Modeled clothing at the grand opening of a Plus Sized boutique.
Everybody acted like I was Christie Brinkley or somebody like that.
I felt more like Roseanne wearing Omar the Tentmaker’s latest line.
The money was good and I was given free clothing, but I couldn’t get past the idea of fat girl clothes.
My freshman year, I drove used cars from various used car lots to an auction house a couple of times a month. By “used cars” I mean really, badly, horribly used cars. Quite often, the cars in question wouldn’t make it from the lot to the auction. Poor brakes was the norm, no brakes at all was just another challenge. It paid well, as I recall, and it was a lot of fun.
Way back in 1966, on a Friday, an older guy we worked with offered to pay a friend and me $25.00 each to drive him to a house, about three miles from my apartment at noon, and another $25.00 each to pick him up at 5:00PM on Saturday. Back then $50.00 was a lot of money. (I had a good job, and I was making about $2.75 an hr.)
The catch was, we had to deliver him in a large cardboard box - it was from a TV, using a pick-up truck he borrowed. He had us wear blue smocks that we borrowed from our “clean room” at work. Then, when we picked him up, in a different borrowed pick-up, we had to wear our regular clothes, but with matching ball caps. When we went to pick him up we had to take a hand-truck because he was in an old refigerator.
To this day I have no idea what he was doing and why he couldn’t be seen going in and out of that house. But the pay was good for less than 2 hours work.
I was an extra in the movie “Cobb” filmed at Rickwood Field, in Birmingham.
Yep, $32 for the change of Tommy Lee Jones being rude to me.
(The part where they focus on his feet walking through the outfield? Yep, we’re about 100 feet out of the shot.)
I was a strolling mime.
No, really! I was paid $25 an hour.
I used to work in sort of a posh bakery/deli/whatever in downtown manhattan. One of the owners was a friend of the family’s. The only thing he hated more than having to work with the other owner was serving the finnicky people who came in there. I remember him being very much like the soup nazi from senfeld. One lady used to call and complain every time we delivered to her office, he decided to cut off not just her, not just her company, but THE ENTIRE BUILDING. When anyone from the building called to order a delivery, we were instructed to say "We aren’t making deliveries to your building. If you want to know why, you can ask Marcy in such-and-such office on the 30th floor.
My ex-girlfriend?
um… I ate bugs. Ants were fine as were worms. However a good friend of mine ate moths for money for a while. He quit because he said the fluttering wings in his mouth got to be too much for him. And yes, of course alcohol was involved.
I crossed my legs for three years as a clerk at a firm the represented one of the companies. You should have seen some of the ones that didn’t go to litigation. One cowboy had it come out miles from home, and rather than ride the horse back (Which pretty much caused the problem) he walked with it more than halfway out. For miles! He didn’t sue! Easily the toughest man I’ve ever heard of. Ahhh, the infections, the deflated inflaters, the partial ejections…what joyous reading. I had to go home each night and speak soothingly to my member.
My most inane temp job was breaking apart screws that had been painted and dried together. 8 hours a day. 5 days a week. For three weeks. Nothing but boxes and boxes of screws.
Why? For whom?
During my senior year at college the alumni association decided to have a Madrigal dinner as a fundraiser. Members of the music and theater departments provided entertainment. In addition to a fencing exhibition and various staged presentations, there were strolling minstrels during the dinner, and somebody thought it might be fun to have a beggar wandering around. So I was dressed in ragged medievel clothes and went from table to table, begging for scraps of food or a few coins. It turned out to be great fun; occasionally the guards would chase me or drag me from the hall, and once or twice would threaten to cut off my hand while I pleaded with the guests to intercede. I also worked out a routine with one of the minstrels where I would “sing” for a guest, off-key and badly (not difficult for me). Best of all, I got to keep the money I collected.
The dinner was such a success as a fundraiser that they decided to make it an annual event, and they asked me to come back the next few years.
