I always love when writers — or anybody, really — talks about the jobs they took to get them to where they are now. It’s always such an odd assortment of work. (I shredded documents to hide from the EPA in one job, and in another, found myself working for an advertising agency where all the ad execs looked like porn stars and all their desks and offices were adorned with sex toys — so, uhh, maybe not an advertising agency? I worked for the ICRDA, the International Cash Register Dealers Association, where I crashed a tour van in a parking garage.)
So:
Weirdest job you’ve ever had?
Go.
tallian says:
Third shift DJ at an adult contemporary radio station in central WI. I can no longer listen to Celine Dion.
April 28, 2014 — 9:16 PM
Heather says:
HA! HA!
April 28, 2014 — 10:04 PM
bhunting9999 says:
Sorted plankton over big pans of formalin at USC, then went across the street to the LA Natural History Museum as “Unofficial curator of crustacea trying to organize the crabs and lobsters which were in pretty bad shape. I was in high school. At USC I would sing Peter, Paul, and Mary songs, harmonizing with a friend who was also sorting plankton.
April 28, 2014 — 9:17 PM
Georgia at In Search of a Muse says:
Roe grader in a fish processing plant in the Aleutian Islands.
April 28, 2014 — 9:18 PM
Terri says:
Okay, that is going to be hard to beat.
April 28, 2014 — 9:57 PM
bhunting9999 says:
No way to edit? Oh well. Imagine the end punctuation for the quote.
April 28, 2014 — 9:18 PM
Andrew F. Butters says:
I wrote trivia questions for the Bible version of a home video game for a short-lived console called the ZapiT Game Wave.
April 28, 2014 — 9:18 PM
Fancy Ruff-Wagner says:
In the 1970’s I was hired by a Greek guru to come his ashram for 2 hours a day and type his life story. His mother, while pregnant, had been visited by Mary or an Angel and told that he would be almost as big as Jesus. He kept trying to get me to buy this T-shirt that said “Cosmic Orgasm.” I refused–not because I was offended (I wasn’t), but because he was pushy and I don’t like pushy.
April 28, 2014 — 9:21 PM
terribleminds says:
WUT.
April 28, 2014 — 9:28 PM
Shecky MMXIV (@SheckyX) says:
WINNAH.
April 28, 2014 — 10:18 PM
Lori says:
I have read your post three times, I can’t stop.
April 29, 2014 — 12:25 AM
Beth Turnage says:
Back in my college days I was hired for a place called Grandma’s Pies, where our uniform was a long light blue gingham dress, and a gingham cap for our heads which weird enough. I was put on the cash register opening day, with no instruction on how to work it, and the managers were too busy to help me when I ran into problems. I quit at the end of the shift.
April 28, 2014 — 9:21 PM
Seamus says:
I worked for a kiosk in a mall selling swords, knives, various other edged weapons. We dressed in period garb and generally got funny looks from folks passing by and lots of questions from cops. When that didn’t pay all the bills, the owners of the kiosk also had an escort service. So, I would get off work dressed in period garb carrying a large basket hilt claymore and then go drive the girls for the escort service to their various appointments and wait until it was time for them to leave. When they asked, I would stand at the door. This did help to keep things on the up and up and kept hands where they were supposed to be. I miss those days.
April 28, 2014 — 9:22 PM
terribleminds says:
Holy crap. Bladed weapons at the mall to escort service driver/bouncer.
April 28, 2014 — 9:29 PM
Lisa L. says:
I worked as a bill collector. Crappy job that made me miserable but I heard a lot of interesting lies… Err…stories.
April 28, 2014 — 9:25 PM
Mark Gardner says:
Yeah. I worked bill collections for a garbage company. We actually played excuse bingo.
April 28, 2014 — 10:09 PM
Coop Morrison says:
Does a job within a job count?
If so, then my strangest/worst job was as a Jarhead when deployed to Iraq. Shitter detail.
Shitter detail, my friends, involves 1) the removal of shit barrels from shit toughs 2) dousing barrels of human shit with diesel fuel and 3) stirring that fucking shit with a sign post. Fucking Platoon style. Mmmm mmm, Delicious.
April 28, 2014 — 9:29 PM
Coop Morrison says:
Oh, I forgot to light the shit on fire, that’s the best part!
