But think of what would happen if no one was there to pick it up… the big rectangular aluminum box, just circling around and around, over and over … for all eternity.
My sister spent a period of time where she counted snails. That was after she spent two summers fighting forest fires - which is actually a pretty common job.
My stepfather in law is a Computational Neuroscientist. He models brain activity on computers. I think that’s a really cool title. But its realitively uncommon.
My unusual job wasn’t that unusual, but what the hell.
I used to paint up little porcelain wishing wells. It was for a company that sold “collectors” figurines and stuff. The ones that I decorated most frequently were these little porcelain wishing wells, with a goldfish in the water of the well. The porcelain is pure white and glazed with a clear glaze, and I was trained to use China paint (which is tricky to learn, because you really can’t touch the surface that you paint, because your fingerprints will show). I colored everything in with a paintbrush—the stones of the well were brown, as was the roof of the well. The goldfish was gold, obviously. And so on.
I’d paint these little wishing wells at home and then deliver them to the factory, where they would be fired in the kiln and then shipped out to stores or wherever. And then I’d pick up more blank wishing wells and paint them up. Exciting.
Actually, that’s what the old gangs did. Instead of killing someone else to get into a gang, you were required to mutilate yourself. Like one guy had a missing finger from joining a gang 40 years ago.
I spent a summer as a coiler in a plastic-pipe factory. It was a small plant, and long enough ago that the only automation they had was the thermostat on the extruder. My job was to wrap the pipe neatly onto the big reels, cut it off, and tie it up. The most excitement we ever had was when there was a power failure that lasted long enough for the plastic to set inside the extruder. The boss had to drive out the screw (polished steel, about four inches across and eight feet long) with a sledgehammer while the rest of us made sure the sawhorses were still lined up to catch it. Then we spent half a day very carefully scraping off the hardened plastic without scratching the screw, and then putting it all back together.
My sister had a job for a while sorting fossils. She’d sit at her microscope all day picking out little petrified critters from the sand they were mixed with. “Sand grain, sand, sand, fossil, sand, fossil, …” Somebody else did the actual counts.
That, my friend, is a skill.
I have a a number of co-worker colleagues who are paid to fly R/C airplanes professionally.
I’m designing a computer system to fly the same R/C airplanes from a flight simulator console…
'Specially since a lot of people (me) have a hard time backing up one boat or trailer!
well, past his eyes anyway.
I once had a job where I sat at a drill press all night reducing pine boards into wood shavings for those bags of potpourri that you see in stores. What a cheeseball company that was!
Author Spider Robinson once had a job guarding a sewer opening. He never knew if he was guarding it from something going in or coming out or what. Now that’s got to be the wierdest job ever but easy money, what?
So that’s what a hostler does.
And I thought it was someone who took care of the horses, or possibly the luggage, at the inn. Although it also sounds like one of those medieval Tolkienish jobs, like sword-cleaner or Orc… 
::scuffs toe in the dirt::
Aww, shucks ya’ll.
This reminds me of the egg sniffers. Eggs that aren’t sold as table eggs get sent off to the broken egg lines. Restaurants, etc. can buy huge bags of broken eggs instead of shelled eggs. Anyway, there are giant room-size machines that carefully break each egg, removing the top part of the shell. Further down the line, a jet of air is blown across the broken egg and into the face of the egg sniffer. It’s her job to detect the rotten ones and eject them from the line. It’s almost always a woman (better sense of smell). The eggs go by at some insanely high rate like 50-100 per second and the machines have to be calibrated to each woman’s response time. FTR, I never had this job (thank Og), but I was studing a way to mechanize the process.
Also, I had a friend who worked for a pest control company. It was his job to sit in a room with thousands of roaches, ants, insect-of-the-day and count how many went to each type of bait. And he liked it! :dubious:
I am an Aerial Photographic Laboratory Technician.
Aerial Photography is used for surveying & map making, & it’s easier than doing it from the ground.
I develop the photos, from 8"x8" negatives.
Also, we have an entire room that is a camera.
A not-uncommon trade in the Navy, at the very least. And every shipyard in the world has several underwater welders. My cousin was one!!
But all rooms are cameras.
[/word nerd]
I have a friend who identifies individual salamanders for a city in Texas. These are critters removed from water systems, and released elsewhere. They suspect that the beasties are somehow gettin’ back into the system, so they want to find out if they’re removing the same individuals multiple times.
I worked for a few years as a market reporter for a commodities exchange. I stood in the “pit” listening to the traders. When the trading price changed I would report it via walkie-talkie to my counterpart stationed at a computer terminal.
Now I design and build physics demonstrations for a large university.
That isn’t the oddest job in biology I’ve had. I spent one summer working for an environmental consulting firm in Colorado, doing impact assessments for oil-shale projects and evaluating the productivity of the grasslands they were going to destroy. At the beginning of the summer we set out meter-square wire-mesh cages to prevent cattle from grazing plots. Later that summer we would come back and clip all the vegetation, sort it by species, and weigh it. I got good at sorting out a dozen species of grass by the stems alone.
I spent another couple summers as a field assistant measuring flower nectar production in studies on hummingbird ecology in Trinidad and California.
I’ve also worked as a botanical artist in Madagascar for a couple of months.
But the job I really enjoy mentioning to people about is the two years I spent as an exhibitionist* on the National Mall in Washington D.C.
*I worked on various exhibitions for the Smithsonian and other organizations.
A friend of mine worked rehabbing apartments in the housing projects of Chicago. Before he went into work he had to tape the bottom of his pants around his boots to keep the roaches and mice from running up his legs. He also carried a loaded pistol in his work belt to protect himself from the homeboys.
Maybe he was guarding it to keep clowns from coming out of it?