got an interview at a place that publishes digital textbooks. When I got to the building, I accidentally went to the wrong floor. When I realized this, I decided to take the stairs down to the right floor rather than hog the elevator. This turned out to be a mistake. The stairwell doors didn’t open from the inside – the stairs were intended for emergencies, not for traversing between floors. I went down to the bottom, hoping to get to the lobby, but the only door said was an emergency door which claimed to sound an alarm when opened. I thought “Well, cock, I don’t want to evacuate the whole goddamn building just because I went down the wrong stairwell,” so I went back up to the right floor and pounded on the door for a while.
After about 10 minutes of fruitless pounding, I decided that my use of the emergency exit door would now be justified, so I went down and pushed on it. Locked! What the fuck!? I didn’t think it would even be possible to lock such a door, but alas, I was truly trapped. I went back up and knocked some more, and just as I was pulling out my phone to call a friend for help, the interviewer came out and opened the door.
“Are you Cryptic?”
“Yes.”
“How did you get in there?”
“I don’t know.”
Despite my bizarre, late, and somewhat stressful entrance, the boss seemed to think I was a good fit, and I got the job. We later told the building manager about the locked exit door and he just said “Hmm… well, it should be open.” No shit.
I applied for my first full-time, ‘real’ job as a bagger when I was 16. The job itself wasn’t weird, but the fact that I showed up to a partially-constructed building with my resume, just in time to catch the uber-manager while was there was slightly odd. Even odder since they had no recollection of placing an ad or even beginning hiring yet.
I was hired on the spot. 
I worked in a biomaterials lab processing pig bladders - had to squeeze out any leftover urine and then peel out the lining.
Stinky…
-When I was 18, I did phone interviews across the country to be an au pair in New Jersey. While it would have been a neat experience, as the household was the type of Jewish household that had two ovens, two sets of dishware for meat and milk, etc., I eventually turned it down because I couldn’t stand the lady’s accent and didn’t want to end up talking like that. >.< Apparantly the Fran Drescher stereotype is a stereotype for a reason! 
-The job I got paid the most for was the one with the least work: Firewatch for union welders. Just…sit there for 12 hours and make sure the sparks go where they’re supposed to.
-Worked 4 boat trips in Alaska. Two for crab processing, two on a fisher/trawler. I guess the weirdest thing about it is that when I first saw the ad, I thought ‘Who the hell would do that kind of work for 4 bucks an hour?!’ And 4 months later, apparantly, I would.
p.s. I’ll take crab work any day over fish, not nearly as stinky!
I applied and was accepted for a job as a bull semen separator/counter.
They centrifuge bull semen to separate the boy sperm from the girl sperm and then sell it to farmers for artificially inseminating their herd.
Thankfully, I was offered a better job in the meantime!
I was also a professional beer taster for a while, as part of my job at a brewery QC lab.
I applied for a personal assistant job while I was living in Hollywood. Turned out the job was for Ginger Lynn. Didn’t get to interview, though
When looking for a job after graduating In the 1993 recession I applied for the German diplomatic service. My not being considered was a good thing for world peace, probably.
I got paid to have vasectomies! I got two and was paid ~$4000 total. I even had to put it on my 1040! Now I’m becoming nauseous just thinking about it.