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.
Leslie says:
I worked at a desk in a factory with a pot of white glue, greeting cards and assorted things that I glued to the greeting cards. We dealt with Angle Hair a lot and it slices through flesh quite easily. Much more painful than paper cuts.
April 28, 2014 — 10:27 PM
Kara Parlin says:
I worked for a startup focused on end-of-life care planning. Essentially, the idea was people could fill out do-not-resuscitate or health care proxy paperwork online, then hospitals could access it to know their wishes. So, not the most uplifting job ever.
April 28, 2014 — 10:28 PM
JD Krach says:
Photoshopping zits and lens glare out of senior class photos, in a working environment best described as gulag-ian.
April 28, 2014 — 10:31 PM
Liz Czukas says:
Although it’s not an unusual job, per se, being a labor & delivery nurse definitely led to some major weirdness. Just start with the fact that I spent hours staring at girly parts. Add in the strange things patients do and you’ve got yourself a recipe for weird. I won’t even begin to detail the foreign objects we pulled out of vaginas…
April 28, 2014 — 10:37 PM
Allyson Lindt says:
I sold vacuum cleaners door to door. Not cheap ones, these were $2,000 vacuums. We had a memorized sales pitch that took an hour and a half to go through, were overwhelmingly condescending, and focused on “This is how filthy your house is, and you’re appalled, right?” Training took a week. I sold a vacuum on my first appointment when, about half an hour in, the woman said “Okay, I get it, my house is filthy.”
And I quit the next day.
April 28, 2014 — 10:43 PM
deanmcsmith says:
Was that for Kirby? Officially my shortest job ever! (less than a day)
April 29, 2014 — 9:19 AM
Josin says:
Ren Fest carnie. Costume, awful accent and all.
April 28, 2014 — 10:47 PM
Chantal says:
When I was a biologist I collected poo samples for three species of antelope in East Africa. Lots of amazing and terrible things happened during that time and every day was very strange is some way. The best day was at a site where my crew and I climbed up a rocky mountain in the evening to get cell reception. It was prime snake habitat so we were distracted all the way up but at the top we turned around and saw a mega-congregation of hundreds of elephants on the other side of a river from our camp. I’m not sure how often that happens, but it’s probably rare and every time I hear about record levels of ivory poaching, I wonder how many of them are left. The worst day was the day we had to figure out how to transport the body of a young girl from a town back to her village. I’m not sure what she died of, but I’d bet whatever it was probably was preventable had her family had the means to get her to a hospital earlier. Her family gave me a chicken in return because it was the only thing they had to give.
April 28, 2014 — 11:03 PM
Lori says:
The job itself wasn’t intrinsically wierd, I worked at ALDO, a shoe store in Calgary, AB. What WAS off, though, was the fact that our manager was fond of shouting profanities and calling us “A-HOLEs” during staff meetings. He had his steel heart set on a trip to Maui or some such place if we won it for him through sales. I was never so happy to quit a job, it was the only one I happened to “forget” to show up for.
April 28, 2014 — 11:12 PM
shelton keys dunning says:
Receptionist (I know, not weird) for an upscale Assisted Living Facility that had an Alzheimers Unit attached, which brought in the weird. The residents were all very lovely people but some of them were extra special, like the woman who would call the police because she thought someone was stealing her shoes to sell on the black market. And the man that had real stock market advice that anyone could trust – I’m not kidding – but any time he’d see a white car, he’d think it was his and that he was late to get to a business meeting in Michigan. We were in California. Some of the residents were so normal that it really caught visitors off guard when Sundowner’s would kick in. Hands down though, my best “when I worked for” stories come from there.
April 28, 2014 — 11:12 PM
Rebecca Douglass says:
I’m looking awfully boring here. Most off-the-wall job I’ve held is as a bicycle messenger. And at that, I was more a weird person to have the job than it being a weird job–I did it while taking a break between my masters and PhD, so just a little more educated than most of my co-workers (though one of those was a med student).
April 28, 2014 — 11:20 PM
Rebecca Douglass says:
Oh, yeah–and I was old. At 25 when I started, I was 3rd oldest in the company, including the owners.
