I worked as a “guide” at an “historical site” - it was a heap of dirt that had been flattened and an iron age (or thereabouts) “homestead” was built on to it. We were given no relevant information about the site, how or why it was there, or anything. They gave it an Irish name and I’d no clue what it meant till a tourist told me…
Most of my blurb was cobbled together from the Jean Auel “Ayla” books (re. cooking, hunting etc), and to my horror someone came for a second visit (with relations or somesuch) and complained “that’s not what they told me the first time!”
Several people wanted to know why it was so far off the beaten track and one child wanted to know where they plugged in the TV, bless
Can you tell us who it was?
The film festival part sounds pretty good. How did you get that job, and how could I get a job like that?
I was a professional message board moderator.
I also did guest internet chats (typing for the guest), moderated chats and moderated picture galleries.
Then the dot coms crashed. 
Cheers,
G
Mandolin player greeting visitors to a museum in Japan.
I was a student secretary for one of my professors in college. It was more like a teaching assistant position, though. I graded papers, even once monitored a test, and a few times actually created the tests for the students.
Just before I got my first real job, I had a temp job where I sat in a utility closet and ran standardized tests into a Scantron machine. When your kids take those standardized tests in school and then get the results back a few weeks later, they’re sent to a company similar to the one I worked at for grading.
None of my other jobs are or have been that strange. I’m a freelance game reviewer, and I get paid for the games I play and review. I suppose that might qualify.
I was a packer for a moving company.
When people were relocated by their employers, and their employers paid their moving expenses, my colleagues and I came in to pack all their stuff, and leave it for the movers.
We got to trawl through people’s drawers and cupboards and pick through their personal possessions. We packed porn and hash pipes and sex toys and all manner of stuff. Good fun.
I…uh…saw a similar type of gig done by Britney Spears. Is your act similar in nature?
Probably the most interesting job I’ve ever had was working in a freezer warehouse. This warehouse was one that was contracted by a large supermarket chain for ice cream storage. My job was that of “ice cream picker”. I would go down the line of pallates with a large cart (about 6ft tall and 3 ft by 3ft square) and load it with ice cream orders for the different stores in this supermarket chain. Sometimes one store would have an order so large it would take 20+ carts to fill it. I worked in -20 deg f for 8+ hrs per day. It was hard work, but got me in great shape and it paid well, plus once in awhile, we were given the opportunity to take home free ice cream from the “damaged” bin. This was stuff that was perfectly fine, but was not sellable. I was bringing home so much ice cream all that summer that we didn’t have to buy any all summer.
I had a job one summer working for the Noon Optimists (service club like the Lions, Kiwanis, etc.). They had sold a bunch of tickets over the phone to a Beatlemania concert (see “tribute bands,” above) for a fundraiser, and hired a bunch of us to deliver the tickets and collect the money. I think we got a buck per ticket delivered, something like that. So I spent every evening that summer zooming around town on my scooter. Pretty fun. (Except for the lady who kept me for 15 minutes so she could tearfully tell me how her grandson got killed on a motorcycle and I shouldn’t be riding that dangerous thing . . .)
Some of the more fun ones:
Working in a comic book warehouse (only downside: No AC. I passed out from heat exhaustion twice one summer).
Driving around Chicago removing the money from pay-phones (so far my easiest and most-fun job)
Playing video games (well, -one- video game. Quality tester for a now-defunct video-game company)
Professional Shakesperian Actor (I was even reviewed in the Reader!)
and my current, doing inter-library loan internet work for a medical library (which I find strangely more fullfilling than I thought I would.)
Oh man, I hate when people do that. Was eating out with my friends just before I moved from Texas, and one of them brought his very strange mom, who ended up trapping me in a long and varying conversation about random stuff, and at some point I mentioned I was planning to join the Air Force, and she made this face that made very fiber of my being go “Aw shit.”
The next half an hour was her telling me I shouldn’t fight someone else’s war for oil, and how I should go to culinary school to help develop an alternate fuel source. Seriously, that’s all I can gather from her 30 minute rant. :rolleyes:
Anyhow, to get this back kinda on topic, at my job working for the Battalion, I did end up doing some photog work with a borrowed Canon 10D for one of my articles, because the only available photographer quit that morning, after realizing that he “hated working with people”, something that is a bit of a problem for people in journalism 
Similarly, I found myself delivering newspapers on the night before Thanksgiving for the Maroon Weekly because one of the guys who usually did it “lost his car” (that is, his girlfriend usually gives him a ride when he delivers papers, and they got into a fight and she went to Corpus Christi). I ended up stuck with the job because I was the only person in town (go figure), and because they offered me $100 to do it.
Not as interesting as some, but unique. Not I, but my cousin.
He lived in NYC for a while and was hired to take handicapped persons on vacation. He would be furnished a ticket on the cruise (usually a cruise) and he just helped them get their bags on the boat, get around the different areas, go with them when they docked to see the sights…
Kinda neat! at least, to me
Now that’s a good question. We have an albino Burnese Python at work that’s rumoured to actually be that snake, but his previous owner mighta been full of it. Likely was.
Yeah, the act is basicly the same, except that Alice Cooper has been doing it since the early Seventies, well before Britney was born! Heh, Alice wore a t-shirt on stage around that time. The front said “Britney Wants Me” and the back said “DEAD!”
Oh, and about that little scene by Ms Spears? Interesting choice of music…
Alice had a fair size hit with “Poison”. Britney’s “snake song”?
“Toxic”
:rolleyes:
Just so we’re completely clear here, YOU are the one on stage in the revealing outfit with the snake tastefully coiled around your bosom and hips? Or is that Alice Cooper?
Because I’m having some…er…trouble visualizing this.
Ha! Whatta sight that would be!
No, the real Alice wears the snake himself. In our tribute band, my parts are Frankenstein (I get to rip someone’s arm off and eat it onstage. Lotsa fun! ), an orderly who catches and drags off the murdered nurse and one of the executioners. Oh, and I drape the snake on our “Alice”, of course.
It really helps if you’ve actually seen an Alice Cooper concert. Otherwise it just sound…indescribable. :eek:
Okay, enough hijacking!
Hey, Kawaiitentaclebeast, I just noticed your location! Get over here and come watch a concert - heck, we’re worth a trip to BC!
Historical Reinactor/Living Historian - twice. I dressed up in period clothing and conducted tours and showed tourists how people lived at the time. The first time I played the role of a post-civil war soldier in a rocky mountain outpost. I showed how to shoot a breechloader and all that sort of thing. The second time (at a different institution) I played the part of a generic 19th century cowboy. I mostly taught tourists how to rope (lasso for you easterners) and engaged in fun carefully planned gunfights 3 times a day. A fun, ok-paying summer job.
I worked as a track mobile operator’s helper for a couple of summers. A track mobile is a large vehicle that can run on paved roads and on railroad tracks. It is essentially a tug-boat for train cars. My job was to hook up (couple) train cars and move them into the train yard (called a “garden”) for pick-up by the UP railroad. Hot, dusty and dangerous work, but very well paid.
The Steve Irwin threads? I think you’ve got me confused with someone else.
I paint doll heads…I guess that’s a little weird…
Getting paid ~$25k/year just to go to school is nice. 
Ok so yes, most people have heard of this, but many don’t reallize that it can cost negative money.
$25000 may not be a lot, but it works just fine when you don’t have any time to spend it.