I was a “worm wrangler” one summer. I worked for this guy who thought he would make a million raising earthworms, so he hired me to build plywood beds, fill them with cow shit and feed the worms the most gawd-awful garbage for three weeks, until the beds were full of zillions of the little red wrigglers, then I’d split one bed into three, and start over. I never figured out how exactly he was going to make money off of them (I think it’s like Amway; nobody really buys the stuff, you just con others into buying worms from you to get started). By the time I left, he had 18 beds of the critters and the summer temperature was getting up over 100 degrees, so I suspect that someplace, somewhere there is a heap of parboiled worm carcasses for sale if anybody needs them…
TT
“Equal Opportunity means everybody has the same chance at being incompetent.”
–Dr. Lawrence J. Peter
I worked as a lab manager for an entomologist at a Midwestern university… very cool woman (like most scientists, she was very nice and very funky). Anyway, my job was to maintain a colony of leafhoppers (very small, green aphid-like bugs). We fed them on fava-bean plants (no chianti, though)and transferred the little buggers from cages of decimated plants to fresh ones by sucking them up with a pipette (covered by cheese-cloth to prevent them passing through) and rubber lab tubing. I’d get in this hopper-hood that had an opaque plexiglass back with a flourescent light, shake the leafhoppers off the dead plants, they’d fly to the plexiglass and I’d suck 'em up and dump into cages with fresh plants.
I read somewhere that there is a person whose job is to be the “secretary” to Sherlock Holmes and answer the fairly substantial correspondence that he receives every year.
I think there are also people employed by the US postal service answer letters from children addressed to Santa Claus.
Anyone know what a “fluffer” is? Pretty weird if you ask me…
For those of you that don’t know… well, let’s just say it takes many hours to produce a smut film and someone has to make sure the guys are always in, uh, “peak condition”. The person responsible for that, guy or girl depending on the genre, is the fluffer.
“[He] beat his fist down upon the table and hurt his hand and became so
further enraged… that he beat his fist down upon the table even harder and
hurt his hand some more.” – Joseph Heller’s Catch-22
From what I’ve heard there are people who are paid to walk around the six flags parking lots with big stuffed animals so you actually think that you can win them. Anyone here work at an amusment park know anything more about this???
With the North Pole being in Canada Santa is a Canadian resident and you can write to him here. (The Canadian postal workers answer as many as they can (and don’t show up quite so often with guns either))
Santa Claus
North Pole, Canada
H0H 0H0
Nice postal (ZIP) code eh?
An ex-girlfriend’s sister’s boyfriend (Yeah, yeah, I know) had a job as a sheep-gelder. Tool of choice: rubber bands (apparently you cut off the blood with tight rubber bands and leave them there. At some point the testicles fall off. Supposedly it’s fairly painless for the sheep, if you believe that sort of thing). It’s not a foaf story, though, I met the guy. And believe me, he had found his niche.
At my previous company, where we handled disability claims, we asked employers to send us a list of their job titles. One job title (at PepsiCo) stayed with me:
“Cheeto Extruder”.
Jacques Kilchoer
Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.
In the Canadian Govt., all job postings are in English and French. There have been a lot of “deployments” recently, and this has been translated into French as “mutation”.
APB9999: I met an Australian guy in Europe who had spent a winter in Israel at one of their rural communes (Kibbutz?), where his job was to help turkeys mate. He said it kept his hands pretty warm.
And he’s not even the only one in Chicago. This know-it-all at Britannica has to research a lot of “generally known” facts for which there are no facts. Like Caligula did not make his horse a minister of state.
I doubt it; you can actually win those, though it’s not common. My sister seems to have the knack for it, though. In my parents house there are a 3’-tall plush Rottweiler and its 4’ raccoon relative. Oh, and a 3’ raisin. (Remember the California Raisins commercials, with anthropomorphic raisins dancing to “Heard It Through The Grapevine”? One of those. And three feet is just the body, there’s legs on that too.)
They stopped for a short while (a pubic detente) and then started back up again. I believe it was a Picasso nude, one or two of a collection on tour, that was once prohibited from passing through Japan customs.
The imagery of taking sharp objects to that region of the body in photos is disturbing. Good job for a budding serial killer.
A hooker (in the legal sense) is a construction worker who works with a crane operator hooking the equipment and supplies onto the big steel hook on the crane.