April 28, 2014 — 11:20 PM
Jen Donohue says:
I worked for the Cat Fancier’s Association, when they were still at the New Jersey location. I opened the mail, sorted the mail, sent out the mass mailing for the breed clubs for two or three years (I can’t remember), answered the phone calls the switchboard didn’t weed out, etc. etc.
A disappointing portion of the population want to name their cats Gizmo, Princess, or Snowball. A further portion do not know what kind of cat they have bought (“My registration form is wrong! It says Persian but I bought a Himalayan!” “Ma’am, a Himalayan is a color point Persian. All Himalayans are Persians. It’s like how all squares are rectangles.”).
April 28, 2014 — 11:25 PM
Coraline Cane says:
I have very fond memories of the mousetrap factory. Everyday, I and one other person, would prep about 35,000 mousetraps (yes, you correctly read that quantity). From our station the traps would head out to other parts of the factory to receive the rest of their parts. I always wondered where the daily 35,000 traps would go. It was quite a lot of dead mice.
April 28, 2014 — 11:29 PM
Jessa Slade says:
Phone psychic for $25/hr. I thought callers would have all sorts of bizarre questions, which I justified (does that make it worse or better?) would be great for my writing. But mostly people had the same questions: Is my boyfriend cheating? Should I move/take a new job? I’m lonely.
I know that last one isn’t a question, but that’s why they called.
April 28, 2014 — 11:36 PM
Jayne says:
I did that job, too! It got too sad for me. A guy called at 3 am because his wife’s car was parked in front of a neighbor’s house, who she insisted she was “just friends” with. I said “Oh, honey, do you really need me to lay out the cards?” We both agreed that parking the car right out front like that was a cry for divorce.
April 29, 2014 — 12:01 AM
Jessa Slade says:
I think sometimes the cards are just there to give me the little papercut that shocks me enough to listen to what I already know.
April 30, 2014 — 2:11 AM
David says:
In college (hi WACers!) while I was working at the school library I got recommended to help out with a psychology professor’s pet project. He had a camera designed to track rapid eye movements while it displayed some picture/video on screen. The driver software, unfortunately, did not work at all, and I was tasked to update the C++ code to something functional. Which I did, despite not knowing anything about C++ or, specifically, Windows’s weird bastardized version of C++.
That wasn’t the weird bit. The weird bit was this “job” involved working one hour per day/week in the lab, at the camera, until I got fed up and left – at which point another student was recommended and duly took over. I’m not sure the camera ever became operational – I was the fifth student to try his hand at the damn thing. Possibly the point was to keep the Comp Sci students from getting bored and owning the infrastructure.
April 28, 2014 — 11:41 PM
I'll leave this one anonymous says:
Professional dominatrix. Telephone operator in a brothel. BBQ operator at a local football club, as a vegetarian.
April 28, 2014 — 11:41 PM
Tonia says:
My first job ever was as a model. I was about seventeen at the time. It was fun, but not something I wanted to make a career out of. My mother did get told once that I could stand to lose some weight. I was 98 pounds at the time. I laughed it off and asked where I was supposed to lose it from. My mother thought that was a load of crap too.
My last job was a teacher’s assistant at a daycare. I had the lovely job of trying to herd two year olds. The kids were awesome, and I miss working with them. The worst part of that job though was the parents. We had one lady who swore her two year old was a perfect angel.
April 28, 2014 — 11:49 PM
Brian says:
So when I was a kid, my father had his own one-man landscape maintenance business in inland Southern California. These days, the area is almost all shitty subdivisions, but at the time, it was largely a dairy community, and a lot of the dairy owners prided themselves on growing ridiculously oversized lawns in the middle of what was essentially a desert, lawns that my dad earned his living by mowing. Every Saturday morning from the time I was in my early teens, I had to join my father to tackle one such yard. My first order every Saturday morning? Go shovel the afterbirth.
