Whats the most wacky or crazy job you have held?

[cbo111]

Spending some of this extra semi-solitary time can make the mind drift in some strange directions. For some reason this morning I found myself pondering the many jobs I have held since delivering newspapers on my stingray back in the early 60's. My first official job that generated a W-2 was probably the most odd. It was a seasonal summer job working for the county agriculture department. Each day I would arrive with my sack lunch and canteen (no bottles back then). One of the workers would drive me out to a pre-coordinated farm/ranch location, hand me wooden spoon and a big bucket of orange-colored squirrel poison. At this point I was on my own for the next 8 hours in the blistering sun, flicking poison grain in every squirrel hole in sight. It was for erosion control, or so I was told. I honestly never saw too many actual rodents, aside from that skunk I nearly stepped on. Then, along about the time I was on the verge of passing out, a white vehicle pulled up and haul me back to the office. A couple of my fellow workers were long-time county ag veterans and taught me a couple things about working for the man. One important lesson was that it was possible to add fun and adventure to even the most mundane jobs. One of these guys that drove me around would routinely transit the canal bank dirt roads at speeds over 100mph, explaining calmly that this was an approved short cut back to the office. For a 16.5 year old kid, I can report, it was more that a little exciting. Another guy would stop at various peach, plum, apricot orchards. With his official vehicle yellow light flashing, we would step out and fill several grocery bags with very nice fruit "for the purpose of inspection". Then it was divvied out at the end of shift. Not sure what the "inspection" involved. Great memories.
What was your craziest job, and what did it teach you?

 

[Beststash]

In the summer of '68, fresh out of HS age 18, I enrolled in college with the hopes of avoiding the draft. Only $200 to my name and a Chevelle SS 396. Fast car!! I found a room at a "boarding house" where they furnished a room, breakfast, even a sack lunch - we had a common bathroom that 4 of us shared. All college students.

I needed to find a job so I went job hunting. On my first day I got a job at a chicken processing plant shoveling ice in this big ice cooler to keep it from piling up. Almost froze to death so I went to the Boss and asked if he had anything else available. He asked if I could drive a truck - sure, no problem. No commercial DL needed back then so I got the job taking a big box bed truck to the cold storage facility which was in the middle of town. I had never driven a two speed axle or big truck for that matter but did OK until one day the dock was so crowded that I was fearful of backing the truck up so close to the other trucks (only a couple of feet on each side) so I parked and went to the dock mgr and told him my situation and that aI really needed the job. He laughed and got someone to back the truck for me. The job lasted the summer until fall semester which by then I had a girl friend, a job at the University Hospital, and a better place to stay.

I look back on those days and smile - good times and much innocence!!

Peace and Love!

 

[Nemo2]

Close to 60 years ago, just outside Adelaide, South Australia, I skinned kangaroos for pet food for half a day.

A few years later I traveled for a short while with a guy, basically a remittance man, whose family sent him a stipend not to come home.....pre computerization/automation he got a job in a factory....they sat him in front of a dial with a central needle and said if the needle goes to the left turn the dial to get it back to the middle....same, same, if it went to the right.

He wasn't able to read or take his eyes off it.....lasted a week and said that the damn needle didn't move once.

 

[aja8888]

1. Assistant with a business owner that artificially inseminated cows.

2. Garbage truck "loader" (hand dump the garbage cans into the truck).

3. Tobacco leaf picker.

All of the above before the age of 20. The military saved me at age 20!

 

[MRG]

I logged. I was all of 16 when I started. It was awesome; chain saws, dozers and loaders to operate and log trucks to drive. We even had a sawmill. This was insane!

I skidded trees out of the woods to a landing where we loaded them on trucks to take to the mill. The guy who cut the timber down was Crazy Barry, an old guy over 30. Barry was smart and loved entertaining himself. He should have helped me attach the logs to the dozer but he didn't. Instead he would work ahead of me making the landscape into a war zone of tree tops. He would eventually kick back, roll a big phatty and get stoned, never asking me to join! A game he loved to play, while stoned, was waiting until I was coming by with a drag of logs and fell a tree so it would hit the ground next to me just as I passed at a half mile an hour. Eventually we quit logging and just ran a sawmill, it was safer.