April 28, 2014 — 9:56 PM
Charles Eugene Anderson says:
Middle school PE teacher for 21 years…most days are just strange.
April 28, 2014 — 9:31 PM
bhunting9999 says:
First real job out of college was jr high general science teacher in Watts
April 28, 2014 — 9:53 PM
radicalsam says:
I sorted glass optics at 14 and got paid under the table. I’d remove the optics from their plastic boxes, optics in one pile, boxes in another for both to be thrown away. I’d sit in this big storage room alone and do this for hours while listening to music. They let me take home any optics I wanted. Search crown glass or glass optics if you’re curious.
April 28, 2014 — 9:32 PM
Susan Hayes says:
Uniform Crime Reporter. I read crime files at the local police department. All day. Every day. Then I broke down what happened in each file into a statistical code and recorded that code for reporting to Stats Canada. One hundred and fifty or so crimes a day for years on end has given me enough fodder to make sure I have things to write about for the rest of my life…and left me with a cynical streak slightly wider than the Mississippi.
April 28, 2014 — 9:36 PM
Jamie A says:
I used to take calls about road kill and then go collect it and identify it based on the remains. I would then enter that information into a database and identify areas of road that were dangerous for drivers. During hunting season I would collect elk and deer heads at hunting stations and remove a part of their brain tissue to test for diseases. Then, map out areas of disease for management purposes.
Needless to say, I am pretty familiar with road kill and dead animals.
April 28, 2014 — 9:39 PM
Joanna Horrocks says:
Read Stuart McBride’s “Close To the Bone” yet?
April 28, 2014 — 9:58 PM
Whimsy and Nonsense says:
Sorta makes me glad I’m not a scientist.
April 29, 2014 — 2:10 AM
Oliver Gray says:
I worked at a Skeet and Trap shotgun range for 2 years, until it was shut down by the government for the 30+ years of lead build up in the water behind the club. After that, I worked as the sole IT guy in a Synagogue/Talmad Torah, where they force fed me challah bread, whitefish, and sweet wine at 1PM, even though I still had hours of work to do. The head Rabbi offered me a full-time job for life if I converted to Judaism, but I turned him down (probably because I was drunk).
April 28, 2014 — 9:44 PM
Rodney Williams says:
I sold cemetery plots and other death-related accessories (caskets, vaults, urns). Telemarketing cold calls followed by a presentation in the potential buyers’ homes if they showed interest. My office was at the end of a long winding road through the same cemetery where most of my dead relatives were buried. It was also where my parents had met at what used to be the only private country club for black people in Atlanta, next door to the cemetery. Years later the country club burned to the ground under mysterious circumstances, the day after its last New Years Eve party. Years after that I sat in the new building that replaced the country club, calling random phone numbers from a city directory and opening conversations with strangers with “Do you own cemetery property in your name?” I’m still surprised at how successful I was at that job. Still, I only lasted a month.
April 28, 2014 — 9:44 PM
Wendy Christopher says:
Okay… the idea of cold-calling people about funeral paraphernalia is slightly blowing my mind at the moment!
April 29, 2014 — 2:39 AM
Rodney Williams says:
It blew a lot of those people’s minds too. That’s a big part of why I made so many sales. They saw me calling them out of the blue about cemetery plots as some kind of sign they should probably listen to.
May 1, 2014 — 12:26 AM
ATaylor says:
Mine would be working in a cemetery putting up headstones or maybe that summer I spent sorting biomedical waste.
April 28, 2014 — 9:44 PM
fadedglories says:
Sorting? biomedical waste. Ack! Poor you.
April 29, 2014 — 2:50 AM
Josh Carlton says:
I once moved 150 miles to take a job for an AT&T Authorized Retailer as a sales consultant. I survived 67 days. I then served 89 consecutive days as a newspaper delivery boy.
2013 didn’t really make the Best Decisions I’ve Ever Made highlight reel.
April 28, 2014 — 9:44 PM
latedra says:
Stuffing bubble gum inside baseball card collections.
April 28, 2014 — 9:46 PM
Toni Rakestraw says:
Used to do singing telegrams. Had to dress up in costumes for different characters, drive all over the city, and deliver them.
April 28, 2014 — 9:47 PM
fadedglories says:
I guess that could be fun, sometimes.
