What's the wierdest job you've ever had?

In My Humble Opinion
21

Oh, wow. This is bringing back some memories.

In my last two years of high school, I had a part-time gig as a maid/gardener. The guy who originally worked for the lady who lived down the street from us had a heart attack or something, and this lady needed somebody to do yard work and some additional stuff.

One day, my mom mentioned that I was trying to earn money for a summer trip after I graduated from high school, and was she interested in giving me a job til she could find somebody else.

This lady was really something. I mean, one of the original Ladies Who Lunch. She was great! About 60 years old, platinum blonde, smoked like a barbeque, tanned beyond the beyond, traveled all over the world, awesome house, etc. Totally interesting and very cool. Typical story: husband had died and left her a pile.

So every day after school I’d come home, put on a straw hat (or ski hat and gloves, depending), and mow the lawn or trim the bushes or shovel snow or rake leaves or wash her cars or whatever. Miss Jane would invite me in after I’d finished and we’d have coffee and she’d tell me about her adventures.

It was definitely an unusual job, but really fabulous. Eventually I graduated to some indoor work (Miss Jane had actually got a lady to work inside by then); namely, I got to make and serve dinner one night to Miss Jane and her boyfriend, Lyle. I remember watching them from inside as I worked in the kitchen as they ate by candle light on the patio. They looked really happy and cute.

That really was a weird but cool job. Miss Jane, by the way, is still alive, as far as I know. I spoke with a girl from my old neighborhood last year who keeps in touch with the original house owners there, and she told me that Miss Jane lives. She’s now in her eighties.

22

Years and years ago, I was paid $100 to dress up as a crash test dummy and walk around a kids’ health fair.

I couldn’t talk at all, because the square mouth-hole didn’t move, and the organizer thought the children would be frightened. Also, the plastic head-and-neck was uncomfortably tight, the skin around my collarbone and on the sides of my neck got all chafed, and the foam shaping inside the head smelled funny.

The worst part? It’s obvious in retrospect. What happens when you take a room full of antsy, bored kids, and put an apparent crash test dummy in front of them?

Bam! Whap! Smack!

I was supposed to be out there for six hours, with a five-minute break each hour, but I couldn’t manage more than twenty straight minutes before I had to go out back and pull the head off and lie on the cold linoleum floor, gasping.

At the five-hour mark, the organizer took mercy and let me go.

A good friend of mine was inside the suit of the Hunchback at Disneyland for a few months, and he laughed at me and called me a pussy when I told him my story.

23

You know, it suddenly occurred to me that my second job working as an exam room assistant for two gynecologists might be “weirder” to you guys than being a carnie. It’s a judgment call, I suppose. I would venture to say I’ve seen more naked women up close and personal than most men on this board…

combined.

24

I’ve posted about this job in other threads–the worst job I ever had, ajob I had less than a week, etc–and it qualifies here as well. That job?

Corn detassler. That tends to get a bunch of "Er…wha?"s around here (Southern California), but Midwesterners likely know what I’m talking about. For 8 hours a day, in four hour shifts with no break, I tore off the yellow flower that grows on the top of mature corn stalks. The flowers were more or less buds still, concealed in folded leaves. The idea behind this was to prevent pollination with other strains of corn in the field (apparently, what those fields grow is cattle-feed corn, not human-feed corn).

In a word, it sucked.

25

The weirdest job because it had the weirdest moments.

I worked two summers for a chain of pet supply stores, and they used to send me to Cargo City at Philadelphia Airport to pick up imported birds. One day the airline left a container full of budgies out on the runway for several hours. I spent a good bit of time at Cargo City counting dead budgies.

I also was once sent to pick up 2 Tokay geckos, 5 scorpions packed in soap dishes, and a monitor lizard, all stuffed in a large, flimsy styrofoam box. I could hear the monitor lizard scrabbling at the sides of the box as it bounced around in the back of the van.