You see, the birthing barn was not far from the lawn, and the dogs who roamed the dairy freely would drag the spent placentas out onto the lawn for whatever fucked up reason dogs choose to do such things. I’d find maybe a dozen every week. Most of them weren’t bad. The older placentas had been desiccated by the desert sun, almost like beef jerky. And the fresh ones weren’t terribly bad either, to be honest. It was the middling ones that were the worst, the ones that had swollen up with whatever gases placentas emit as they decompose, the ones that would rupture and fall apart when you tried to prize them up from the lawn, releasing their choking miasma in a single burst.
Sometimes, I’d just leave those to lie in wait for my father to run over them with the lawnmower. Mean, maybe, but I was fourteen, and he was a bit of an asshole.
April 28, 2014 — 11:54 PM
Sarah Herlong says:
I worked at a funeral home as a body remover. I picked up and delivered dead bodies to funeral homes. we even did crime scenes. I created a comedy routine about it and did a career day presentation about the industry to middle schoolers. I was the rock star of career day. I even brought props.
April 28, 2014 — 11:54 PM
Laura Roberts says:
I’d have to say my weirdest jobs were a tie between Wet Playground Attendant (“wet” modifying “playground,” not attendant) and the 3 days I spent as a cam girl. You can read about the latter in my book, Naked Montreal. The scene in the bathtub actually happened.
April 29, 2014 — 12:01 AM
ewatchous says:
I worked for one day as a temp at what I guess you would call a turkey processing plant. My first of job of the day was to throw out frozen, rotten turkeys into a giant bin. They guy that assigned me the job told me I was not allowed to give any of the rotten turkeys out or take any home. I thought that was weird instruction but sure enough a handful of people wandered up and begged me to pitch rotten poultry over the fence to them.
I had one other interesting job but the people that ran the place made it horrible. I was a relay operator. People that were deaf or hard of hearing would call into our call center on these modem like devices called tty machines and place phone calls through us. I would read their part of the conversation to the hearing person that we called, and then type the responses back. Most calls were completely mundane, everyday life but I had everything from drug deals to doctors calling prescriptions and even had one call where a woman’s missing daughter’s body had just been found.
April 29, 2014 — 12:15 AM
njmagas says:
I once had a job that seemed to be as much about listening to the boss talk about his problems with his marriage and kids as it was about fulfilling the actual job description. At least as far as remaining employed went.
April 29, 2014 — 12:19 AM
Val Elkin Agnew says:
I was 17 and got hired at a mom and pop shop to make submarine sandwiches. The owners spoke a different language than me, and I couldn’t understand what I was supposed to do. When the lunch rush hour arrived, I got scared and hid in the supply room. I got fired when they found me.
April 29, 2014 — 12:20 AM
marylholden says:
Santa’s Helper but David Sedaris already wrote that truth.
April 29, 2014 — 12:26 AM
Silver James says:
I’ve had a lot of cool jobs–airport rescue firefighter, crime analyst, court marshal. But the weirdest job was when I was the bouncer for a discotheque/bar in the late 70’s. Ah, yes. Good times. And despite all the fights I broke up, the only time I ever got hit was by a bitch wearing green spangles and spandex who was out with her paramour when she discovered her husband was there with his mistress. The two bimbos went after each other and the men were smart enough to stay out of it. Gods but I hate cat fights. I sill have the scars from the claw marks left from the mistress. The wife? She slapped me. I cold-cocked her. Seemed fair at the time. 😉
April 29, 2014 — 1:11 AM
Sarrah Jones says:
Strangest job? Most definitely when I was a nanny in NYC for the over indulged 2 year old of two psychiatrists who encouraged bottle toss…”She’s listening to different sounds. ” And crayon consumption. ..”Her mouth is her laboratory and it only makes for colorful poop later. ” And all day cycling episodes of Teletubbies on every television on every floor in the house. We’re talking 6 floors people!
April 29, 2014 — 1:20 AM
Melva Bennett says:
I washed Jello. Really. The restaurant owner was tight with money and had the cooks save the leftover Jello desserts from the Rotary luncheons. We had to rinse off the whipped cream and throw it into a large container. The cooks melted and reset it in a decorative mold, for use as the centerpiece for the next day’s luncheon. No one was allowed to eat it. And the molded decoration was never the same color twice.
April 29, 2014 — 1:27 AM
fadedglories says:
I’ve worked in catering and thought I knew all the yukky stories, but not that one, It’s a winner.