April 29, 2014 — 3:20 AM
boydstun215 says:
Desperate for tuition money during my first semester of college, I applied with the Hawaii Department of Labor and essentially told them I’d do anything. My first temp job involved cleaning and renovating industrial-grade restaurant and supermarket appliances, mostly freezers and refrigerators. It’s likely that most of these appliances stopped working while still in service, because they smelled so bad (think rotting meat soaked in fish sauce, wrapped in old gym socks, and left to sit in the sun for a week) that I required a respirator, which still left me gagging and weak in the knees. I did this work in a warehouse that was near 100 degrees. What made it worse was that the guy who owned the business smoked cheap, filterless cigarettes as he stood around “supervising.” I gave it the college try for a week before I walked off the job.
April 28, 2014 — 9:47 PM
Michelle says:
I was an engineer for a space & communications company. We made communications satellites, big ones that went up into geosynchronous orbit. The satellite antenna arrays were made out of carbon fibers composites. Items that go up in space have to be able to withstand a great deal of stress because they get extremely hot on the sun side and extremely cold on the side that is away from the sun. At one point, my job was to destroy antenna arrays to see how much stress they could take. It was kind of fun.
April 28, 2014 — 9:49 PM
piirus says:
I’ve had two strange ones.
When I was a kid, in the summer I worked weekends in Christmas tree fields with both a machete and pruning sheers “encouraging” the trees to take on a more pleasing shape. Paid really well for 1992.
As an adult, I had the illustrious job of scooping chemicals (sulfur, resins, acetate, and MORE!) into plastic bags, to within 1/100th of a pound, so that they could burn it with the rubber they used to make tires. The area I worked in was NOT air conditioned and I was required to wear goggles, a hat, a full double barrelled respirator, coveralls with the sleeves cinched using velcro so that the chemicals couldn’t make skin contact and gloves. It was around this time that I grew tired of washing my hair 4 times at the end of my shift and decided to start shaving my head down to the wood.
Is it odd that I really miss that job?
April 28, 2014 — 9:51 PM
UrsulaV says:
I worked at a streetlight outage hotline.
You would think that crazy people would not call a streetlight outage hotline.
You would be wrong.
I mean, I’ve drawn furry art for a living and it hasn’t been half as weird as some of the crap that happened on that hotline. (Although if you get me drunk, I’ve got some pretty good stories about that, too.)
April 28, 2014 — 9:52 PM
UrsulaV says:
(Let me add, by the way, that YES, we got conspiracy theorists convinced that we were making the streetlights go out as they walked by and screaming at me to stop. That was kinda normal.)
April 28, 2014 — 9:53 PM
terribleminds says:
Did any of them tell you they could shut off streetlights with their minds?
April 28, 2014 — 9:59 PM
UrsulaV says:
Oddly, no. I guess they wouldn’t call to complain about that.
Fair number of people at parties would tell me how street lights would always go off as they passed, though. I’d explain that they shut down temporarily when they reach a certain heat, but you could always tell that they secretly wanted me to tell them they were the Golden Child.
April 28, 2014 — 10:51 PM
Adam Christopher (@ghostfinder) says:
Hey, I have a half-finished novel based around street light interference phenomena!
April 29, 2014 — 10:48 AM
UrsulaV says:
…awkward.
April 29, 2014 — 11:26 AM
Jeff Patterson says:
Lord forgive me but I first read that as “I worked as a streetlight outage hottie”
April 28, 2014 — 9:59 PM
Shae Connor says:
My very first job was wrapping gifts in a department store during the holiday season. Maybe not so weird on the surface, but… have you ever tried to wrap one of those big wicker clothes hampers? (At least it wasn’t some poor guy buying it for his wife.)
April 28, 2014 — 9:55 PM
Beck says:
My first job after getting a B.S. in Wildlife Management was as a technician on a Greater Sage-grouse project (basically, researching a giant species of chicken). Part of it was taking care of captive-born sage-grouse chicks. I had to dress in a ghillie suit five times a day (so they didn’t imprint on humans), descend to the basement, and feed them live crickets and mealworms. Plus we kept the crickets in an aquarium in the field house (which was in the middle of nowhere, northwestern CO) and they got out all the time.
April 28, 2014 — 9:55 PM
UrsulaV says:
OH MY GOD, that is so cool! Did you have a good success rate with the chicks?
April 28, 2014 — 10:52 PM
Rebecca M says:
No, unfortunately most of them died once they got put with surrogate mothers in the wild. Sad.
