My husband has one of those jobs that most people don’t realize exist. Up until a few months ago, he was a Corrections Officer (prison guard). But he got promoted and moved to “intake”. Most people have heard of intake and know that’s where they process new prisoners. But it’s his *specific * job that’s unusual. He photographs and catalogs every single tattoo, piercing, loss of body parts etc… This is so they can keep up with any new gangs that pop up. He also has to question them about any gang affiliation, which can be difficult if they’re trying to act like they don’t speak english or if they’re trying to convince everybody they should be sent to the Mental Health facility instead of the main prison.
It’s the first job he’s had where he had his own office. On his first day, he was all excited because there was a regrigerator in his office. But then he found out, that’s where they keep the pee from the drug tests.
Tell him to make sure to stay away from the lemonade.
My step-father (a-hole) had one of those jobs no one thinks exists.
He repaired dental hand drills.
Now he’s just an ex-con. I think that one’s not so rare.
A friend of mine (who has since passed away) had a job as an inspector for OSHA, where he’d go to various job sites and make sure everything was safe. He told me about a few jobs that were funky. One of them was at an egg farm, where they had thousands upon thousands of hens. When you have that many animals, it’s just a statistical reality that some of them are going to die now and then. This one guy had the job where every morning, he’d walk through isle after isle of chicken coups with a shopping cart, picking up the dead chickens.
Install and maintain buoys in Florida. His job was basically to dive and weld, not too things that go together well.
Install and maintain traffic signs. This guy is in charge of all the traffic signs in the county. And when some drunk knocks one down, he gets called to replace it.
A trailer park designer. Yes, this guy designs trailer parks.
Pet psychologist. I don’t really know one of these, just thought I would mention it as a truly strange job.
Marine lifeguard. I knew a woman that was called whenever a whale washed up on shore. Her job was to get the whale heading back out to sea.
Mortician’s apprentice. I knew I guy that tried, but didn’t make it through mortician’s school.
Barnacle scraper. This may be perhaps the worst job in the world, scraping barnacles off the bottom of boats. Reason being, barnacle glue is some of the strongest adhesive known to man, and barnacle shells are razor sharp when they’re chipped.
Foundry mould flipper. I actually did this one summer when I was in college. Walk around in a hot smokey room all day flipping molten aluminum foundry moulds that are usually on fire spewing strange colored smoke in your face.
I actually used to pick up bodies for a funeral home after hours. A lot of people don’t realise it, but the medical examiner’s office doesn’t pick up accident victims and murder/suicide folks. They actually have a rotation where the funeral homes pick up the bodies and take the to the morgue for autopsy.
Although, in a large city they may do things directly.
You know when you go to the local newspaper’s Web site, and that day’s stories are posted there, all organized and everything? Ever wonder how those stories got posted to the site, with photos and links and polls and whatever else?
Bio-medical equipment technician: Repair & maintain the medical equipment in hospitals, everything from bp cuffs to x-ray machines. Every hospital has a few BMETs.
PACS administrator: Hospital x-ray departments are going filmless – all digital imaging. It’s called PACS - Picture Archiving and Communication System. One person at each hospital is in charge of the system.
Had an uncle who was an ocularist. He got convicted of tax evasion, but they had to let him out of the jail for a couple of days each week. He was the only ocularist in the state.
Not quite 30 years ago, during the summer between school years, I had a job at a dairy factory. My job was to take 100 pound, perfectly square, blocks of butter out of a box, and push the block down a metal slide (a metal slide that looked identical to the one at the local park) into a boiler which melted the butter down.
Thing was, when the butter block fell into the boiler pool, it created a MIGHTY splash. So they gave me an umbrella to duck behind after each block hit the boiler vat. All day long I worked under an umbrella while butter rained down on me. Scalding hot butter poured down on me like a storm.
When I got home from work every day, I couldn’t f**king stand the sight, smell, or taste of butter!:mad:
But the job did pay $4.00 an hour, which was really good back then!
I should really grab a snack, because the concept of buttery pkbites made my stomach growl. If you’re going to talk about being covered in butter, try not to sound so much like food!
That being said, I used to get paid to reduce working “trade-in” photocopiers to itty-bitty pieces with a sledge-hammer so that they wouldn’t devalue newer models by continuing to make copies. Go figure.
I was told about this one from a friend who lived in the country. Seems this largish town had a pet food factory. In it they put the “miscellaneous” meat in the cans, then ran them through this huge oven to cook. The oven was really an enclosed tower with heat, and a sort of conveyor that ran the cans a few stories up one side then down the other and out to where they were labelled.
Anyway the oven ran without human input so no-one went in there, normally. Now sometimes while the meat was cooking the can would explode and deposit the contents on the concrete floor. Since no-one went in there and it was pet food, the factory saw no need to clean this up too often. Can you see where this is going?
Once every few months they hired a poor student from the local university to clean out the floor of the oven, which by now was coevered in several inches of rotting, maggot-ridden, squirming, stinking, half-cooked pet meat. No-one ever went for that job twice.
I can’t help thinking about that “loss of body parts” bit. Do gangs now force new members to lose body parts in order to join ? Just imagine it - instead of the Jets and the Sharks it will be the No-noses and the Only one big toe gangs !!
AndrewT, for some reason that reminds me of a job my brother-in-law did for a while. He worked at a ketchup plant, where he stood over a conveyer-belt that was conveying horribly un-pretty, overripe (ie; putrifying) tomatoes to machinery that pureed them. He manned a rake. To keep the rats/mice/other creeping things from going through the press, you see.
One summer I worked for my hometown’s Water and Sewer department. I did odd jobs, like mowing grass, weed whacking, cleaning up parks, etc. One day I was assigned to the Waste Treatment Plant.
If you’ve never been to one, it’s probably exactly what you would expect. Basically, they talk the sewer water, dredge out the goop, run the goop through an oven to kill germs, and then spread it out in fields to dry and become soil or something.
My job that day was to clean all of the windows. It didn’t sound so bad at first, as most of the buildings are reasonably clean and normal, once you get used to the smell. But in the room where the shit was being dredged, there lived approximately one bajillion flies. Most of which were clustered on the windows. I basically refused to do that room. Even after the plant supervisor came over and looked at my handiwork, which was decent everywhere else.
Oh, and I also cleaned poop out of a sink at a local park that summer.
My husband does that on an on-call basis for a local funeral home. He only picks up from the morgue and nursing homes and hospitals and occasionally private homes, though, and brings them to the funeral home. Sometimes he’ll go to the airport and get someone who’s been shipped from out-of-state. In that case, he goes directly to the plane and gets the container right off the cargo hold.
I was a “backer-upper” at a trucking company (UPS – the actual job title was “hostler”). The yard was tight, and the trucks were parked very close together; so they trained one guy on each shift to back them in. So, when an 18-wheeler came into the yard, I hopped in and backed the trailer into its slot. I have an entire truck-driving career spent mainly in reverse.
[mildly interesting sidenote]
A weird benefit from that job: Here in Texas, pulling 2 RVs is common. We pull a fair-sized camper trailer and a skiboat behind our truck when we head out for the weekend. I’m sure there are others, but so far I’m the only person I’ve encountered who can back BOTH trailers simultaneously into my parking spot.
[/mildly interesting sidenote]
They don’t just send it through to baggage claim? Down the slide then around the luggage carousel? “Man! I wish they’d tie a flag onto these things so I’d know which on was mine.” That’s not how it works, huh?