One day a coworker packed a van for me to make deliveries, and he put a loose spare tire up against the side of the van and packed product around it. I forgot about the loose spare. Later I picked up a mynah bird in a cardboard box for a return. I put it in the back of the van and pulled out. The spare rolled right across the center of the box and killed the bird. :frowning:

Publishing is so much more sane.

26

I had a friend who owned a horse carriage company that took the tourists around town where I lived. I was 13 and it was my first job Basically I was called the “pooper scooper”. It wasn’t bad because I liked the money and people were quite nice when I was in the middle of the street cleaning up. I eventually became a horse-carriage driver which was much more fun!

27

It is not without a certain trepidation and hesitation that I venture to set before the reader my tale, which, owing to its unaccountable queerness, may be found scarcely credible.

It was on a fine day in 18—— that, upon my inquiring after an advertisement in the newspaper, a Mr. R——— D———, after pulling my hair somewhat painfully, offered me employment in what appeared to be a profitable sinecure, financed by the estate of an eccentric gentleman in America. When I was shown to my duties, they turned out to be nothing more than to copy out, in longhand, the entirety of the Encyclopædia Britannica. For this nominal labour, consuming a mere four hours per day, the emolument amounted to a handsome four pounds—four gold sovereigns!—per week. The only stricture laid upon me was that I must remain in the office throughout the entire four hours, without once setting foot outside it; or else the whole venture would be forfeit.

After two months of this most curious manner of engagement, I arrived one morning to find the door bolted and my employer altogether vanished from the premises, without a trace! I ask you, gentlemen, is there any way to account for such an anomalous turn of events? Quite the rum go, I dare say.

28

I’ll just note a close friend’s job. He worked for the University of Houston in Maintenance and after a brief stint in keys (of which there were thousands, many in the wrong hands), he transferred to a gig he did for quite some time.

Many years ago UH had a history of problems in the lifting department, and his job was to ride every elevator on campus once a week, and make it stop and go for every floor, going both up and down.

The entire circuit just about filled up his work week, and he cringed when relating to me the apparently oft-repeated scenario of getting on an elevator with an obviously fresh-out-of-time coed and pushing the buttons for every floor in a 15 story building, subsequently withering under her hardening glare as he failed to get off on any of the many floors he’d requested.

29

Chasing thunderstorms. No really, I worked one summer chasing thunderstorms. Best summer job I ever had. It was a government job (who else would pay you to chase thunderstorms?) and bureaucratic rules required that we be paid from 8am to 4:30pm, plus overtime. Thunderstorms rarely happen in the morning, they form during the day and do their worst in the evening, so there was a lot of overtime. We were working out of an old air base that had a storm tracking radar and two-way radio equipment, there were a dozen crews with specially equipped trucks, and the guys at the base would vector us into position along the storm path. We set up all kinds of gear to catch rain and hail samples, measure wind velocity and barometric pressure and the electric field between the cloud and the ground. Once set up, we’d sit there while the storm rolled over us, then quickly pack up and drive like Hell to get ahead of the storm and do it all over again.

You don’t know what it is to be terrified until lightning hits the ground 30 feet from you.

30

When I was about 15, I got a job with an exterminator. He’d figured that if he got a trench dug around the foundation in the crawlspace under the house, all he’d have to do was stick the nozzle in and spray. Guess who got to go under the house with a claw-hammer to dig the trench? Mind you, even at 15 I was about 6’ tall.

Aside from the spiders and snakes, the worst was when a possum with a new litter decided I was invading her territory. Now, let me tell you, a mama possum certainly does not play dead. And she has long, sharp teeth–lots of them.

I hated to do it, but she ended up with the claw end of the hammer in her head–after all, I was laying on my belly in a 2’ crawlspace. Not easy to run. But the worst part was that I had to whack the babies too.

I quit that day.

31

I worked in an adult bookstore for five months, and trust me, you do not want details:eek:

32

Oh, yes we do!

33

I was a researcher at a cemetary. This was not a small behind-the-church cemetary either. This was one of those huge corporate cemetaries that takes up acres and acres.