May 6, 2014 — 9:05 AM
Matt Davis says:
I was coroner’s assistant in a podunk cowtown in the middle of Nowhere, California for years. I was the guy that got called if anyone in the county died. I’d suit up and jump in my converted Chevy Astrovan and sling corpses into bags and take them back to the morgue. Saw lots of bizarre things, lots of heartbreaking things. Junkies OD’ing on their birthdays, teenagers and Xmas presents blown across the freeway on Xmas Eve, half-ton cadavers and crazier shit. It was definitely a job.
April 28, 2014 — 9:56 PM
terribleminds says:
That’s definitely writer fuel.
April 28, 2014 — 9:59 PM
Jeff Patterson says:
Paid: laundry worker at a geriatric hospital. Looooooots of bladder control issues.
Unpaid: AV guy at a Space 1999 con. I dare you find a geekier vocation.
April 28, 2014 — 9:56 PM
Wulfie says:
A book store where I had to rip the covers off of paper back books then dispose of the books in the trash – which killed me! – then box up the covers to be returned to the publishers for refunds on books not sold.
April 28, 2014 — 9:56 PM
Brie says:
I did this too! Totally killed me. I could do them all, except SF/F.
April 28, 2014 — 10:03 PM
Wulfie says:
There’s a special place in Book Hell for us, my friend. lol
April 28, 2014 — 10:06 PM
Minerva Zimmerman says:
Seafood Inspection Cleanup. Squid should not be purple. If you have a 5 gallon bucket of said squid you should at no point trip in a -30 walk-in freezer and spill it on the floor.
April 28, 2014 — 9:57 PM
sheilasstephens says:
I was a graphic artist for a science supply company. Every day we worked with something different for the catalog: Galileo thermometers, fetal pigs, lasers, triple-dye-injected cats, rockets, giant hissing cockroaches, dinosaur models, squid, digital microscopes, a tarantula, cow and sheep eyes, tuning forks, frogs, models of the human body, the DNA helix, the solar system… At Halloween we’d stack jars of dissection specimens on our desks and in the windows, completely freaking out some of the visitors. I was among fellow science nerds, and it was a blast!
April 28, 2014 — 9:58 PM
fadedglories says:
Curious. Why did you leave?
April 29, 2014 — 3:22 AM
Finn Tallaksen says:
Sorting the moldy tomatoes from the good ones for a produce warehouse. I lasted one day. Have never been able to look at a tomato in quite the same way since.
April 28, 2014 — 9:59 PM
tamara says:
I was a floorshow dancer for a reception centre and restaurant run by Russian mafia by night, answered ‘000’ (911 Aussie equivalent) emergency calls to the police by day.
April 28, 2014 — 9:59 PM
Jayne says:
I used to solder circuit boards under a microscope for pacemakers & sattelites & such, until the robots took over. You only need one hoo-man to make sure the robots have everything they need, and that didn’t turn out to be me.
Needing a job all quick-like, I noticed an ad for “adult phone operator”, so I did phone sex for the next few years. That was OK, but not really my bag, so I eventually answered another ad for shining shoes at the airport, which was pretty awesome, until the world changed & airports aren’t comfortable places to be anymore.
April 28, 2014 — 10:02 PM
Brie says:
The title of Graduate Research Assistant in Biomedical Sciences doesn’t sound that weird, but involved passing electricity through the neurons of fly larvae after dissecting out their brains. On a good day.
Also, injecting thousands of fly eggs with DNA to make transgenics. That’s right. GMOs!
April 28, 2014 — 10:02 PM
fadedglories says:
I’d say that’s pretty weird.
April 29, 2014 — 2:54 AM
Jeff says:
I was a limited-term aide at a state facility for ambulatory folks w/ developmental disabilities. Depressing for my sensitive soul, and I followed lifer colleagues into their dissolute coping strategies – indiscriminate drink, drugs, and sex. Okay. Fine. I was 22, 23. But when the unit director offered me full-time employment, I booked.
