As part of my job, I do something that I’ve never heard of anyone else doing.
I stand in a place and watch for people to approach. Most of the people, as they approach, I think of a name–but it’s not their name. I don’t always know what the person whose name I think of looks like, and I almost never know the name of the person approaching. Nevertheless, I type the name I think of, and that’s my job duty.
My job is after-school pickup of students. I recognize the parents but don’t know their names, and after they’ve picked the same kid up a few times, I know the name of the kid, but I don’t always know the kid. So I type that name on our pickup spreadsheet, and the kid comes out to their parent.
Is there any other job with this weird quirk–where you link faces to names, but not the name that normally goes with the face, and you don’t know the correct name for that face, or the correct face for that name?
I’m also interested in other weird quirks of jobs.
You see kids come out. You write their name down if you know it. Into adults cars of people you know the faces but not necessarily their name.
Why is this a thing? Are you preventing a foul up? The wrong kid in the wrong car?
Or is it just an excercise to fill out a spreadsheet for filing somewhere.
I don’t understand.
My son often tells of a job he was tasked with in boot camp. He sat by a small table and screwed the tops on salt shakers as another guy filled them. A million later, He says he still has twinges in his carpal tunnel nerves.
I had a a weekly task where I was to meet with our suppliers to brainstorm cost reduction ideas, after a year of such meetings you run out of things to ask. But we kept on meeting as it allowed for us to take a nap or do other work without being disturbed.
I stand outside the school. An man walks up to me. If I don’t know him, he says, “I’m here for Pablo Picasso, in Ms. Kahlo’s class.” I type “Pablo Picasso” into our special spreadsheet. Ms. Kahlo has that spreadsheet open in her room, and sees that Pablo’s parents are here, and sends him outside to meet his parents.
After a few weeks, I know what Pablo’s dad looks like. As soon as I see this man–whose name isn’t Pablo Picasso–I type “Pablo Picasso” into my spreadsheet. I may not know what Pablo looks like. That means I know a face that attaches to a name, but I don’t know the name of the person with that face, and I don’t know the face of the person with that name.
It’s a way of ensuring that kids get into the car of a known parent or guardian and not a stranger (or an unauthorized ex).
At my grandson’s school each kid has a 4 digit number. When you pull up in line, you give the monitor the number, they punch it in to their device, then someone inside sends the kid out. My wife usually picks him up but if I have to fill in for her, I need to know that number - I can’t just ask for him by name. (Although sometimes they recognize the vehicle and punch in the number before you have a chance to give it to them.)
I did car pick up for 4 kids til they could drive themselves.
My car lisc. Plate number was on a list somewhere. I was listed as primary pick-up person.
I, most of the time had a card, I had to put on my windshield. It had a number that my kids corresponded to. First part of the school year it’s always a CF getting these things worked out.
If someone else was to pick the kids up I had to call the school before 10am to change the pick up person. I’m sure some kids get in the wrong car or bus every year.
By the end of the school year the pick up line monitors just sat there playing on their phones never looking up unless the line got stymied or stopped.
There was always a car, mom van or after-school daycare bus that was a problem. There was always one in every line I sat in.
The last part kind of reminds me of the head-count lady at Basic Training. When filing into the dining facility, soldiers would have to shout the last four of their social security number to the lady at the front desk. She would just write these onto a sheet for accounting purposes–to ensure the facility is funded properly.
Anyway, there would be easily 1000 soldiers going through a single facility 3 times a day. Soldiers remained in training for about 14 weeks. Every couple of weeks, a group of about 220 would graduate and a new group would start. So, there were thousands of soldiers coming through and hundreds changing all the time.
What amazed me was that by the 2nd week, she would have all of the face and last-4 memorized for each soldier. She would just watch the line and have all the soldiers already written down as soon as they entered the door.
She wasn’t memorizing the order and she wasn’t associating the number to a name tape on the uniform. It was by face. A soldier could come separated from his unit and wearing PTs (that don’t have a name displayed on them) and she would write down their last 4 before they had a chance to tell her.
It’s all digital now of course. She definitely had a knack for memorization and to say that she was underemployed would be an understatement.
Related to the OP, I bet she didn’t know or remember the names of each soldier. Pretty sure she only associated the face to the four-digit number.
Yeah, that’s really interesting, and is the kind of thing I was talking about! Every time I see some grownup and am like, “I know you’re gonna say Bill Sykes, but you’re not Bill Sykes, and I don’t know your name or what Bill Sykes looks like,” I wonder if anyone else has a similar job. Sounds like this lady did!
Oh I know about that. I was watching a friends kids a few years ago, and had to tell them who I was. My friends (the parents) called the elementary school to let them know I would be walking them home. I went up to the people outside amongst the kids and said, “ xxxx for yyyy and zzzz” and they checked off something, or noted something on a clipboard. It was only about 1/4 mile walk.
It sounds like this isn’t so much to ensure that the kids are getting into the right car (Pablo’s father didn’t have to provide any documentation the first time) as to make sure that all of the kids end up accounted for somehow.
