For some reason, I want to say, Whale Boat Captain.
I remember Frontier Village! We went there often when I was a kid.
Kerning. I spent 7.5 years kerning every character against every other character, on over 6,000 fonts.
And when I was in college, I had a summer job in a die-casting company, operating a machine that made aluminum bases for bronzed baby shoes.
Long long ago, my first job was as a corn detasseler in the rural Midwest. In the summer, teenaged boys baled hay, and teenaged girls detasseled corn.
When we first became old enough to hire, my friends and I were thrilled that we’d be able to get wonderful tans from working in the sun in our bathing suits. Not such a good idea. The first day we were cut to shreds. The second day everyone had a lot more clothing on.
It didn’t pay much, but for us it was a fortune.
According to wikipedia, this job is not obsolete:
First thing I ever got paid to do, at about 12, I was a rock loader at a trap shoot. My dad ran the trap shoot on Sunday mornings, for local hunters to practice bird shooting. I sat in the trap house and manually loaded clay pigeons on the trap platform, and randomly aimed the trajectory. Got paid a quarter a Sunday morning.
I’ll mention my ex-wife’s job here. She was on the staff at a medical school as a “guinea pig”. The med school had students from Asian countries, who had no first hand knowledge of human female anatomy. To familiarize them, my wife would be a practice gynecological patient, for the Egyptian and Pakistani students to fumble around with until they had some sense of what they were doing, and the reactions to expect. She drove 120 miles to the university every weekend, and was paid good money.
I worked one summer at a yacht club, firing their cannon to start races. The guy before me hadn’t watched his aim and blew off part of the railing of a boat. He was sacked and I got the job.
During the early eighties, I worked as a crane operator for submarine construction. “Submarine” as in under water, not the navy boats. I was positioning equipment for divers 600 hundred feet below me. It was interesting to listen to Daffy Duck* on the radio telling me where to position the block. When we sent down the block (with or without equipment) the deckhands would festoon it with glo-sticks so the divers could see it coming. I had to know their depth and watch the payout counter to know when to slow down, so as not to bonk anyone on the head.
*The divers lived in a high compression area of the vessel full time (traveled to and from the seabed via diving bell). As a result they were always on a helium gas mix and quite literally, sounded like Daffy Duck on the radio.
Press clipping service reader. You haven’t lived until you read magazines for funeral directors and embalmers.
We read for everything and anything and clipped out what people ordered. Like a street sweeper company who wanted all mentions of any street sweeper accidents, I guess so they could make a sale. Authors and actors wanting their reviews. Could be interesting, could be deadening.
Some of these are great.
While no longer done because of large format inkjet printers, I hand painted maps. Oil on linen. Geomorphic landsat maps - Soil types. They where VERY detailed and one could take a couple of weeks to finish. Pretty much paint by number. Very cool looking maps, but god was it boring.
My first job out of college I counted fish on a Russian fishing boat in the Bering Sea. They would bring in about 300 tons a day and I would identify about 1.5 tons of it. The daily tally was used for management of the fishery.
This was back in 1989 so it was still the USSR. They had a political officer on board. It was a very cool experience.
I was asked to do that, since I was a simulated patient for other things already. The pay was very good, but I turned it down. I don’t enjoy it when my experienced doctor does all the examinations there, why would I want inexperienced ones fumbling around?
I was a serving wench at a medieval dinner theatre, and also worked as a “Department of Refreshment Agent” as a summer promotion for Coke.
I cleaned fish for a summer in Ketchikan, Alaska at age 16. My first job, my first apartment of my own. I loved it. Smelly and demanding work, however.
I used to do security/support for a regional promotion company, working at local venues when they had rock shows. This, in itself, isn’t so different and probably doesn’t qualify. But there was this one night (Kix was performing) where a group of 4 of us had to carry a (purpose-built) platform through the crowd while the singer stood up there, shook his ass and sang. We only did this for a couple of songs, thankfully.
I teach martial arts. According to the Martial Arts Teachers Association, as of Jan. 2016 there were just under 16000 of us in the country.
I temped for a bit when I was between jobs. Most memorable of that time was spending a few days as a can sorter in the local Coca-Cola distribution warehouse.
On the slime line! Never tried it, but after a stint in a cannery, a lot of young people get their first glimpse of why it’s a good idea to get an education.
I don’t think it’s particularly uncommon, but just before I went in the military in the 60s, I worked for the State of Alaska highways department. I ended up cooking dirt in a trailer on the Kenai Peninsula. We would go out and get samples from the road that was being prepared for paving, weigh it, bake it, then weigh it again, checking for moisture content. We also did compaction testing using a Washington Densometer.
It was a volunteer thing, not a paid job, but…
For about six months, I worked as a reader at a specialized radio station, on which we read articles from newspapers, magazines, etc., so that the blind and vision-impaired, who could not otherwise read said articles, could hear the content of them.
Not too terribly unusual, but I worked at the portrait studio in the local JCPenney in college. The kicker was that the pictures I took were mostly of kids, and I’m not really a big fan of kids.
Frankly the only reason I took it was cuz they were hiring and hired me. Wasn’t terrible to do for a summer.
Yep, that’s the place. Worked there in the early 70s. The busboy part of the job wasn’t anything exciting but they would occasionally recruit me as a player in the “drunken outlaw vs sheriff” drama. I’d confront the badly-behaving outlaw in the saloon and give him the bum’s rush out into the street where the sheriff was waiting and the gunfight would commence.
Besides the Frontier Village website noted earlier, there is also a book that chronicles the theme park’s history: Frontier Village (Images of America)
The oddest temp jobs I know of were jobs that people I know did. My personal oddest was feeding a pilot scale high solids anaerobic digester. It included occasionally collecting 500+ pounds of fresh dairy manure. If you’re in the pen with bored cows, they’ll come up and lick your shovel. I eventually learned when the guy with the bobcat there clearing the pend. He could give me a scoop and I’d have enough in two minutes or less.
Odder jobs that others did:
Mite sexer. They were trapped in sticky tape. It required a microscope.
Fuzz plucker. This was on election day job for the County because the tear-off strip from the ballot (that they hand you to show that you voted) didn’t tear of cleanly. It left fuzz behind. And the fuzz would jam up the counting machine. So my son was paid to pluck fuzz off of the ballots before they were fed into the machine.
Simulating sheep grazing. There was an ecology experiment set up in a sheep pasture to test how big and how close protected, fenced off islands needed to be to develop habitat. Unfortunately, the sheep were also part of an experiment and went to sheep heaven a few weeks before the ecology experiment was over. They hired a student to simulate sheep grazing with a weed whacker to keep the wild islands separated by “grazed” sheep pasture.