April 28, 2014 — 10:03 PM
Heather says:
I wouldn’t say weirdest I will say worst! My first job ever as a poolside waitress at Frenchman’s Reef St.Thomas USVI’s. I was nervous! My job simply take drink orders from the lounge lizards pool side. Easy! Well I walked up to the first woman poolside with kids. I asked for her drink order, repeated the order to make sure I had the order correct. Long story not so short, I brought the ticket to the bartender she said, ‘Congrats the first person you ever served is Joan London.’ I said who the hell is that? Well, yeah she heard, I ended up lobby bar, listening to harp music all day….I really hated her.
Famous people are so touchy…
April 28, 2014 — 10:03 PM
tamara says:
Oh yeah. And life model for drawing classes. Stories?
I got ’em.
April 28, 2014 — 10:03 PM
Clint Staples - Writer, Sculptor, Game Geek says:
Worked as a Bouncer in a disco back int eh early 80s. To this day, ‘Caribbean Queen’ makes me want to throw someone out the nearest door.
April 28, 2014 — 10:03 PM
Elizabeth says:
As an undergrad, I worked in a lab that studied how to use fungus to kill caterpillars.
April 28, 2014 — 10:04 PM
Terri says:
In college, I delivered Bag-Lady-Grams. I dressed as a bag lady and crashed your outdoor parties and annoyed the birthday boy or girl (eating snacks, drinking out of random soda cans, asking inane questions, generally making myself at home) until right before they beaned me with a BBQ implement where I did the big reveal and hilarity ensued. Awesome gig.
In those days, I also had the legs to delivery Playboy-Bunny-Grams. My college town had a big theater contingent, so one day I burst into a local dance shop, trench coat and ears on proclaiming that I needed a bunny tail and I needed it NOW. Unperturbed, the male clerk brought a tray of tails out from under the counter. I made my selection and told him he had to pin it on, I was due at a party and had a cake melting in the car. Again, unruffled, he ushered me onto the platform with triple mirror and adhered said tail to said leotard.
Bless the professionals, one and all.
April 28, 2014 — 10:04 PM
Kelly J. Doran says:
I worked at an occult shop all through my undergraduate years. The job itself was interesting–we carried books on topics like witchcraft, mythologies, tarot, chakras, and so on, along with herbs, crystals, candles, and all sorts of random items for various spells, and I knew the purpose of everything in the store! Not like it was always hard to figure out–a black candle shaped like a penis with a snake coiled around it carries some obvious connotations. My boss was also a psychic-medium, and she would sometimes ask me questions like, “Did you know someone who drowned in their twenties with a name that begins with an N?” in the middle of otherwise normal conversations (I did, by the way). The customers were great, too. I’ve met three different reincarnations of Christ, a couple of Cleopatras and Virgin Marys, and even an archangel trapped on Earth. And don’t you know, each one told me how the world was going to end.
April 28, 2014 — 10:05 PM
joshuamneff says:
For about six months, I worked in the head office for an independent bookstore chain in North Carolina called The Intimate Bookshop. It was started in the ’60s with the idea that “Intimate Bookshop” would mean a friendly place where you could hang out, read books, chat with the staff, and consider it a second home. In the ’90s, when I worked there, people who weren’t familiar with it assumed it was an adult bookstore. (And we would fairly regularly get calls from catalogs who listed porn bookstores, asking for our location and contact information.) Working in the office was as close to being in a sitcom I’ve ever been. It was like being in NewsRadio.
The chain was owned by Wallace Kuralt, the brother of legendary broadcaster Charles Kuralt. Wallace looked a lot like Santa Claus, sounded exactly like his brother, and was absentminded as hell. He once decided to take the afternoon off to go play golf with some friends, forgetting that some important business contacts were flying down from NYC to meet with him that afternoon. They were pretty pissed off to find out he was gone and unreachable. Wallace was also compulsively investing in schemes he assumed would net them loads of money but they never panned out. (He’d independently published a book by a local author that everyone else had turned down. There were hundreds of unsold copies of the book stacked in all 9 stores. Employees referred to the book as “the doorstop” because that’s all it was good for.) Wallace’s wife, a bullying hardass from New York, was co-owner of the chain, but she worked out of a different store because she and Wallace couldn’t stand working together. Neither of them had any business sense at all, and the chain was buried in debt, owning every publishing company loads of money that they kept not paying off.
