I used to cut puzzles for Putnum publishing company. I ran a giant press, where I’d take the big huge picture that was pasted on a piece of thick cardboard, slide it into the press, depress two buttons at once (You had to push both, and they were spread really far apart so you couldn’t possible press your hand in there), and the die would come down and cut the puzzle. Then I pushed it out of the press, it got jumbled up and broken, and it slid down a chute into it’s box.
The best part of the job was seeing all the cool pictures. The worst part was when I’d see a piece fall out on it’s way into the box. I’d have to climb down off the machine (it was raised up about 10 feet off the ground and was HUGE) and pick it up and put it into the box before I did another one. I couldn’t stand the thought of someone buying a 1000 piece puzzle and have them find out they were missing a piece at the end.
If he were keeping clowns from coming out, he must have carried an enormous mallet.
My most unusual job title was “Frogurt Packer.” In a huge refrigerated room, a conveyor carried three-gallon cardboard containers under a nozzle which extruded thick ropes of frozen yogurt (frogurt!) into them. I had to fold the tops of the containers over, then lift the filled containers off the belt and onto a hand cart so someone else could put them on a truck for shipment. In the middle of August, I had to wear a parka all day.
I had a similar job to rjk’s sister for a while: sorting invertebrates from sand for the Park Service, but I got to identify them too. My eyes almost went bad from all the microscope time.
I’ve been a marsh builder, constructing artificial salt marshes in California.
I’m currently a seal wrestler… this isn’t a job; it’s volunteer work, immobilizing northern elephant seal pups for tube feeding/administration of medication or fluids/taking blood samples.
Had an aunt who “candled” eggs. That is the person who watches eggs go on a strange looking contraption with lights behind it so she can pull the eggs that have been fertilized (chicken fetuses in them) so you are not freaked out when you crack one open to make your omlettes at home.
I knew a guy who got a job in the poulty industry, travelling around the state trimming chicken’s beaks and checking their feet. Different. Last I heard he was doing more conventional work, apprenticed to a butcher… well that’s what he planned to go back to once his hand healed after he had his thumb reattached.
But, seriously folks… I have always thought a Well Witch was rather whacky way to make a living. I met a fellow that did it. One of my clients hired him to “witch” the location for his new well. They drilled following his suggestion, got good water in a particularly low water area… what do I know?
In his youth, my brother briefly worked for a place that made ping-pong tables. His job was something like putting two screws in.
A friend’s brother is a stone engraver. He started out engraving tombstones, but moved on to carving names in public monuments. He is considered to be one of the best in his field, and his speciality is correcting errors - for example, correcting a misspelled name on a war memorial.
I used to work for a large consumer products company. One of the jobs there (not mine) was to sniff test people who had used soap to see how long the fragrance stayed on them. I asked one what they told their family they did for a living, and just got a nasty glare in return.
The missus used to work as a volunteer at the cool little Baltimore aquarium. Her job was to hose down the tropical rainforest part. Sometimes she’d hosed down the sloth that lived there. I tell her that she should put “sloth handler” on her resume, just to see the reactions.
Apparently there are a lot of really odd jobs in Biology. In college, I worked a semester sorting worms (nematodes) by sex. Another microscope intensive job. I thought it was cool.
My sister spent a summer detasseling corn. Good money, mind-blowingly boring.
The oddest job I ever had was working in a warehouse filling orders for a major supermarket chain. What was odd about it was that this was a freezer warehouse. That’s right. -20 deg F for 8+ hours, 6 days per week. We wore freezer suits and “mickey mouser” boots to keep from getting frostbit in July.
The job was to fill icecream orders for the supermarket chain. The ice cream would be on palettes and we would walk through with large 4 wheeled carts loading cases of each type of icecream onto the carts.
Talk about getting me into shape. With a fully stocked cart, I was easily toting around 300 lbs. After the orders were loaded on the carts, we would have to load them into the freezer trucks. There was a ramp that went down from the doorway of the freezer warehouse and 3 other ramps opposite that that were the loading ramps. We would have to take 2 of these filled up carts, run them down the ramp and up one of the loading ramps. Since there were 3 loading ramps, we would often have to make a zig-zag like turn after running down the entry ramp to the freezer. Doing this with over 600 lbs of ice cream loaded onto 2 carts really get’s one into shape.
I did this for 3 months before I got married that summer. I wasn’t tan, but man was I buff! My new wife LOVED me!
I had a job working as a lab assistant for a behavioral psychologist one summer. One study involved force-feeding alcohol to pigeons as part of an experiment on delay of gratification. Another had undergraduates pushing buttons on a complicated machine for a reward of free movie tickets.
I think my job would have been easier if they had been reversed.