April 29, 2014 — 3:14 AM
Jemima Pett says:
I’m relieved no one was allowed to eat it!
April 29, 2014 — 5:10 AM
Nicole Bross says:
Sniffing used cloth diapers. As part of my job working at a store that sold products for babies and new families, I had to assess the cloth diapers that came into our consignment section. Part of that assessment was a good whiff of the inside to check for detergent buildup, ammonia odour or other issues that would make them unfit for resale. Usually people washed the diapers before they brought them in though. Usually.
April 29, 2014 — 1:28 AM
Nicole Bross says:
I’m also a certified bra fitter. Have the certificate to prove it. It’s a strange world.
April 29, 2014 — 1:30 AM
Whimsy and Nonsense says:
Hilarious! Very crunchy.
April 29, 2014 — 2:07 AM
James L'Etoile says:
Well, I was locked in the gas chamber at San Quentin, once. Kinda creepy things there…
April 29, 2014 — 1:30 AM
Whimsy and Nonsense says:
Way back before we had caller I.D. I worked for a credit card company checking for fraud on credit applications. We had a service that gave us info like the people’s neighbors and their phone numbers. This was when the internet was new and you couldn’t look anybody up easily. We spent all day calling neighbors and pretending to be someone else to find out if they really lived there. It was fun and interesting to come with our back stories. The funny part is, people did not get suspicious. They would tell everything we asked and much more. Often enough, the addresses were fraudulent. They would be the address of a business or a kiosk in a mall. I only did that for about a month because it was just too weird and it paid horribly.
I worked at two jobs where crimes were committed. One was a jewelry store in a mall. The manager was embezzling money and got arrested right in front of all of us. The second was a bank. We had a takeover robbery just like in the movies. They came in with giant guns ablazing and made us all get on the floor. The incident was horrible, but one funny thing did happen. The teller next to me had gone out to get a big taco salad at Taco Bell. She walked in right in the middle of the robbery and the guy at the door with the biggest gun yelled “Get on the floor!” She slid across the floor in her high heel shoes and short skirt holding that Taco Bell salad out in front of her, and she actually saved the salad.
April 29, 2014 — 2:04 AM
fadedglories says:
Funny the things people worry about in dangerous situations. Great writing material though.
April 29, 2014 — 3:13 AM
angelacavanaugh says:
One cool job I had for a while was catering for celebrities. I had to get up at 3am, but it was fun. I made omelets for Tom Arnold (he was sleepy), for Liam McIntyer who said they were “brilliant”, Dominic Monaghan (who seemed real nice, but I’m pretty sure he called me fat behind my back. To be fair, at that point I was, but come on), Chad Michael Murrray and Katie Sackhoff didn’t eat my eggs, but they were super nice and chatty. They were both doing a green coffee bean extract thing then. There were more people, but I can’t think of who right now. It was a fun job, but it depended on me being able to transport stuff in a big car. Wasn’t enough work, had to trade in the car, so then there was no work.
I worked as a Life Insurance Sales person. I had to talk my way into homes in Compton and Commerce, and Inglewood (that was our main territory) and randomly start telling them that some day they’ll die and they should buy the insurance. It was an awful job.
I worked for the government once. All the caseworkers I worked with (dept of family services) would watch TV and nap while on the clock. They wore sweat pants, and I took two hour lunches, and no one cared.
I was a therapist for an Autistic teenager once. It was basically just hanging out with her, taking her to the arcade and petstore and watching movies.
I was a photographer. Had a groupon out and everything.
Sometimes I do extra work. I was even on the show The Dr’s once. And on Let’s Make a Deal.
But most the time it’s boring stuff. Spent some years in an office (no thanks!) and now I work in the exciting field of waitressing.
April 29, 2014 — 2:44 AM
fadedglories says:
Weirdest unpaid, making life-size drawings of Bronze Age weapons and jewellery. I did about 12000 of them, had to travel to see them and spent weeks in museum basements. They were published, but I got no credit.
Weirdest paid,probably armed forces; observing and recording artillery shells exploding on Live firing range.
