My sister has had a far more interesting job history than I have.
She spent six months working as a dog handler at a greyhound racetrack. The “fun” part of the job was trying to round up her assigned dogs after they finished their races – particularly the ones who didn’t want to stop running, and would jump the fence and head off into the parking lot or the farmland next to the track.
But, her best story was when she was working for Manpower (the temporary job service) in Milwaukee in 1991. She and her friend got a job assignment to spend a few days at a chocolate manufacturing plant, cleaning up the factory floor and equipment before a health inspection (which mostly consisted of scraping up dripped chocolate and rat droppings).
The two of them noted one of the plant employees, a quiet, kind of creepy young man who sat by himself in the cafeteria, and would stare at the other employees. My sister and her friend (who were a pair of bubbly, pretty girls in their early 20s) would tease each other about him, accusing each other that the creepy guy was their “boyfriend.”
A couple of months later, my sister got a phone call from her friend. “Ohmygod! You have to turn on the TV! Remember the boyfriend from the chocolate company? He’s a mass murderer! He EATS PEOPLE!!!”
When in H.S. I got my first job at a coal yard (anybody know what coal is?). Loved it as could get filthy and my mother could not complain. Shoveled coal into the truckss, road shotgun and then backed up to the little windows, put in a slide, and dumped the load down into the coal bin in the basement. Got really strong.
Does Army service count? I was in the Army Air Corps (before they changed it to the Air Force) At the tail end of WWII I was sent to Fairbanks, Alaska. After a few days, they sent me down to the dog camp. Dog? Great, I loved dogs, thought probably they were K9s being trained.
No, it was the Search and Rescue service with malmute dogs. I mushed a dog team all winter, as consdtamtly had to go out for training. There was one old Sergeant and two young Eskimo guys. We had 40 dogs, so two of us would go out, and when we came back, we stayed to feed the dogs in the long kennel plus, of course, clean up.
In the summer (yeah, they had a short one) we had a “sled” with wheels, so continued to take them out on two week or so trips. It was a perpetual hunting and fishing trip.
I would have stayed in for 20 years if I could keep that job. Coldest I saw it there was-68F
In two years only one plane went down and by the time we got there, the pilot had walked back.
I got a job operating a limousine-sized dinner-roll machine in a bakery. I had to put in the ingredients at one end, and the dinner rolls came out the other end. I was supposed to put them in a rack and take the rack to the freezer room. The only problem was nobody told me what to do when the rack was full, i.e. where to instantaneously find another rack, or at least to halt the machine. So the dinner rolls started to pile up at the end, and I was like Lucy and Ethel at the candy factory. The supervisor came and turned the machine off, then yelled at me in 4-letter words, assuring me that I wouldn’t get paid for the shift. I walked out and didn’t look back; shortest job I ever had.
Around here, temp agencies advertise for corn detasselers, because at least in cities, kids aren’t as willing to do it, so they are more likely to be adults.
I did that too, on a school-district owned radio station, for extra credit. Because I didn’t have a driver’s license, a classmate drove me to the school that had the station, also for extra credit.
One Sunday, an elderly woman at my church who was legally blind from cataracts walked up to me and told me that she’d heard me on the radio, and a blind man my brother and I befriended several years later exclaimed, after I told him I’d done this, “That’s where I’ve heard your voice before!”
Our local public radio station now has APRIS, which requires a special radio receiver to hear.
One summer I worked for an Environmental Assessment and Management company in Denver. This was during the late 1970s coal boom and most of our work was on open-pit mining concessions in Wyoming. Before mining started, we had to evaluate the productivity of the grassland so that it could be restored to its original state after mining was finished. This consisted of installing little cages of rebar and wire mesh at random points on the prairie in the spring to prevent cattle from grazing the grass. We would trudge off across the plains with a bundle of rebar, wire mesh, and a hammer, all the while dodging any bulls. Three months later we would return, take the cages up, and clip all the grass and other plants in the cage, separate them out by species, put them in paper bags, and bring them back to the lab so the caloric value could be measured. I got so that I could tell the difference between a dozen species of grass by a single blade.
Another contract we had was evaluating abandoned mine sites for possible restoration. There were hundreds of sites that had identified from air photos that we had to drive out to and assess, often in the middle of nowhere. Most of them were abandoned gravel pits, but in some areas there were old coal mines that had caught fire underground and were still burning years later. In another area there were hundreds of old bentonite pits, a very slippery mud used to lubricate oil drills. It was a nightmare to drive on the dirt roads in that area when it got wet. Another hazard was grizzled ranchers who didn’t want any damn “environmentalists” creeping about their property.
I spent part of a summer with a Pony Ride and Petting Zoo. I liked working with the animals, but it was hard work - drive a few hours to whatever small town fair we were hired for, set up the pony ride wheel, and all the animal pens, then spend long days counting how many times the ponies went around before helping that round of kids off and lifting another set on the ponies. Then put the critters up for the night, sleep in my car or the pony trailer and do it all over again the next day, then tear down and go home.
Shit pay, long hours and I was so covered in bruises that people started looking at my boyfriend funny.
Standardized test essay scorer. Before it all went online, there were massive centers full of computers. The temporary employees were usually a mix of recent college grads, teachers on summer break, and retirees. I still do the job a few weeks out of the year, but it’s all online and done from home. I did meet some friends as well as some very ‘interesting’ people that’ll probably be temp employees for life
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In a neurophysiology research lab, I “trained” marine nudibranchs (Hermissenda crassicornis), then dissected out their central nervous system and recorded action potentials from their type B photoreceptors, as a way of looking at the cellular basis of learning.
