Inspired by this thread on jobs now gone due to automation, I am curious about the uncommon jobs some of us may have had, which may still be around.
My entries: in med school I had part time jobs both as an intra-aortic balloon pump technician (making the rounds on the machines checking various readouts) and as a diener in the hospital morgue (morgue and autopsy lackey).
I was a cake decorator at a bakery for dogs.
I once decorated a “Sorry you were neutered” cake. It said, “No Testes Is The Bestes.” 
Wait… so you were Igor? Like from the Frankenstein movies? Did it come with a liripipe hood and fake hunchback?
Dunno if I can top that…
Part of my job as an IT tech at Target was to call people up, all over the country, and tell them to reboot their computers.
A summer job I had during high school was as an intern at the Havre Daily News, where I was primarily a copy-editor. Not a bizarre job, really, but not a job most people can claim, and certainly not one most had in high school.
I also had a weekly opinion column for the Havre Daily News during some of my time at high school. From one perspective, I was well set-up to go into a job in the print journalism world, and in a different era, I might have, but from another perspective, when I graduated high school in 2002 the stench of death was already on that field, so I followed my passion for software into computer programming, where I’m employed now.
This is the best thing I’ve read on the internet today!
At one point a few years ago during a particularly broke phase, I was a professional guinea pig: that is, a paid medical test subject. I got to stay in a test facility for a week or so, take a preparation that may or may not have been the drug under test, then have my blood taken every hour to watch the drug levels (or lack thereof) in my system decrease over time. Made $2700 for a week’s work.
I’ve worked on many exhibitions where part of my job was to be an “image and object finder” for things required for the show.
My first job of this kind was for a rainforest exhibit at the Smithsonian. I would start off the week with a list of things I needed to find that week. Examples of things on my list were a poison-dart frog, a recording of a jaguar’s call, a recording of a jaguar’s call, a forestry map of the Ivory Coast, and a thousand army ants (dead, fortunately).
We called it “Dialing for toucans.” We would call all over the country, and sometimes the world, with bizarre requests. (This was long before the internet and Google.) My greatest triumph was finding an Amazonian fruit-eating fish at the Cleveland Aquarium that they were willing to give us.
I also had to find esoteric information. We had a diorama of a pygmy village, and we had to have a background mural painted for it. The mural would depict everyday life in the village, including a kid chasing a chicken. At the meeting with the artist to plan the mural, he turned to me and asked “What does a pygmy’s chicken look like?” I was tempted to say, “Like a regular chicken, just really really big.” But I had to go find out. It turns out they’re like ordinary chickens.
Bridgetender: sat in a shack at the end of the swing bridge and walked out to the middle to disconnect the water pipe to the island and open the bridge for marine traffic. Once went 3 months without an opening.
Blacksmith in a heritage village
Hand-set type and hand-fed a letterpress printing press, in the 1970s, when this was pretty much a dead technology
Washed and delivered to the stalls numbered saddle cloths worn by horses in harness racing
Busker
This made my day, perhaps even my week 
!
One thing that I never stopped to think about was–
Where do all the price signs for gas stations come from?
That is, until I worked for a company that makes those signs. I was basically a parts/inventory control guy. When a sign was being built, I would collect the wires, LED panels, etc., and deliver them to people who did the assembling. This particular company is in Colorado Springs. They also make the huge signs that hang over highways and can be programmed to show various messages.
I held a work study position in a poultry genetics lab. One project I worked on required controlled breeding of the hens and roosters, artificial insemination style.
So, yes, every Tuesday was the day to f— a chicken. Multiple hens. And worse…
Every Monday we had to collect from the roosters that which we would give to the hens on Tuesday. Monday was wank off the rooster day. Multiple roosters.
So your job was to choke the chickens?
Busboy in a theme park saloon (Frontier Village).
That was that little theme park just off Monterey Highway (what was U.S. 101 at the time, IIRC?) a few miles south of downtown?
Yikes. Our age is showing.
Damn, i remember that place.
In grad school, I had a job in a library for the blind. We mailed out copies of book-on-tapes; I made the requested copies on a giant tape machine which had about 8 copy-bays to one master.
We also did magazine subscriptions. Whenever a new issue on a master tape cassette came in, I used the tape machine to make enough copies to send out to everyone on the subscription list. It could be handful, or a hundred, depending on the magazine. When the readers sent the cassette tapes back after they’d listened to them, I’d erase the tapes in batches with a magnet so we had a good supply of blank ones at hand. I got good at taking apart and fixing cassettes, although after a point the tape always got too worn or damaged and couldn’t be reused anymore.
I made pine shavings all night long on a drill press for a potpourri company. We’d make the shavings and they’d go into vats to be dyed for product filler.
It wouldn’t have been a bad job, really, if the owners hadn’t been on the shady side and safety was more of a priority. Also, it would have been nice to have had some sharp routing bits. All the ones we had were so dull they could barely cut butter, much less soft, dry pine.
I spent a summer scrubbing intake pipes at a water treatment plant in a suburb north of Chicago. There was no point to the job, I think the city just committed to hiring a certain amount of college students on summer break.
I thought it would involve scrubbing ocean critters.
Mike Rowe did a “Dirty Jobs” episode at a turkey farm, and this was one of the duties he performed.
My most unusual job was my first, at age 14; I spent a 2-week summer session working as a dishwasher at Girl Scout camp. It wasn’t as bad as it sounds, and the counselors treated me like a little sister.