I mostly teach high school, where we mostly just assume that the kids can take care of who’s picking them up themselves (and many of them are themselves driving). The only time I’ve done pickup-supervision duty was when I was a counselor for summer day camps, and we took it very seriously. The kids were all in their groups outside, but they were not to get up until we told them to. We had a list of people who were authorized to pick up each kid, and we had to see a photo ID from the pick-up-er every single time, even if we recognized them. Once we confirmed the ID and that the person was on the list, only then would we call the kid (or kids; a lot were siblings or carpooled with friends) over to the cars. I’m told (but then, we all know about the accuracy of “I’m told”) that we once had a case of an actual evil twin, where the father had a twin brother who was emphatically not on the list, but who tried to pick up the kid anyway.
Even if we did recognize the parent, it didn’t make much difference, just meant that we could flip to the right page of the list before they told us the kid’s name (but we still had to check ID and everything). It did cause some headaches when a parent didn’t take it as seriously as we did, and sent an aunt or someone to pick up the kid without first putting them on the list.
I had a slightly unusual job in college, transcribing weather balloon observations. A researcher would release a weather balloon and watch it through a transit or something like that. He didn’t have time to take his eye off the transit to write down the readings, so every minute or so he’d dictate a reading into a tape recorder. My job was to play back the tape recording and type in the readings.
The best part was that many of the researchers would have a radio playing in the background while working. So most of my work was just listening to recordings of radio broadcasts from a few months earlier.
The weirdest job i know of is a woman who had to watch porn at work. She’s a friend. She used to work for Acamai. (“We make the Internet faster”) And one thing their employees did was to check the streaming speed of their clients, which included porn sites. So … Yeah, she was literally paid to sit alone on a room and watch porn.
I suspect she’s asexual (for other reasons). As she told the story, she found it amusing, but neither particularly fun nor especially unpleasant.
I worked as a bridgetender for a few years, roughly 1973-1976. Sat in a small shack at one end of a 1-lane wooden bridge for an 8-hour shift. If a boat needed to get through, I would walk out to the centre span of the bridge, electrically close close the lane barriers at each end, disconnect a 6-inch hose that brought water to the island, then turn a couple of switches that would swing the bridge open. The boat would go through, and I would reverse the procedure.
The most openings I ever had in a single shift was 6 and once I went 3 months without an opening. Boats would contact us via marine radio, 3 horn blasts, or on a couple of occasions, when the tender was asleep, by throwing seal bombs (large firecrackers commercial fishermen exploded underwater to drive seals away) at the shack or firing a shotgun in the air. Never happened to me, but I was startled when someone banged on the door at 1 in the morning, soaking wet. He was off a pleasure boat that would have fit under the bridge, but had lost power some distance upstream and managed to maneuver into the bridge, tie up, and climb up the bridge to get help.
One summer, the motor that opened the bridge fell off into the water. We had to open the bridge with a capstan and a 10 foot lever, walking 'round and 'round, pushing the lever. The gearing made it surprisingly easy. When we were really bored, we would put on the hi-viz vest and hard hat, take the sledge hammer to the middle of the bridge, close the traffic barriers, and pound in the 10" spikes that would occasionally poke their heads up.
A co-worker lost his virginity on one shift but nothing like that happened to me. I came to work 30 minutes early once to see another co-worker, who had worked 3 shifts in a row, running around the shack yelling and jabbing holes in the drywall with a broom handle. Once a sailboat started through long before the bridge was open wide enough and snapped off both masts. I loved that job, apart from the bum pay and lack of prospects. Read a lot, wrote some high school and college papers and terrible poetry, played the banjo, made a lot of phone calls on the telephone.
Two of my friends have stumbled into this.
The first was when we were working at a major cell phone manufacturer. Someone reported a bug, and the repro steps involved a very specific web site. The bug wasn’t reproducing elsewhere, so they had to keep using that one until they figured it out.
The second was a friend who was working at a cable box manufacturer. His employee contract specifically stated that he may have to watch pornography as part of his job.
Yup. I think it had something to do with the encoding and size of the video they were showing. “wasn’t reproducing elsewhere” may be too strong a statement - they couldn’t easily repro it in other cases, but I wouldn’t be surprised if, after figuring it out, they found other ways to cause the issue. This was 15 years ago and I wasn’t really involved in the debugging effort.
I’ve had some unusual & unique duties working in the event production world; I bet some of you have even seen my work on TV.
I had a teammate who is a grip, & was the primary caretaker for the creepy lottery-shilling (not real/alive) groundhog; he posed it, & moved it & even took it home at least once.
When I was a teenager a neighbor worked at a place that made and sold “deer bags”. I don’t think I found out what they were, but apparently they were for deer hunters after they killed Bambi’s mother or father. He paid neighborhood kids to work in his garage. There were “rollers”, “sealers” and “packagers”. His teenage son was over the packagers, his teenage daughter was over the sealers, and his barely teenage daughter was over the rollers. I was friends with the teenage son, so I was a packager. We would get put them in in the box and tape it up. It was the place for kids from 10-16 or so to work for a little money. These would have gone to stores to sell to hunters for a product that was packaged by child laborers.