Wow, LurkMeister, have you ever thought about trying out to work at a Renaissance festival? It sounds like you had a great character there.
I’ve just found a job description that says, in part, “Answer e-mail inquiries and place internet orders.” I know, that’s not so strange, but…wow, I do that at home! Finally, a job that fits in with my hobbies! I never thought it would happen to me. 
I wonder if I could put the SDMB on my resume…well, I wouldn’t want to face prejudice from people who have not experienced the wonders of moist toilet tissue, so I guess I won’t.
My husband’s company had a guy (recently fired 
) who really liked hot and spicy food. His co-workers started coming up with the spiciest things they could find and pay this guy to eat them! He once ate 20 chicken wings with Blazin’ sauce from Buffalo Wild Wings! (Later, there was the complaint that the restaurant hadn’t put enough sauce on the wings–there had been a plan for him to repeat his performance, but, alas, it was not meant to be.)
Well, I guess “Painted” is the wrong term. They had been “coated” Amazingly, it was for a company that made…screws! 
Somebody ran a screw line for a few days before noticing that they weren’t letting them dry enough before boxing them.
Waking up somewhere between 3 or 4 am…putting on “clean” clothes that no rational person would ever consider clean…driving 45 minutes on half-asleep autopilot…crawling through electric fence while trying not to fry my inner thigh or spill my much needed coffee…Walking around with the stock dog croaking “Come on!” “Come on!”…wading through knee-deep cow shit after the slow (though amazingly voluntary) line of bovine ladies…hunkering down in the muck to paw at their breasts while they chow down…trying to pretend that the sound of the compressor wasn’t rattling the teeth from my skull…giving the girls a parting squirt of cold antibacterial ooze across their teats and a quick slap on the ass…“Untill tommorrow, my dear.”
This was usually followed by falling asleep with my face in my Genetics book in some cozy corner of campus.
I spent about three years as a mechanic in a R&D department working on the latest and greatest sanitary napkin production equipment.
It was a perfectly normal job, with lots of cool machining work and my own rollabout toolbox full of neat stuff, but I always got odd looks when I explained what I did. Once in awhile I would pause and consider how weird it was: a group of engineers and mechanics holding the hourglass-shaped sanitary pads up to the light saying things like “Looks like the fiber is kind of heavy on the left side. Give the baffle a quarter turn.”
Our job was fairly laid back; others weren’t so lucky. One of the scientists explained to us how the experimental designs were sent to panels of women who would use them and then return them for analysis:eek:. The scientists would then don all kinds of protective gear and go through the used pads, making observations about absorbance, flow, and whatnot.
I myself haven’t done anything particularly strange for money, but one day when I was in high school (near the end of my junior year, I think) some friends of mine and I paid a friend of ours about a dollar to crush up and snort a Lance “smokehouse cheddar” cracker.
We were bored, easily entertained, had spare change burning holes in our pockets, and not really very concerned for our friend’s post-snorting health (although for the record, he seems to have suffered no ill effects in the two years hence, except for everything smelling like bacon right after he did it, which everyone except him thought was really funny).
Ah, to be in high school again…
I sold my soul for 75 cents. There was a candy bar in the vending machine I really wanted, but I was all out of change. When I explained the situation to my friend he got a strange look and asked me how bad I really wanted it. Well, we drew up a contract and I signed over my soul. There was a brief soul-extraction ceremony and the candy bar was mine. Best one I’ve ever tasted.
If any of you have ever been to a Steak n’ Shake, you have invariably seen the jars of pickled hot peppers sitting on the tables used for steakburgers and such.
Well, I was once paid about $2.50 in pocket change to eat 24 of those little pieces of hellfire. I carefully arranged them all on a napkin and then rapid fired those suckers into my mouth like a machine gun.
The resulting eye-watering, water-gulping scene was nothing compared to the toilet-clenching liquid fire volcano that came out of me the next day…
I ate a live cricket for $3 on a dare.