Probably the strangest job I ever had was working as an “Ice Cream Picker” in a freezer warehouse. This was a temp job. The warehouse filled ice cream orders for a major regional supermarket chain.
The way the job worked was that each of us would grab an order sheet. Each item on the sheet was in the same order in the “Pick line”. So we would go down the pick line and fill up a 6 ft tall cart with ice cream. When the cart was filled, we would set it aside and continue the order on the next one. After the order was loaded on the carts, we would load them into the semi trailers.
It was very VERY cold work. The freezer was set to -10 deg Fahrenheit… So cold that the job provided freezer suits to wear. A typical shift was from noon until 8 PM, but we often had way more orders then the time allotted so I got a lot of overtime pay. Often times I worked 13 - 15 hr shifts.
The hardest part of the job was not the cold. It was loading the carts onto the trailers. Once the carts were loaded, they easily weighed 200 - 300 lbs each. There was a ramp that exited the freezer part of the warehouse and opposite that were 3 ramps leading up to the trailers. We had to take 2 of the carts, then run them down the exit ramp and up the ramp to the trailer, but the hard part was that the trailer ramps weren’t exactly lined up with the exit ramp from the freezer, so we had to make 2 turns while running with up to 600 lbs of ice cream on 2 carts to get them on the trailer.
It was a spring/summer job for me and it made me a good chunk of money. I quit it when I got married and moved, but I was rich and buff for the wedding.
I sometimes get hit by lightning on my current job. They are small lightning bolts (1-2 ft long) but let me tell you, they pack a punch.
I work for a company that makes an electrically charged plastic film. I operate the machinery that charges the film. The film is mostly used for printing- advertising, movie posters, banners. After it has been charged, it will cling to walls, doors or windows, sort of like a static cling.
The film comes in large rolls. I run it through the machine, zap it and rewind it on the other end. As the film is rewinding, it pops and snaps and as the roll gets larger, it can build up until a small lightning bolt goes off with a “Crack!” and a flash. If I’m too close to the roll at the time, it can reach out and touch me- usually on the hand or arm. It is not a pleasant experience, but I’ve been working here for years and I’m used to it- although the larger ones can make me dance around and utter expletives.
The larger lightning bolts will scorch the film and leave a pretty cool imprint. I should post a photo. I’ve thought about starting an “Ask the guy who gets hit by lightning on the job” thread but never got around to it.
Hey–I’ve worked in an insectory, too! I didn’t do anything with DNA, but I did help rear colonies of walking sticks, mealworms, fruit flies, blowflies, and various species of cockroach. I also had to water acacia plants with colonies of ants.
I really enjoyed that job, and the experience came in very handy later on in grad school. And, just to show you what my life is like–I don’t even think of that job as weird.
Here is a photo of a lightning bolt on a sheet of film (scissors for scale). This is a particularly large one, most are smaller. I don’t get hit by big ones like this too often- maybe once every 6-8 weeks.
I tell my boss we should frame these and sell them as art.
This would be a nightmare job for me!
I am that guy who gets shocks whenever I touch ANY metal! Yes, I have tried the key trick (get a shock even worse) and every other trick in the book, but no matter what I do in the winter, every damned thing I touch goes “ZAP!” and I get a shock. I seriously can’t even pick up items in the local Walmart grocery section as I get zapped from the metal shelves! We are not talking little shocks - people have seen blue flamers fly through the air and zap me and strangers will look at me and say, “wow, I bet that hurt!”
Yes, it did.
So, at your job? Ohgoodlord…just shoot me now.
I would be dead before lunch break.
I used to review gay porn sites right outside of highschool answering a craigslist ad. I am not gay, but for $30 a review that takes 20 minutes or so I can be paid to be. Unfortunately the boss had a crew of reviewers and would email at odd times, and the first ones to reply would get the job. Since I had a regular job at the time and no smartphones back then, I wasn’t often able to respond quick enough, and eventually I stopped getting the emails with offers.
Quick update on the OP: Bloody heck, I actually got the job! Starting in Brighton, UK, then hopefully moving to Montreal when the paper work is in order. Apparently the company wasn’t exactly awash in potential Norwegian testers. Not surprising, as the money is crap, the hours are bizarre, and the work is brain-melting. OK, then, this should be… interesting. Maybe I’ll start an “ask the game tester” thread at some point.
I guess it’s not too odd in the grand scheme of things, but once I interviewed for a job doing math for a company that made slot machines. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, so I wasn’t even close to getting hired.
When I was 15 (back in 1990), I briefly worked for a local company that manufactured those fugly little troll dolls. I was paid, by the piece, to glue on the hair and dot the eyes…seriously. It saved up enough to make a down payment on a 1980 Honda Accord (dents in every body panel…and rust, dry-rotted back seat, missing grill, burned more oil than gas), then I moved on to the lucrative world of fast-food chicken!
I worked briefly as a mystery shopper for movies. My job was not to gauge the quality of the movie, the service or anything else. Basically, I got paid to sit and count noses. they wanted to know if the number of people watching the movie matched up with the number that bought tickets. I was supposed to sit in the theater for every showing for an entire weekend. I often would sit through the first 15 minutes of a showing counting heads and then leave, especially when I was asked to do a Chris Rock movie. I barely managed to sit through the 15 minutes on that one.
Were you hired by the management of a particular chain or just a single cinema? I’m wondering if you could be spotted by any perps scamming the ticket numbers themselves.
By the distributor, I’m guessing. I used to work for a cinema (which was not strange at all). We’d fax the distributor a daily list of the number of tickets sold for each session, and the distributor would occasionally send someone to check that we weren’t scamming them.
Back when I passed my civil service exam to enter the public sector for the first time, I sent application forms for pretty much all entry level vacancies in the area. One of these was for a CIA courier.
