They PAY People To Do That?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Or What’s the weirdest job you’ve ever had?

I’m a Professional Audience Member. It’s true! Yes, you can get free tickets to tv shows all over TinselTown but didja know that many of the people filling the seats are paid to be there? And if you get a Union Job, you get paid VERY WELL.

I fell into this job by accident and it’s helping me through a persistent bout of unemployment. There’s no heavy lifting, I’m inside an air-conditioned studio all day and I get to be seen on TV. So far I’ve worked Family Feud,* Deal or No Deal*, and The Naked Trucker. I’m down front on the Feud so my gramma will get to see me!

What other odd jobs are out there that people have never heard of?

2

I painted wrought-iron bird cages for a chain of pet stores. I had other warehouse duties, but the cages were my main job.

3

Last summer I worked at an elementary school summer program. Basically, I went on field trips every day to make sure that the kids behaved and that they all came back at the end of the trip. It was pretty cool, I got to go to the marble factory, museums, swimming pools all over the city, the nature center, all over the place.

4

My last job was working for a feral cat rescue group - I trapped cats and socialized kittens. I also trapped dogs, possums, racoons…

5

I perform weddings on the weekends. Despite the fact that the weddings are all Christian-style, religion was a distinct non-issue during the interview. I even mentioned that I wasn’t Christian and got a shrug: “that’s ok, the bride and groom usually aren’t, either.” I mainly treat it as playing a role on stage, and I’ve ended up outlasting just about everyone but the old-time missionaries (the guys who came over back in the 60’s and 70’s and founded their own churches).

6

Oh yeah, and they pay me for it. Quite well, in fact.

7

For a brief period (by which I mean exactly four days), I was a “hand billing greeter”.

I stood at a street corner in a busy tourist area and held up complimentary magazines to tourists. Every 20-30 minutes, I’d head over to that other corner. For about four hours a night.

Paid pretty well, considering that there was next to no actual, y’know, work involved.

And yes, this was long after I got my two associate and one bachelor’s degree. Why do you ask?

8

Well, there likely aren’t too many zookeepers/presenter’s on here. My sideline, theatrics and snakewrangling in an Alice Cooper tribre band, is a bit odd too.

Fun though!

9

I looked up Alice Cooper on Wikipedia and now know who he is, but what is “tribre”? and what is “snakewrangling”?

10

I haven’t had any really bizzare jobs but taken together it makes a stange list…

Working at the Met
Working at CBGB’s
Doing the news poll for Dateline
Working at an S&M club (just taking money at the door, I swear…I wasn’t a full fledged pervert back then.)
Working for the only liberal newspaper in New Hampshire.

That’s just for starts…this is why I can’t get a job, my resume is all over the place (hey, I’m complex!)

11

No, but I’m in a closely related field.

12

My Aunt was telling me she went to an Island vacation resort. (I can’t remember what island)

The Hotels there actually pay these guys they call Island philosophers to walk around on the beach and tell stories to people.

I was like “Jeez! Around here in Dallas they call them vagrants!!”

13

For several years now I have been an Author Escort. When writers come to town on book tours, I get them to their engagements at bookstores, media outlets, and the like. There aren’t a whole lot of us.

14

I’m gonna guess that it’s a “tribute” band, which is a band that imitates another widely known band. An Elvis impersonator, for instance, is a tribute to Elvis. Animal wranglers manage and sometimes perform with animals. Given that Alice Couper was known for his over-the-top theatrics, I’m not surprised that a tribute band would need a snake wrangler.

15

Dead on, Lynn. I just didn’t want to bother a Mod over my typo as I figured most people would recognize the word as “tribute”.

You’re also right about wranglers. I wrangle the snake, “Slim”, who by the way belongs to the zoo, for the band. That means looking after him at shows and in transit, making sure that he’s onstage at the right time and being available to get him off our singer, Paul, after his song. I also work with Paul regularly, teaching him how to hold the snake properly and what to do if he gets overactive onstage. We have sessions where Paul comes in simply to hold and play with the snake so that the animal stays used to him and feels comfortable being held by him. Matter of fact, he was in doing just that for about two hours this morning.

It was the snakes that got me in the band, as a matter of fact. They rented another snake, Lydia, for their first gig last year. When Paul came in to see about using the snake, he also discovered that he’d walked into the biggest Alice Cooper fan in Surrey - me! One thing led to another and now I’m part of the band. I love it!