April 29, 2014 — 3:06 AM
fadedglories says:
That should read 1200 weapons etc, it felt like millions.
April 29, 2014 — 3:07 AM
Katherine Hetzel says:
Pickling eggs. (Pickled eggs are a delicacy(!) in fish’n’chip shops in the UK)
At the tender age of 18, while waiting for my A level results to come through, I spent two weeks in an egg-pickling factory. My job involved making up forty litres of white or brown vinegar in a bath tub (literally), counting 20 hard-boiled eggs into each glass jar, topping up with vinegar of the right colour and screwing on the lids. You had to check every egg before you added it, because if the yolk was too close to the surface the vinegar ate through the white, exploded the yolk and made the whole bottle cloudy.
I still cannot bear salt’n’vinegar crisps to this day… and I decided to retake my flunked exams rather than carry on working there.
April 29, 2014 — 3:21 AM
fadedglories says:
Did they pickle walnuts too? I haven’t eaten a pickled egg in years, they were great snacks when out on a pub crawl.
April 29, 2014 — 3:29 AM
Katherine Hetzel says:
Nope – just the eggs… Can you imagine the RSI you’d get if you had to crack walnuts too?! Was bad enough tightening the lids – my right wrist is still weak 25 years later…
April 29, 2014 — 3:39 AM
georgiavailerwin says:
I haven’t had the strangest jobs, just a lot of them! Forty and counting. I’m 28, but I started working when I was ten, for my dad at his shave ice stand and for my step mom as a balloon artist. Sugar overdose and lotsa latex.
April 29, 2014 — 3:45 AM
Wendy Christopher says:
While I was a college student I had a side job working in a nightclub – and did almost every job going at one point or another; barperson, cloakroom attendant, glass collector, collecting entry money – I even ran the little snack bar in there for while before I left. Oh wow, the stories I could tell..! Weirdest job I ever did there was definitely when I was a bouncer for about ten minutes while the real one went off to ‘take care of some business’ (I didn’t ask.) Weird because I was a nineteen-year-old girl of five foot two inches – probably the least scary-looking bouncer in the history of that place. To add to that effect, the guy lent me his trenchcoat to wear while he was gone (he was guarding the main door and it was a cold night.) He was six foot four, so with the bottom of the coat draped all over the floor and no visible arms I looked like I’d shrunk in the wash. Luckily for me (and the club!) no-one caused any trouble in those ten minutes.
Around the same time I also took another job as an after-hours cleaner in the Unemployment Benefits Office, which I held down for the grand total of… five days before being ‘let go.’ I was officially the Worst Cleaner Ever. Day One: left the building by the wrong door at the end of my shift, thereby setting off all the alarms and causing a massive security scare that I was completely oblivious to until I showed up for work the following evening (I’m hearing impaired, so I didn’t hear the alarms going off.) Day three: blew up a vacuum cleaner (tried to yank it free when it got caught behind a desk leg, the thing crashed into the desk in front, there was a massive blue flash, a lot of smoke and then a very dead vacuum cleaner.) And day five, my final day: spilled an entire bucket of water over some middle-manager’s desk – including all his files and important paperwork. At which point the company decided they could probably manage without me…
April 29, 2014 — 4:45 AM
decayingorbits says:
My weirdest job was also my first job. I was 16 and worked on a turkey ranch in the central valley of California. My main job was to walk through the breeding houses and bird pens and collect the corpses of the dead turkeys and throw them in the “dead hole.” Believe it or not, lots of turkeys died each day for one reason or another. If they had a crooked neck, that meant they had Newcastle disease and we had to kill them on sight so it wouldn’t spread.
The dead hole was a pit covered with a heavy concrete lid (it took two of us to lift it) and we tossed the dead turkeys into it. You could never see the bottom and I have no idea how deep it was — but I did know that if you fell in, at some point you’d land on a pile of rotting, maggoty turkey corpses.
I was paid minimum wage. It was awesome.
April 29, 2014 — 4:50 AM
NiTessine says:
My first encounter with gainful employment was at an architect’s office, where I was an office assistant. In practice, in addition to pushing a lot of paper around, this meant that every morning, my first job was to go down to the basement, check the mousetraps, remove any dead rodents, and reset them.