The office manager, who had hired me, was an older woman with an undying crush on Wallace and a Smithers-esque need to please him no matter what goofy direction it took the store. She took major problems in stride but would lose her shit at tiny dilemmas. She had been in competition with another office employee, a crusty, cranky old woman, who had worked there just as long and also had a huge crush on Wallace. That woman had an on-again/off-again romance with the guy in charge of supplies, a good ol’ boy who wore powder blue polyester suits and was known for taking long liquid lunches. The guy in charge of making payments to the publishers we owed lots of money to was a really nice young guy who was not at all suited for the stress of being hounded by huge companies who want money. He’d walk through the office with a pained, haunted look on his face, swigging Maalox, and telling anyone who got a call for him, “Tell them I’m in a meeting.”
Then there was the hippie computer programmer who had designed the store’s rudimentary computer system (we called her “hip cat” behind her back), the young, long-haired Wiccan guy who worked as the receptionist, the nice young Jewish woman who was obsessed with finding a Jewish guy to marry, and the snarky, young, Italian-American woman who was my best friend there, my partner in eye-rolling at everyone we worked with.
Every day was an adventure in tedious, boring work, punctuated by angry calls from publishers and cops showing up to serve the store a summons from an angry publisher.
April 28, 2014 — 10:06 PM
Chris Burdick says:
I worked in a glitter warehouse that was also a Persian kitten mill and a would-be film production company. I believe to this day that their real income, however, came from credit card fraud; every day, I’d get calls and visits from people who claimed that thousands of dollars’ worth of glitter was fraudulently charged to their credit cards. My bosses claimed that all that glitter was shipped out just before I started work there, but I had a hard time believing that place ever even held that much product. Highlights included: a visit from a Howard Stern employee looking for brown glitter that he could blast from the back of Stern’s “Fartman” costume; Hollywood icon Angelyne looking for pink glitter to match her convertible; and me eating a granola bar crumb from my work table only to discover it was actually a piece of used cat litter from one of the giant barrels that filled the warehouse. I stopped working for these people after I got tired of them not being able to afford to pay me but still giving me the occasional hundred dollar bill to run next door and buy them expensive champagne so they could celebrate whatever big investment deal they were always seemingly on the verge of. For the next three years, I was still sneezing glitter.
April 28, 2014 — 10:07 PM
Mozette says:
Strange jobs… my very first job was putting together plastic pastry cutter for Women’s Day Magazine. It was a tedious job and at my Uncle’s Factory, and the pay sucked, but then my next job was working for one of the biggest and oldest insurance companies in Queensland… 🙂
After I finished working at RACQ, I found a part time, temp job as a cleaner in Annie Shandon’s Inn on Lower Edward Street here in Brissie. What a shit job that was – and a weird one too! You wouldn’t believe the things people do in the bathroom! I found rose petals in a communal bathroom, along with scented candles all because a couple of the tourists wanted to be romantic and he wanted to propose to her in the shower…. um… yeah, just the place dude! Why not at sunset at Mt Coo-tha Lookout? Or at the Kangaroo Point Cliffs?
While I was there (which was only 3 weeks), my supervisor was on my case something rotten. She went ahead and worked all the rooms on the 4th level that were on my clipboard to do, told me a lie about accepting gifts from one of the guests and ran me up and all 4 levels until I quit – throwing the keys at her face… even then, I wasn’t off the hook, and my Aunty Helen had gotten me the job and helped me out. So, back to work I went after a 5 minute measley break (after 4 hours of solid work, that was crap!), and what do I find? A room with the shower ensuite cubical tiles all kicked and smashed in from the last people who stayed there…. oh… yay…. how fun this will be.
We had to call the police, customs, the airport and have the flight delayed to pull the people off and brought back and charged for vandalism – only to find out that they’d done this to every other place they’d stayed in … which was about 25 countries and just as many half-way houses and 3-star hotels.
That was the worse job I’d had…
Another weird job I’ve had is working at a theatre… a haunted one. It’s the Butterbox Theatre Company… wow, you want a freaky experience, just work at this creepy place for a few months. We weren’t allowed in underneath where all the props were kept alone or the door would shut and lock and we’d be in complete darkness… and nobody would come looking for you! It was shit-creepy! If you were stuck there, they left a hammer by the door so you could bash on one of the nearby pipes for somebody to come and get you…
The ghost was a woman who used to work there… and to this day, she still does it to people who work at the theatre. However, when I’ve mentioned it, other people who work in other parts don’t believe me. But then, they’ve never seen what I have. 😛
I’ve been a committee member of a writer’s guild – where somebody paid a witch to hex the whole guild but me… weird that. The hex worked, but they didn’t count on me being able to undo it… 🙂
Committees suck… I hate being on them. People on them are greedy, back-stabbing little children who think what they do is best; when it’s just for them.