Most of my job was finding-out where people were buried and who owned the plots. I also knew the layout like the back of my hand. Since this was a memorial cemetary, it didn’t have big old marble headstone; instead, it had flat bronze markers. I could go into an area that had no markers and, without any surveying materials, I could pace out exactly where any certain grave would be…I guess this made me sort of a cemetary-savant.

Since I was pretty easy-going, I sometimes got wrangled into going to the graveside services. The rule was that there had to be an official from the park there until the vault in the ground was sealed around the casket. I didn’t really care…it got me out of the office and into the fresh air. It’s amazing what would happen sometimes. Some people would open-up the casket to say goodbye, while others would remove the body and carry it about. I really didn’t care as long as the body ended-up back in the casket, and the casket in the ground.

Some people would send their loved one’s cremains to use for internment through the mail. That’s fine, I have no problem with that as long as you do it right. Some moron sent us his mother in a manilla envelope. There’s no indication that there is anything in the envelope of any importance, so one of my colleagues just opened it up like it contained paper…the resulting plume covered us with “mom”. I have this picture in my head that we looked like Lucy and Ethel all covered in what looked like flour. We did our best to gather everything up and reseal the envelope, but with little success.

I loved the research. The rest of the circus, I could do without.

34

Ruffian is wrong to want details. A friend of mine thought about working in one–the hours were at night, so he could do other stuff during the day, and the pay was good. Then he was told what his tasks were–including cleaning out the private video booths. Ewwwwwwww. :eek:

35

In my senior year of High School I was paid to donate sperm. My sperm in a cup was used to impregnate two different women who had infertile husbands. I have no idea if either pregnancy took. It may be that I have two 19 year old children out there somewhere. Scarey.

Haj

36

This one sucked a lot. Made a great story, though.

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=34408&highlight=handcuff*

37

:gulp:

Surely you jest?

[sub]please say you’re kidding. please please please please[/sub]

38

And even that wasn’t the worst of it. Oh, the humanity :eek:

39

I had a job that started out normal, then turned wierd. I was hired as a technical writer for a company that made injection molded parts (mostly for headset telephones). The building was kind of small to warrant it as a ‘factory’ and working on a computer I could never completely get over the stench of burning plastic and mold-releasing solvent.

And thats the normal part. See, they hired me to help them update their documentation for ISO 9002; this was a summer job that was supposed to take all summer, but I was so determined to do a good job that I finished the task in five weeks. After that, there was not much technical writing that needed to be done, so I pretty much was a very high paying janitor for the place. Sweeping, taking out garbage, cleaning the bathrooms, etc.

The worst part I think is when a coolant hose would rupture (or an employee would forget to close the valve and pull the hose off the machinery) and I would get called in to mop up this lake of what looked like toxic waste on the floor (dark green stuff-smelled vile).

40

Stacking railroad ties.

We worked in an empty field. The railroad was replacing about 50 miles of line that summer. Dumptrucks would pull in four our five times a day and drop off several hundred railroad ties. Our job was to stack them in 25 tie bundles and band them with metal stripping.

The bad parts were getting creosote burns ono our forearms and working in hot temperatures. We tried to wear long-sleeve shirts, but we worked in July and August in eastern Montana. We started a 6 in the morning, but by noon it was usually 95-105 degrees and we couldn’t work with long sleeve shirts. We got paid 25 cents above minimum wage, so we probably made $3 an hour.

The good parts were that I worked with three of my best buddies from high school. We figured out that we could bust ass for about four hours, slack for three and then go home. We’d park a car next to where we were working and rock out. We also developed a thriving black market for homeowners who wanted to get railroad ties at a 50% discount.

And we also figured out that the metal bands we used to tie the ties together could be ran through the door handles on 1970’s cars and sealed. The band could only be removed by tin snips or a hacksaw. That was fun at a few keggers.

After two months of throwing ties I got a job working construction at twice the money and a 50 hour work week. I thought I was in heaven.