Strangest job you've ever had

Man, that sucks a lot worse than mine. Final day of community service, they pulled me out of the park and sent me to the county farm. Spent the day bucking hay in 100-degree heat brutal.
Some of the other guys had to slop hogs. They were done in half the time, but I was happy to buck hay instead.
Carcass patrol would suck.

 

My strangest job was working in a fossil fish quarry for three summers in southwestern Wyoming. I was the glorified tour guide -- show people how to use a hammer and chisel to break layered limestone correctly. I know more about fossil fish of the Green River Formation than anyone on this board, and likely, more than anyone I'll ever again meet in my life. And I'm not necessarily proud of that fact. Hey, it paid for college.

 

I worked in a tobacco field, but it didn't last long. I absorbed way too much nicotine through my skin and passed out from a combination of nicotine poisoning and heat. I came very close to landing on my hatchet thingy when I went down, and that was enough for me. I think I had just turned 16 at the time.

 

Manual elevator operator.

 

Detasseling corn. Wow did that fucking suck. I think I lasted a couple weeks.

A couple friends of mine had a really weird job in college: Loading the giant scantron machines with people's ACT and SAT tests to be scored. It paid really well. They worked 12 hours at a time for three days consecutive and got paid for 40 hours. And once they loaded the machines, they had two hours at a time to kill.

Two vastly overrated jobs from personal experience and/or observation.

1. Selling drugs. The money's generally only good if you're going to transport the product, which is a huge risk, and you're always sitting around waiting for some douchebag. You also end up having to hang out with some serious creeps.

2. Professional gambler. It's fucking work, man. I've got two close friends who do it, and, when you get right down to it, it's a pretty boring and labor intensive job. Back in the heyday of internet poker, they both got paid to prop tables at certain sites. Even with a two monitor setup so they could play as many windows as possible, they could only make a somewhat-above-average wage, and they were anchored to their computer for hours and hours at a time. Sports betting can pay off, but really only in the long run. It's a fucking grind.

 

For you midwesterners, those signs with the odd combination of numbers and letters you see in front of corn and soybean fields? Yeah, me and another kid put those up for a summer. six days per week, sun up to sundown, five weeks.

the good thing was you got paid by the sign. The bad part was putting all those damn posts in the ground in the scorching heat (nearly 2,000 of them).

The signs are telling you what kind of seeds they used in certain rows of their fields. Farmers get paid by the seed companies to change up for each set of rows they plant. which is fine, as most of the guys had a map of their land so we could put the signs up in the right place. This one guy, though, had the map memorized in his head and scratched it out on the back of a McDonald's bag. Too bad he couldn't write for nothin. I've had an easier time translating Sanskrit.

Other "fun" jobs:
-- Painting the bumpers at a Putt-Putt golf course (orange paint is a bitch to get off your skin, too)
-- stockboy at a craft store. Can you be allergic to fake flowers?
-- fixing the bumper boats and paddle boats at a water park, and having to go out and save two "large" women after their boat sunk, even when I told them they weighed too much together for the boat to stay afloat.
-- Part time retail during christmas holiday for extra cash. Man, that sucked.

 

During one Christmas break in college, I:

*Continued my part-time job at Little Caesar's I'd had off and on for three years;
*Worked as a Waffle House hostess
*Worked at Honeybaked Ham.

About the ham...beware that fucking foil it comes wrapped in. That shit gives cuts WAY worse than any paper cut you could ever get. At one point, they rotated me back to the back, where I had to WRAP the damn hams that had just come from the glazing station. So I'm wearing big gloves, handling steaming hot gooey hams and trying to wrap them all to specification without gashing my hand off.

Also, the glaze? They sprinkle something on it, then turn a hand-held, industrial flamethrower on it. Seriously.

 

Dressing up as Boomer, the Parks Canada Beaver; castrating pigs; selling circus tickets; pulling toe nails and Kleenex out of old men's pants pockets at a Grainger's Dry Cleaners; designing the exterior of an ugly-ass factory presently desecating a big chunk of Vaughn, Ontario; crawling through lumber piles to root out raccoons, who generally made me painfully aware that they preferred to stay put; picking cucumbers and artichokes.

Fuck all of that shit.

 

I never had a telemarketing job, but this was almost as bad. Same principle, but I made phone calls for a market research company. We'd call people that recently stayed at a hospital or bought a certain product and ask them question. Very mind numbing. I went home after the first day and never went back.

 

Of course, I knew Jones would win this hands down.

 

moderator of an industry message board

 

I worked one shift at an air conditioning manufacturing plant one summer.

If your AC did not work in the early 1990s, it could be because the things I created with the dual aluminum grinding lathe were about 10 centimeters off the recommended allowance.

The supervisor who told me to trash them and redo them walked away before seeing me box up the bad parts and send them on down the line. Then I kept grinding.

One night was enough of that shit.

Hauled hay
Shoveled cow shit at a dairy
Unloading trucks
Sandwich shop