So yeah, I was basically a rat catcher. Unfortunately, I was not given a small but vicious dog.
April 29, 2014 — 4:54 AM
Ryan Viergutz says:
I worked as a janitor for a parking ramp recently. People throw away some strange objects. Besides that I found a dead mouse, a syringe and an honest-to-Cripes CAR TIRE.
I think this current position as a set-up and take-down person for a hotel could potentially become quite weird.
April 29, 2014 — 5:01 AM
Jemima Pett says:
Straight after college I was thinking about becoming a probation officer. I was too young to go into the training so I got a volunteer job at a juvenile offenders unit, arranging community projects for the inmates. Only trouble was, being the only female under 50 was a bit of a strain. The most terrifying occasion was when I had to escort two ‘boys’ (one was the same age as me and a Hells Angel, the other a sex offender) back across the yard to the psychiatric wing. Both were ‘in love’ with me, and they spent the entire 300 yard walk trying to make sure the other one didn’t get too close to me.
April 29, 2014 — 5:19 AM
M T McGuire says:
I did stand up for a while. I was really shit at it although I got quite a few laughs.
Otherwise, none of my jobs were so weird but I did meet some interesting people.
Fresh out of college, I was the MD’s PA and office gofer in a sponsorship agency. One of my jobs was to answer the phone – or at least, try to answer it more often than anyone else; it rang a lot. My brother made a prank call to me. A few minutes later the leader of the Labour Party (who were in Opposition at the time) rang up (for those outside the UK that ‘s the person who would be prime minister if the other party was in power so, a fairly important dude). This bloke, Neil Kinnock, had a very distinctive Welsh accent. So after I answered the phone with the prescribed company greeting the call went like this:
Neil Kinnock: “Hello can I speak to X please?”
Me: “Yeh, yeh. Hello Giles.”
Neil Kinnock – sounding a little bemused – “No, sorry, I’m not Giles I really am Neil Kinnock.”
“No you’re not. Nice one Giles. Now piss off. I’m busy.”
M T stops her arm with the phone a few millimetres above the cradle as she realises her brother wouldn’t actually know the name of the employee Mr Kinnock is asking for and that the employee’s husband is chauffering members of the Labour party around the country during an election campaign. Slowly she puts the phone back against her ear. Mr K stays on the line, clearly he is used to this.
“Er… hello, are you still there?”
“Yes.”
“Ah… You really are Neil Kinnock, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Right. Sorry about that. My brother’s been making prank calls to me all morning. OK, I’ll put you through.”
I also washed dishes with John Lennon’s half brother, rang Dirk Bogarde by mistake and insisted he was my friend Kirsty’s Dad until he hung up on me and generally made a monumental tit of myself in front of many members of the political and artistic elite of early 1990s London. I’d like to think I’m smarter than that now but actually, I just have a different job.
Cheers
MTM
April 29, 2014 — 5:23 AM
Jemima Pett says:
ROFL!! Well done for handling it like that. I always thought Neil Kinnock was too nice to be a PM – that sort of shows it.
Makes me feel better about the times I’ve made a complete a”” of myself in public, though!
May 1, 2014 — 3:27 PM
M T McGuire says:
Mwahahahahrgh! Trust me, I’ve elevated it to a fine art!
Cheers
MTM
May 1, 2014 — 3:48 PM
Fran Smith says:
I taught English to migrant workers in a vegetable packing factory. I liked my students and the work, but I did smell of leeks a lot of the time.
April 29, 2014 — 5:47 AM
deanmcsmith says:
Librarian (specialist corrections officer) in a prison that has both a male and female facilities.
April 29, 2014 — 6:26 AM
Pat says:
Weirdest AND nastiest: doing laundry (while in college) for a convalescent home BEFORE there were disposable diapers. They were cloth. Lasted about 2 weeks…
April 29, 2014 — 7:06 AM
Matthew Wright says:
One time in 1983 I walked into the local Forest Service office, looking for work. ‘Can you drive a bulldozer and rip out tree stumps?’ the senior forester asked. ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Actually, we want a historian’. I was that historian – and so began my first writing job. Yah – I got paid to write books, on salary. For a while anyway.
