What are some strange or inventive ways that you, or someone you know, have made a living?
One of the oddest that I know is what the sister of a friend does. She drives a cab – for the Amish.
Apparently the Amish are not allowed to operate cars, but they’re allowed to be passengers. A good day for the driver is when Amish people want to go to the beach. It’s a good 2-3 hour drive each way, and several hours at the beach, and she gets paid for all of it. Sometimes she gets paid in US currency, but she’s been known to take livestock as payment.
What are some odder jobs that you’re heard of or done?
This past weekend, i volunteered at a science fiction convention. My job was to sit at celebrity booths and guard their head shots/sale merch while they were conducting panel interviews/discussions.
Which reminded me of the time Bose paid me to sit in a chair on the off chance that somebody might want me to print something in color. My boss’s boss actually gave me a disk of games to play because I literally had nothing to do all day. They were moving the entire office to a different state and many people had already either found other jobs or relocated - but they had a budget to cover double positions, and my job was one of them. It was ridiculous.
When I was living with a Jewish guy who kept kosher but wasn’t particularly orthodox, friends of his who were orthodox would borrow me to be the shabat goy if they needed something done. I also made some excellent money cooking on weekends. [I still have my milk and meat cookware boxed up in the barn…] I make a killer matzoh brei [grape jelly, thanks!]
The strangest job I ever had was one summer in college. I got a job in a foundry, making die-cast aluminum bases for bronzed baby shoes. Not the shoes themselves, just the bases.
Similarly, I spent a summer as a temp just sitting in the reception area for a radiology clinic. They were remodeling their reception area, and so the patients had to go to the other end of the hall to register. But in the meantime, it looked like a construction zone and they were afraid that the patients would go away without seeing anyone. So I sat there and redirected the patients to the temporary reception area. It was hours of boredom. I read all of the back issues of the New Yorker in their pile, and then started to buy paperback novels from a nearby Waldenbooks. (That was the summer that I got introduced to Tom Clancy.)
But then the office manager hated the wallpaper, so the whole job had to be redone, and the work stretched out for weeks longer than planned. And their office hours were long enough that I got an hour or so of overtime each day.
My grandparents do this. They don’t drive a “cab” or have livery licenses (or report their income…) but they live in “Amish Country” and have 2 extra cars just for “Amish hauling.” They take the local Amish everywhere, from Wal Mart to the emergency room to a forest a guy was interested in purchasing trees from (for lumber).
My cousin is a nurse who is assigned to the helicopter squad. He’s the nurse in the helicopter when you’re transported. Of all the different places you’d find a nurse, it never occurred to me that “in a helicopter” would be a specialty.
[ul]
[li] Sit on a bucket and shine a flashlight at a piece of glass[/li][li] Transcribe the contents of an old set of collectible cards about luxury automobiles[/li][li] Walk around holding a balloon[/li][li] Hand-deliver a 3-foot-diameter circular green lampshade[/li][/ul]
I spent part of a summer sitting on the side of the road counting cars for the highway dept.
Do you know what happens when the primary holding tank at the sewage treatment plant needs repair or maintenance? Somebody has to suit up in diving gear and go into the tank full of waste and grope around in complete darkness to do it. There was an article in one of the the diving trade journals a while back about a guy that did that job. Self taught then went on for years in the business making respectable scratch. Died in three feet of water goofing around at the lake.
I knew a guy who grew eucalyptus trees. Everyday, he would havest the tender leaves, package them and take them to the airport to be shipped to zoos for the koala’s. From what he told me, zoos had to have a source of food before importing koala’s and he shipped all his product all over the country.
I spent a couple of months as a botanical artist in Madagascar.
I also spent a summer as a tech camped in a mountain meadow by a glacial lake in California taking nectar measurements on flowers in a hummingbird territory.
I spent another summer cutting grass blade by blade in meter-square plots on the high plains in Wyoming and Montana doing grassland productivity studies for environmental impact assessments. I also spent a month driving around assessing defunct mining sites.
The best job title I ever had, however, was for a job that wasn’t that unusual. I was a quality control inspector for the Ball Computer Company. So I was a Ball Inspector.
I used to do similar stuff at the Setmana del Còmic de Barcelona - haul a few boxes, help set up some booths, keep lines looking somewhat linear, remind people that they can ask for one autographed picture that’s oooone how many fingers am I holding up that’s how many pics you can ask for, and in exchange I got a professional pass so I could be there all 5 days instead of the 2 it was open to the general public.
A friend has a PhD in Agricultural Engineering. The subject of his research was “crop prediction in fruit trees” and he specifically wanted to use methodology which would not require fancy equipment.
He spent five years using a tailor’s tape, a metric tape of the kind that rolls up into its box, his finger, pen and paper to check a lot of “old wives’ wisdoms” which his colleagues despised as “unproven” (that is, “tested by farmers for thousands of years, but those farmers don’t have doctorates”; in general, they came out to be “true for some species/variants and irrelevant for others, so my advice is ‘just do it’”) regarding how to prune trees, clear off buds, etc. Got more miles than an airplane, too, as his research fields were all over Spain and Southern France.
It always sort of amuses me when people get upset because the Amish buy disposable diapers or ride in cars or whatever. “Your anti-technology sect does not live up to my standards of what an anti-technology sect should act like!”
I’m by no means an expert on the Amish, but I’ve done some reading up on them. Their beliefs are mostly centered around keeping close ties between family and community, and they feel that technology generally leads to weakening those ties. So a beach vacation with someone else driving is OK, but owning the actual car might lead to you driving off by yourself or whatever. It’s really pretty interesting stuff. In my opinion.