We set a mill up back in 600 acres of timber and were running there. The trees were delivered by dozers as they were cut. We were back a couple of miles with nothing around us. No roads 4x4 only. My buddy was working with us, we were both in our senior year of high school. That day my buddy was trying to adjust the belts that powered the mill, with it running! A stupid decision from a 17 year old kid. Nobody stopped him.

All of a sudden I saw a big blue puff above him, he stumbled, as he turned around his jeans had disappeared; they were the big blue puff!! He was standing there in his tidy whities and nothing else. Had his jeans not ripped off the cloud would have been red.

It was a very somber moment when my DB cut the diesel off and we stood in complete silence. My buddy almost was ground to burger over a careless action. If you blinked for a second you would have missed the entire event. One guy, Curt, saw it and remarked "say, you just lost your pants in front of the wrong guys". My buddy was the smart one and never came back. It would be almost a decade before I got smart.

 

[KCGeezer]

“On my very first job I said thank-you and please
They made me scrub a parking lot down on my knees
Then I got fired for being scared of bees
And they only give me fifty cents an hour”

Couldn’t resist inserting a little John Prine.

 

[38Chevy454]

In college freshman year, got a job vacuuming in the dorms. 2 hours per day Monday through Friday. Best part was I could get my areas done in 1 hour, leaving 1 hour to meet and talk with the girls in the dorm. Hours were flexible to work around classes. Besides the pay being minimum wage, it was 10 hours per week pay and only 5 hours really working; with 5 hours paid flirting time.
After that job, I started working in auto parts store and 25 hours per week. Better pay and needed as self supporting student.

 

[njhowie]

While a grad student I had a part-time job working at a 30-unit motel maybe 15 or 20 miles away from the school. It was pretty sleazy, but I really liked the manager - he was a really good businessman and had bought the place looking to upgrade, clean it up, and resell. Many times I'd be there running the place myself, checking folks in/out, doing/folding the laundry. It was a good job, because most of the time I'd be in the office without anything to do and could just study.

This was in the mid-80s and there was no cable TV in every room as is standard today...just standard TV, and ... we had individual pay-per-view ... we had a collection of about 50 movies and a couple of VCRs in the office which we could direct in to any of the rooms.

Additional benefit - if we were full and I re-rented any of the rooms the same night, I'd get to keep the money...this meant that I was also responsible for cleaning up the room after the earlier visitors left.

 

[jfn111]

When I was 16 I worked as a mechanics assistant for a ready mix concrete company. One of my jobs was to climb inside the drum of the cement trucks and use an air chisel to remove any dried cement. This was done with no dust mask or ear protection. I decided that making deliveries for the local drug store was better for my health and left the concrete company.

 

[MissMolly]

When I was 15 I was hired by a gas station to give away their free glassware when people got a fill-up. Remember when gas stations used to do that? My uniform was a short little blue Scooter-skirt and white blouse. After the attendant finished the fill-up (back before self-serve gas stations) I would trot out with the little box of 4 free glasses.

 

[Markola]

I scooped up floating golf balls on a country club’s driving range that was a lake. My title was Driving Range Attendant, because they would have had a harder time hiring for Driving Range Target.

 

[Tom52]

Don't know if I would call it whacky or crazy but at 16 I had a part time job turning leather gloves inside/out. That was when I worked in a glove factory.

Definitely the worst job I ever had was after high school working in a gray iron foundry. Imagine a day where the temperature is 95 degrees with high humidity. You are standing over a ladle of molten iron at 2500 degrees, pouring the metal into sand molds. The blast of heat coming off that molten iron is unbelievable. No face shields or reflective protective gear in those days, just your jeans and tee shirt. Just gloves and safety glasses. Lots of excitement when someone splashed the molten iron on the floor. No fun when some molten iron ran inside your boot. They had a thermometer on the pouring deck, and by mid afternoon in the summer it was 125+ away from the pouring ladles.

That job was like hell on earth and was my motivation to get an college education so I would never have to take a job like that to support myself.

 

[njhowie]

Definitely the worst job I ever had was after high school working in a gray iron foundry. Imagine a day where the temperature is 95 degrees with high humidity. You are standing over a ladle of molten iron at 2500 degrees, pouring the metal into sand molds. The blast of heat coming off that molten iron is unbelievable. No face shields or reflective protective gear in those days, just your jeans and tee shirt. Just gloves and safety glasses. Lots of excitement when someone splashed the molten iron on the floor. No fun when some molten iron ran inside your boot. They had a thermometer on the pouring deck, and by mid afternoon in the summer it was 125+ away from the pouring ladles.

