I worked as a computer game tester for a couple different companies over a
decade ago. Normally I don’t care much for computer games - I always seem
to become stuck at some point and can’t figure out the next step. But at work this
was not problem - you could always ask the other testers something like “How to I
get the troll to kill the dragon so I can get in to the room with the treasure chest?”
While the pay wasn’t that great I spent many enjoyable days playing games. For
the multiplayer games we would play against each other, laughing and shouting
at our victories and defeats.
The best part of the job was telling others what I did for a living. They would
almost always look very envious and comment that they wished they could
have a job like that.
While I am still doing a job I very much enjoy, local news videographer / reporter / editor / tech in Washington DC, my previous station in Baltimore had the best job I have ever enjoyed - news helicopter camera operator. At the time I flew Thursdays and Fridays with Captain Roy Taylor, a retired police pilot with great skills and an air of excitement about his job. Initially hired to just pilot, he turned out to be pretty good at reporting which helped because a Bell Jet Ranger didn’t have enough moxie to carry a pilot, camera op and reporter with a full tank of gas.
For my part I was and still am a top notch scanner man - I have a great ability to hear news on scanners. So coupled together we would float over the city during news time and just jump on anything interesting. It got to the point that we would hear something, roll over to it, I would put the camera on the event - a few moments later the desk would radio “Hey guys what are we looking around?” We would tell them, and a few seconds later we’d hear “Okay, 30 seconds!” And soon we were reporting live. What fun.
Here’s some of our video:
Baltimore Boat Accident
Pretty Video on the Severn Near Annapolis
I miss it but the job has changed I I am better off now, even though grounded. My current employer doesn’t have a helicopter of it’s own, and they forbid employees to fly in choppers for work.
I’m ashamed to say I worked for a few months falsifying applications for exceptions to trucking rules. A trucking company that routinely broke the rules kept up a steady stream of application letters requesting permission to do so. I had about a dozen themes I could use, and would put two or three themes in each letter, and word each letter differently so no two were the same, and every day another pile of letters would go out. There was not the slightest connection between conditions for any of their trucking jobs and the content of the letter that sought exceptional permission for that job.
I was a teen, a student, and hungry. I also think they took unfair advantage of my naive nature and immaturity, but have to acknowledge that’s a hard protest to make, as I did understand it was improper and of course illegal at the time. I was still learning how close to the law the workplace stayed.
They pick dull spots in the film to do the reel changes. In the old days two or more projectors would be loaded up, the projectionist would wait to see a pattern of white dots show up in the corner of the screen to start the next projector and then stop the next one. It didn’t have to be a seamless changeover. If the modern projectors even need to switch over I’m sure it’s synchronized electronically.
No changeover needed.
Projection booths have used platter systems since the Age of Disco. The whole film is spliced together in one piece and run through a mechanism that is similar to an 8 track tape. All going away as digital takes over.
Here’s a thread on a closely related topic: truly awful jobs we’ve had. Warning: it’s 8 years old, so please don’t revive it.
My personal fave that caused me to remember this thread was post #13 by fifty-six. Something about a mind-numbingly simple task required to be performed at impossible speed that just screams “Modern American Commerce”.
I once managed a rooming house full of crackheads. I witnessed a guy behind a wooden door being attacked by a guy on the other side with a chainsaw!
The building was so legendary that four years later, when I mentioned managing it to someone, a person who overheard us asked me where and, when I told her the name of the town, said “That must have been the big white house.”
Did that include the DEW Line up west of Prudhoe? We landed offshore on Spy Island one summer, built a bonfire and I swam a little ways out toward the pack ice. But between the cold and fear of Leopard Seals it was a reasonably short foray.
We later landed a Long Ranger out on the ice, keeping power on so we didn’t break through. Walking around up there, yeah, other worldly.
A three letter federal agency has a high level security force that will hopefully never have to deal with actual bad guys. So they try to make their training as realistic as possible. Very high tech laser tag is one way to describe the MILES gear that is used.
Car bombs and IEDs are a potential threat, so a way to simulate these was needed. Something that would “kill” everything in a large area if it were triggered. This required about 250Watts of lasers, that still had to be eye safe. You can do that if you only turn the lasers on for a few nanoseconds at a time.
Some of the sites were converted from the old White Alice sites, and at least one of them still has a couple of these still standing, though serving no function. This is a map of the sites. Some of them have been automated, such as Bullen Point, Point Lay, and Point Lonely up on the Arctic Coast. Some of the sites are dome sites, with a radome up on top of a high point and living/equipment domes in a more protected area. Others are called “train” sites, with long metal buildings joined together.
This is a typical coastal airstrip and the hairy approach to it.
When I was a teenager, I got a job as a tour guide in a semi-well-known set of caverns near my hometown. It was a lot of fun, and easily the coolest (in both senses of the word) job available in my area.
We tour guides (there were anywhere from five to ten of us, depending on the season) would lead hour-long tours through the caverns and work in the gift shop. At one point, the owner of the caverns had a large (20’ diameter) waterwheel installed at the corner of the gift shop. He rigged up a wet saw that was powered by the waterwheel, and we would cut slices of onyx from broken stalactites and stalagmites to sell in the gift shop.
We got to go spelunking after hours a couple of times, in areas that the public tours didn’t see. The clay mud in those places was unbelievable – three and four feet deep in spots. I lost a shoe in one particularly deep mudhole, and for all I know it’s still there.
My first job was planting trees for the forestry service. 20 or 25 teens were hired and we would carpool to the planting site, older teens with cars driving the younger ones. I wound up with 4 or 5 other guys in a Camaro blasting AC/DC driving dangerously down dirt roads. The job sites were usually recently clearcut fields. We were given a sling bag with a bunch of white pine seedlings and a digging bar tool. We’d all line up one digging bar width apart and walk down the field punching the bar into the ground and pushing it deeper with our foot, wiggle the bar back and forth a few times to make a v-shaped hole, grab a seedling out of the bag and throw it in hopefully roots down, make another v-shaped hole beside the first one to press the seedling in, and move on.
It was hard dirty work and cold in the morning and really hot in the afternoons. I think we made $35 per day. I don’t remember doing it for more than a month or two on weekends.
SIGINT voice interceptor/linguist, Low Level Voice Intercept team lead.
That’s probably the most interesting. Otherwise, I’ve done a lot of things that aren’t super typical, although not very glamorous. Maybe process server? (Which I wouldn’t really call a job, just some extra spending money.) Or lift operator at a ski resort. Or the job at the tool and die factory where I punched out aluminum tanks for radiators.
In high school I worked after hours in a dentist’s office doing general cleaning. Among other things I got to oil the drills. That involved running them for a minute to spread the oil evenly.
Chocolate taster. Even got paid for it after a while (before that we got vouchers for their employee shop). Biggest lesson: It’s like wine tasting - you don’t have to actually eat all the chocolate they give you. I learned it after eating 8 Lion bars on my first day.