Okay, they are the weird jobs I’ve had… this is why I’ve created my own job and have stuck to being a writer and artist… at least I answer to myself and nobody else. 😀
April 28, 2014 — 10:08 PM
jrblackwell says:
I was a contortionist. I performed with a freak show and a burlesque. My stage name was The Plastic Elastic Kitty.
April 28, 2014 — 10:19 PM
Jayne says:
That’s awesome! I do nerd/geek burlesque here in Phoenix. We’ve only got one decent circus-type couple here, but I’d love to see more. 🙂
April 28, 2014 — 10:30 PM
fadedglories says:
I’d like to read more about that job.
April 29, 2014 — 3:25 AM
jrblackwell says:
Being a contortionist is being a performer, part-dancer, part magic trick.
One of the most delightful memories I have of performing is people gasping in sympathetic pain. I’m a back-bender, which means that I bend very easily backward, and a few parts of my body can hyper-extend to get into some interesting positions.
After almost every show, I’d get a sex question. Or perhaps I should say, a sex statement. I could predict the person who would bring up sex. There would be a person watching me on stage, and you could just about see the scenarios building in their mind. Then, after the show, they would watch me, building up confidence. Finally, they would approach me and say something like “Sex with you. . .must be fun!” before blushing, and running away. It might have been rude if they weren’t always so incredibly embarrassed.
I learned an important lesson in the burlesque from the woman who ran the show. The shows were usually in a bar, or a venue with a bar, and we were expected to mingle before and after the show. I would arrive in jeans and t-shirts, and then change into my show gear. Candy, the woman who ran the show told me that I had to have a pre-show outfit. When I showed up, I had to be in-character. That taught me something about performing – you are always on stage, even when you think you’re not.
April 29, 2014 — 8:06 AM
Sky says:
I spent a summer working as an “administrative assistant” (actual job title – very benign) for an escort service. I booked the ladies’ appointments and collected the company’s portion of their fees.
Looking back on it, I was apparently a pimp.
April 28, 2014 — 10:20 PM
Clementine Danger says:
I’d have to say nude model.
You think it’s going to be all bohemian and artsy, and sometimes it is. You end up in weird little attic rooms in Berlin making out with Australians and standing on the cliffs of Dover with nothing but a smile and a crowd of disapproving Englishmen. Then one day you look around and realize that you’re being rolled in cow manure butt naked and posed in a field during a blizzard, and holy shit you’re going to die for art, aren’t you? Or you find yourself crammed naked in a musty old closet with a medical skeleton in some dude’s living room, because his 80-year-old mom just walked in on your photoshoot and would have a heart attack if she knew. And then you have a good long think about your life choices, in that closet, and you name the skeleton Harry and have imaginary chats with him while an old lady watches her soaps and she’s got just no idea. Then a bunch of goddamn bohemians show up at your wedding and give you a 5000 euro painting of yourself while your aunties give you the stink eye. Such is the glamorous world of taking your clothes of for money. You think writers are weird, try hanging with painters.
Honestly, all I could think about during those times was “yes, this is horrible, but it’s going to look FANTASTIC in my biography.”
April 28, 2014 — 10:21 PM
Mozette says:
Oh yeah! I can completely relate to you! I’m a life model and the people I have gotten are interestingly weird to say the least. I haven’t done this for very long, but people who don’t know how weird this line of work is (think you’re nothing but a slut who sleeps with every artist there is going around) just hasn’t got a clue what it’s like to be in a room filled with people while you strip off to nothing and pose sitting on a chair with a shawl draped across you… people don’t realise how difficult it is to hold a pose for those 5 -10 minutes either… especially when you need to scratch your nose/back/arm/ear.
But when you look back on your life, you can definitely say you crossed that off your bucket list when nobody else has. 🙂
April 28, 2014 — 11:31 PM
Clementine Danger says:
Yeah, exactly! I used to pose for painters, and twisting yourself into a pretzel and holding for five hours does bloody murder on your joints and back.
