Being a personal servant to Caligula probably wouldn’t have been that great.
And as I remember, there are companies that specialize in cleaning up grisly accident and crime scenes.
“Whipping Boy” doesn’t sound too great, or well paying, though it might have been better than starvation or serfdom.
My sister in law’s father is a retired cop. He used to lead the Underground Brigade: yep, that’s an euphemism for the guys who check the sewers for bombs.
Mud larks would comb the edges of the Themes (sp?) for any valuables that made out of the London sewers. They would search through the raw sewage and effluent with their bare hands for any scrap that was worth selling; they would walk through filth all day, and they would do it barefoot. Getting their feet cut by broken glass or punctured by nails was evidently common and the infections would leave them unable to work for months at a time. How the street urchins who combed through endless shit for a few sellable tidbits managed to survive when the cuts in their feet were too cut up and infected to walk on is beyond me; however, some apparently did manage to live to tell about it.
There are a lot of shitty jobs out there, no pun intended, but it helps to keep things in perspective.
Couldn’t imagine why…
[sub]:Runs off to vomit:[/sub]
Could you tell me more about your time working there? I got the “opportunity” to see animals slaughtered at a slaughterhouse and ever since then I’ve been obsessed with learning about the people that work at those kind of places and how it has affected their life. It’s a horrible, horrible line of work, if you ask me.
My email is in my profile, if you would prefer to contact me that way.
[/hijack]
Working in a porn store was one of my favourite jobs. Mind you, we didn’t have “booths” or anything. Just adult toys, novelties, videos and mags. Very relaxed work environment.
I think I remember reading somewhere that there was supposedly once a line of work that involved kidnapping children, disfiguring them, then selling them to a circus sideshow.
Though that’s probably the kind of job you’d only do if you really enjoyed what you were doing, anyway. :eek:
As I understand it, the last castrato died around 1916 in Italy. It is really not that long ago.
Groom of the Stool.
You had to stand next to the King whilst he was evacuating his bowels into a medieval toilet (hint: no flush, no running water, bacteria-infested medieval food…). 
Weirdly, this intimacy turned the job into a very politically powerful and hence sought-after position.
Kind of off topic, but I work in a medical lab. We once received in about half a testicle to be tested for cancer. All the women in the lab fought to get to be the one to chop it up.
That doesn’t surprise me. Maybe it was mine.
Nope, there is a current one, he had an accident when he was 11 or 12. Saw a documentary on him on PBS about 4 years ago.
Now maybe you wouldn’t consider him a cstrato because it wasnt done on purpose, but at least it turned out to be a marketable oops…