16

I know - saw you on the Steve Irwin threads. You’re why I said “not many” instead of none!

17

In grad school, I had a job counting pedestrians at an intersection. I was supposed to count every person I saw counting the street from 3pm until 11pm so they could time the traffic lights. But the intersection had no street lights so once the sun went down the number of pedestrians I saw always dropped to zero.

18

I once spent a single evening as a phone tarot reader…one night is all I could stand. It’s not exactly an obscure job, but it sure was weird.

My husband, who is currently not permanently employed, just spent two days as the K-Mart Stuff Bus manager. Basically, he had to ride a bus ferrying college students back and forth from campus to K-Mart, take surveys, hand out coupons, and take pictures of the kids with their purchases. Except for some reason, they couldn’t find a bus and hired a limo instead, and he only had three people ride one day, so he was paid 12 dollars an hour to ride around in a limo by himself for most of six hours last Friday.

19

Another person with no individually weird jobs, but a weird ensemble:

Worked in a daycare at a Catholic church when I was in high school (what? I got to hang out with 5 girls my age and trade dirty jokes. Oh man, we told LOTS of dirty jokes in the church daycare.)

Worked for a week as a cook’s assistant at a Boy Scout summer camp. This mostly consisted of washing dishes, cleaning tables, mopping, scraping rat poop and spider webs out in the pantry :eek: , and trying to supress the rising urge to kill one of my coworkers. Made me swear never ever to work in food services.

At Texas A&M I worked as an office assistant for the Biology Department (basically a student working in a secretarial capacity). This included answering the phone, helping organize office stuff, sorting and delivering mail, reminding professors to check their mail more than once a month, calling maintinance when we discovered a dead bird on a windowsill was still there 3 months later (what? It was low priority, and the people working in the building found it fascinating rather than worrisome), helping set up and tear down dining rooms for various banquets, brunches, and what not, and making sure the copy machines worked right, along with various other random things. I found the co-workers to be very nice, and the job soul-crushingly uninspiring.

I also wrote for two newspapers, the Battalion (the official student paper of Texas A&M, and an AP-affiliated publication too, where my job title was “Newsdesk Reporter”) and the Maroon Weekly (the wacky, left-wing, off-campus weekly publication, where my job title was “Staff Writer”, despite the fact that my work was strictly freelance in nature.) Maroon Weekly was easy work, but the management rather fast-and-loose for my preferences (in College Station, they claimed two of my paychecks being late were because of Hurricane Rita :rolleyes: ) and the Battalion was rewarding, but way too fast-paced for me to be able to keep up as a writer at the time (they were going to hire me as a photographer, but the Photog editor only wanted to hire people with digital cameras, apparantly my trusty Spotmatic wasn’t good enough :rolleyes: )

Oh, and for a month I worked as a delivery driver for a hot wing delivery place. First week I worked 46 hours because I was the only delivery driver they had working for them, and the second week I had 9 hours because they hired 7 more drivers, just before the semester ended and everyone went home for the summer. They fired me because they had hired too many people, and I was the only one asking for time off for various trips out of town during the summer. Apparantly, they intended to hire me back in the Fall, but failed to realize I was moving to Arizona in July. :smack: Good tips, but I wouldn’t want to work in food services again if I had the choice.

Now I find myself working as a library aide for a local community college. The guy doing the interview said my variety of experience actually made me more attractive as a hiring prospect because it suggested I could be flexible if needed. He also found my interest in computers to be an asset, along with the fact that I just love books. It didn’t hurt a bit that I was the only applicant for that job opening. :stuck_out_tongue: Enjoy the work very much, along with most of the co-workers, though it can be boring at times.

20

I was basically a babysitter for a famous American performance artist while she was doing a show in Berlin…had to escort her around town, translate, make sure she didn’t piss off too many people…she was an uncouth bitch on wheels, but I can deal with that. Job lasted six months, paid quite well.

During my freelance writing days, I got creds to go to film festivals and see all the films, interview the directors and actors and got paid to do it…all the while I was also writing porn for a few magazines that paid me $400 a month each. People would ask me what I did for a living and I told them I watched movies, fantasized about sex and hung around celebrities…nobody ever believed me.