Honestly I have mostly good memories of those six or seven years I did it full-time, and some nice stories to tell at the bar, but the slut-shaming got to me in the end. Because I, as an individual, chose to sleep with some of the artists, clearly I was living proof that ALL artistic models are huge slutbags. Because sleeping with people you like is shameful, yo!
I was also bullied out of college by a teacher who found pictures of me online. Which she only found because of photographer was angry at me and broke the contract stipulations by using my full name. Looks like I’ll never be a teacher. Because again, we can’t let slutbags into out schools, right? Won’t somebody think of the children?!!???
But I’m so thankful for the women. The other models, the support network we built, the “whispernet” where we quietly warned each other of predatory “artists” and the people who would pressure us into doing pornographic shoots. Every time I got an email from a woman I never met before saying “girls, heads-up, this guy is trouble” I felt so incredibly grateful. Women supporting women in a high-risk profession is a precious thing. Looking back now, that underground whispernet was my first foray into feminism.
It’s a weird, weird world. I’m glad I took a trip down that road, I have some wonderful memories, but I wouldn’t want to go back. The whole subculture is a magnification of patriarchal power structures (at least in the countries where I worked) and I just didn’t feel safe in the end. One handsy, pushy “artist” too many, I guess.
Sorry, I go off on tangents. I don’t want to discourage you or anything, it’s a very rewarding experience and you definitely get some good stories out of it (plus rent money). But trust the whispernet. It can save you a lot of grief.
April 29, 2014 — 12:30 PM
Mozette says:
I know what you mean… I live in a unit/townhouse complex and word got around that I’m a life model; and every pervert here thinks that when I get a male visitor (even my own brother!) they think I’m going to screw his brains out!
Last October, I had a modelling gig for my birthday… seeing half my family out of town. And I did it at my place, blocking out the view of the front window and closing off certain doors with furniture – as you do – and it worked out well. I met a new artist I thought was hot… but he was already seeing somebody.
This year, he asked me out; reasurring me that he wasn’t using me as rebound and we’ve gotten along well. He knows about the whisperings and goings-on around here with people thinking I’m a slut when I’m not and he said that if somebody says anything to him about me that insinuates that, he’ll punch their lights out (how sweet is that? 😀 ). I’m not saying violence is the end all and be all of things, but I’ve tried ignoring these people, I’ve tried telling them to get lost, I’ve complained to my Landlord and Body Corporate… having a wonderful man put them in their place is going to be the best thing around. 🙂
And you know… when I come to the end of my life, I want to have a cool story to be told by my family where I gave everything available to me around in my life right now a go… then it would make for a great memoir and even better laughs at my funeral wake. 😀
April 30, 2014 — 12:23 AM
Clementine Danger says:
You’re absolutely right. I’d rather regret doing something than regret missing out. And I’m so sorry people are treating you badly. That’s just fundamentally Not Okay. Don’t ever start believing them. You do you.
April 30, 2014 — 9:01 AM
brucearthurs says:
A story or novel that used that closet-with-skeleton experience as an opening hook is one I would SO VERY MUCH want to read.
April 29, 2014 — 11:46 PM
Clementine Danger says:
Just wait until I’m a super famous sci-fi author and you can buy my biography! Skeletons and naked women in the closet! Crime and passion and lovely hats! That one time I got attacked by wolves in Transylvania! Only twenty-nine ninety-nine!
April 29, 2014 — 11:56 PM
Mark Gardner says:
I’ve worked at the Tupperware warehouse in Imperial, Pennsylvania. I’ve blocked most of it out, but I still hate Tupperware twenty-two years later.
April 28, 2014 — 10:26 PM
Rob says:
Three way tie for my strangest,
1) Abercrombie and Fitch guy, not the six pack type. I had to keep my shirt on (pants too.. I know right?) and fold jeans to dreadful fist pumping techno. I smelled fierce and peddled distressed jeans to high school girls and their moms. I was in high school at the time so that part was cool, but still.
2) Live in care giver for uber wealthy bank CEO with rapdily progressing Alzheimer’s. Just… Insanity…
3) Growing medical marijuana for a legal dispensary. Giant forest of a grow too, maybe 1500 plants. Big brother was always watching, cameras on every corner and my coworkers were truly uh.. unique? Botany courses in college really paid off, and chem helped too. It’s all in the water chemistry really, but you knew that.
April 28, 2014 — 10:26 PM