One summer I worked the graveyard shift at an injection molding factory. Not the temps you're talking about, but I can certainly relate.

 

[travelover]

.............Definitely the worst job I ever had was after high school working in a gray iron foundry............

My weirdest and worst job was working in a zinc die casting factory after high school. There were huge vats of molten zinc attached to a casting machine that would take in some liquid zinc, compress it and then force it into a mold. If the two halves of the mold did not seal properly, it sprayed molten zinc all over the place and the long time employees were all scarred. I pointed out to the boss that guards could easily be put in place to prevent this and he replied that it would increase the time it took to service the machines.

The casting dies were cooled with water and due to numerous leaks, the floor always had at least a half inch of water on it. The zinc bars were stored on the floor and part of my job was to feed in more bars as the molten zinc was consumed. What they never told the new guy was that putting a wet bar into the molten zinc caused the water to instantly turn to steam and throw gobs of molten zinc out of the vat. You only made that mistake once.

After the zinc was cast, huge hydraulic presses were used to trim off any extra "flash". This required reaching into the press and adding and removing the castings. To prevent an accident, there were two buttons to push simultaneously to close the trimming die. One day one of the buttons broke, so they just wired it on and told me to continue with the single button. That was my last day.

 

[harllee]

My DH had a job one time playing the trumpet for the Ringling and Barnum and Bailey circus. He says he loved it but quit to go to college.

 

[RunningBum]

Carnival worker. Well, for just a couple of days when I was a young teen, helping set up some of the rides. It was actually better supervised and inspected than you might think, though I'm not sure it was legal to hire a couple of 14 year olds. I quickly learned to keep my fingers clear. The only accident I remember is when one guy accidentally walked another one off a platform when they were carrying something heavy. No injury. I caught the look the head guy gave the other, who shrugged an apology.

 

[braumeister]

Not especially crazy, but one of the more interesting jobs I had back then was a summer job in college with the phone company. Did a small number of installs, but most of the work was collecting phones for recycling when someone moved or just didn't pay their phone bill (the actual landline phone "instruments" were rented back then).

Some of the collections were interesting, mainly due to the difficulty of getting access to the premises to unhook the phone, but those are different stories.

The memorable ones involved being up on a pole to disconnect a circuit and noticing an extra cable going to a house that had obviously not been installed properly. Plugging my headset into the circuit let me hear a stream of chatter that indicated an illegal bookmaking operation where the culprits were too cheap to pay for a legal phone line. That happened to me three times that summer. I told my supervisor when I got back to the garage but I don't know if anything was ever done about it.

 

[Sunset]

My weirdest job was when 17, a gov't program would send us kids to Northern Ontario to cut trails in the bush, pick up camper's garbage bags and take them to the dump, and to trim branches off tree stands so they would grow into more expensive wood.

For that lovely work I got a bed in a bunkhouse, 3 meals a day, and $5 per day.

One day my foreman took me to the dump, and told me to pick out all the beer bottles and put them in a shed. He didn't say it, but it seemed to me he had figured out a way to make money off my cheap labor.
This is the same dump that the bears would come to forage in at night.

I did it for about an hour, but honestly it was boring and it became more fun to throw the beer bottles against a rock.
After smashing many bottles, I was so bored I walked to the road and sat on the gate. So there I am sitting on the gate when a work pickup truck drives by, and screeched to a stop. Of course I feel panicky as I'm thinking I'm not picking out the beer bottles.

Turned out it was my foreman's boss, and he asks me why I'm sitting there. So I told him I was tired of picking out beer bottles as I was pretty pissed at the foreman. Well I got a drive back to camp, and never had to pick beer bottles again.

 

[Mr._Graybeard]

Night aide on a mental ward.

 

[REWahoo]

Moderator on an early retirement forum.

 

[MichaelB]

Moderator on an early retirement forum.

Is that crazy jobs or jobs that drive you crazy?

 

[harllee]

Moderator on an early retirement forum.

Is that the same as a night aide on a mental ward?

 

[REWahoo]

Is that crazy jobs or jobs that drive you crazy?

Sorry, I'm not good with "chicken or the egg" questions.

 

[REWahoo]

Is that the same as a night aide on a mental ward?

No, the pay is far worse.

 

[CardsFan]

Moderator on an early retirement forum.

You win.