On the way to that point I delivered and helped install TV sets, got paid to act, picked fruit, drove a tractor to rip up potatoes (not trees!), loaded reefer-body trucks and worked in a bank where the first job I had to do was help count $400,000 in tens. Worse than it sounds, the stuff was soaked with human sweat, grime and bacteria, and stank.
April 29, 2014 — 7:10 AM
tssharp says:
I used to work as a video games tester. I tested video games by playing them for circa 40 hours a week. Anything from sports games, to FPS games, to driving games. One hellish stint involved me and about 20 other guys (almost all male I think) playing Pop Idol: The Game (Simon Cowell on the front cover) – where we had to listen to the same 25 or so god-awful pop songs playing over and over and over again, intercut with the gamer having to try out new ‘outfits’ for the contestants. I am forever broken after that part of the job.
Imagine taking your favourite hobby, then being forced to do it for 40hrs a week, in an open plan office with a bunch of unkempt gamer nerds (just like myself), interspersed with a load of excel data entry. That was me for a year or so. Fun and hell at the same time.
April 29, 2014 — 7:49 AM
Lyra Marlowe says:
I worked at a mothballed arsenal, taking apart Vietnam-era ordnance. It was sort of like bomb disposal on an assembly line. Remove the trigger, load the shell onto a machine that spins the brass band off, load it in what looked like a giant baby bottle sterilizer to melt out the TNG or TNT, then another that burns out any remaining explosive, pack up all the separate parts an sell them for scrap. It was terrifying the first few days, and then it just got to be pretty routine, like any other repetitive job.
April 29, 2014 — 7:54 AM
Zac Dozier says:
I spent a summer in high school dressing up as Duke the dragon at Dutch Wonderland. Google it; I wore a big purple, Barney-looking suit. Ugh. I wasn’t allowed to speak while in the costume, except for one time some teenagers were being, “teenagers”, and I let fly a Wendig-esque, foul-mouthed fury.
April 29, 2014 — 8:09 AM
Alecia Miller says:
I got flashed at my first job. It was in a key-copying booth in the middle of a mall parking lot. People could just drive up to get their keys made. It was a perfect opportunity for the creeps to drive up with no pants on.
I also worked in a maternity store in downtown Philly that was frequented not only by pregnant women, but also by cross dressers. We had to buzz people into the store and my boss didn’t want me to let them in, but I always did. They were great fun as customers and always bought something.
April 29, 2014 — 8:29 AM
MakeLifeMemorable says:
Repped for guitar hero and got paid to play the game on a 60″ plasma all day in a store
April 29, 2014 — 8:31 AM
jonathan Zero says:
I have two:
In high school I worked at the local paper. I was the one who inserted the advertisements into the center section of the newspapers. Thanks goodness it was a twice weekly paper.
In college I worked in a seat-belt factory painting the rolling carts that held the spools for thread that were used to make the seat-belts. It was so loud in the building I could sing at the top of my voice while working and no one could hear me.
April 29, 2014 — 8:34 AM
mznetta says:
I spent one summer as a dancing hamburger for Red Barn. I scared more little children than the boogey-man. I also worked for a urologist as a medical assistant for five years–we performed minor surgeries in the office like vasectomies. Our biggest pool of clientele were prison guards from the local prison.and the best part of the job was saying things like, “WHOOPSIES,” or “You didn’t need that anyway.” Heh. One guard told me they had a picture of me posted in the break room labeled “Nurse Ratchet”.
I know way more about the prostate and associated accouterments than any woman has a right to know.
I also worked and lived in a hotel for three years on the edge of East St. Louis. WOW. Found a dead body in a locked room; fought with the Insane Clown Posse; put out a fire in one of the industrial dryers; dealt with strippers, crack hos, and pimp daddies. Lots of stories.
Fun times.
April 29, 2014 — 8:35 AM
fadedglories says:
LOVE it. Especially the dancing burger
April 29, 2014 — 9:57 AM
mznetta says:
At least I wasn’t a dancing hot dog. 😀
April 29, 2014 — 10:42 AM