Whats the most wacky or crazy job you have held?

[someday soon]

In high school I opened a makeshift recording studio in half of my mom's garage -- yes, there were egg cartons on all the walls -- and charged local SoCal bands $7/hr to create song demos. Had a great time working with some super-talented folks -- and then there were the others, too ( "I need to scream into the microphone for this song...can you turn out the lights please?" )

After college I read gas & electric meters for the utility company around here. Keeping the monthly billing cycles on schedule was critical, so the company sized all daily routes ( about 250 houses/yards per day ) for completion even in adverse weather conditions. Translation: on the 95% of days with good weather, you were paid for 8 hours of work that you could finish in about 4-5 hours -- woohoo!
On one memorable day, it was about noontime when my route coincidentally took me to the house where a friend of mine was prepping his boat for a weekday water-skiing jaunt. I stopped my route, joined him for a few hours of skiing, then -- you guessed it -- returned to where I left off and completed my route that afternoon.
On the flip side, there were bads days for sure: trudging thru buckets of rain and snow for hours, homeowners greeting me with their guns drawn ( twice ) ...and then there were those dang dog bites...

Last but not least: the part-time job in my 20s where I cleaned up the audio recordings of self-help seminars.
I would listen carefully to the ( reel-to-reel ) tape, and stop when a distracting click, pop, slurp, etc would come out of the speaker's mouth between words or phrases.
After slicing out the unwanted sound with a razor blade -- about 2-3 inches of tape -- I would splice the tape back together and proceed to hunt for the next audio glitch...and on and on.

Thanks for reading -- been fun to hear about the offbeat jobs nobody ever knew existed.

 

[Lienlord]

Summer job in high school working for a state park. Usually mowing, pick up trash, etc.
Pretty good job working outdoors. Toward the end of the summer, a guy quit who was helper running the "Honey Wagon". I was selected to replace him. I discovered the "Honey Wagon" is a tank truck that sucks out the contents of the portable toilets scattered around the park! There's a large suction hose that gets shoved down into the hole; works great unless some idiot threw their underwear or swimsuit into the toilet, then it gets clogged and must be unclogged. At the end of the day, the tank gets emptied into a large sewage lagoon! It was about 105 degrees that day, and I saw/heard/smelled things I still can't forget! Since the summer was almost over, I told them that was going to be my last day! Great motivation to finish college!!

 

[Keim]

We called ours a flumper (flusher/pumper).
After the boss made us mad we changed that to The Conroy.

Summer job in high school working for a state park. Usually mowing, pick up trash, etc.
Pretty good job working outdoors. Toward the end of the summer, a guy quit who was helper running the "Honey Wagon". I was selected to replace him. I discovered the "Honey Wagon" is a tank truck that sucks out the contents of the portable toilets scattered around the park! There's a large suction hose that gets shoved down into the hole; works great unless some idiot threw their underwear or swimsuit into the toilet, then it gets clogged and must be unclogged. At the end of the day, the tank gets emptied into a large sewage lagoon! It was about 105 degrees that day, and I saw/heard/smelled things I still can't forget! Since the summer was almost over, I told them that was going to be my last day! Great motivation to finish college!!

 

[EllisWyatt]

Summer job as a herring fisherman on the Hood Canal, WA. Not much fun.
Summer job where I was paid to climb cliffs in Utah and describe th rocks. A lot of fun..until the company went bankrupt while I was out in the field. Learned the art of negotiation when they told me weren't going to give me my pay for the previous two weeks or my expenses.
I explained that I still had the keys to their truck and in exchange for the money they owed me (cash) I would give the the keys and tell them where the truck was parked.
The exchange went off without a hitch.
Several years later I was on a field trip and ended up sitting next to my old boss. I'd like to say we laughed about it.....but we didn't.

 

[statsman]

Worked a semester for a sorority at my university in the late 1970s cleaning dishes during/after the dinner hours. I was treated to a lot of interesting dinner-time conversations.

During one Winter break (about 6 weeks) around 1979-80, I worked 10-12 hours each Saturday at HP's financial department in the Bay Area (California) hand processing written time cards for paychecks. By this time, I had taken several programming and computer courses, and I found it amusing that a large corporation such as HP, at least for the area we dealt with, were still doing timecards by hand.

 

[harllee]

Worked a semester for a sorority at my university in the late 1970s cleaning dishes during/after the dinner hours. I was treated to a lot of interesting dinner-time conversations.

Hey that's how I met my husband! He was the busboy at my sorority house and that is where we met--he says it was his greatest job ever! He did not get paid in cash--his pay was all the food he could eat and all the dates he could handle --he loved it!

 

[travelover]

............
I explained that I still had the keys to their truck and in exchange for the money they owed me (cash) I would give the the keys and tell them where the truck was parked..........

This is great.

 

[Sunset]

Hey that's how I met my husband! He was the busboy at my sorority house and that is where we met--he says it was his greatest job ever! He did not get paid in cash--his pay was all the food he could eat and all the dates he could handle --he loved it!

Did he keep working there after you met him

 

[harllee]

Did he keep working there after you met him

Oh yes he kept working there--he said the food was too good to quit!

 

[Mr._Graybeard]

Learned the art of negotiation when they told me weren't going to give me my pay for the previous two weeks or my expenses.
I explained that I still had the keys to their truck and in exchange for the money they owed me (cash) I would give the the keys and tell them where the truck was parked.
The exchange went off without a hitch.
Several years later I was on a field trip and ended up sitting next to my old boss. I'd like to say we laughed about it.....but we didn't.

I worked for a guy like that once. Rules of decency were irrelevant unless they were of benefit to him.

Notably, my guy also had zero sense of humor.

 

[popntx]

When I was in college in the mid 70's I worked summers at a marina at a resort on Lake Travis outside of Austin. We rented boats that people could take out on their own, but the ski boats we rented required a driver, and I was lucky enough to be a driver.

People would travel from all over the country to the resort, and often those renting the boat would want to be taken to a place called Hippie Hollow, which was packed on weekends with nude swimmers/sun bathers. They'd want me to drive as close to the shore as possible to gawk at the nudists.

I'll never forgot the time I took two couples out skiing. They were old hippies, probably in their 30's which was old to me at the time. Once we got out on the lake they all took their clothes off and skied naked. I have to admit it was hard for me to keep my eyes looking forward instead of behind me as I pulled them!

 

[socca]

When I was a teenager, my Dad got me a summer job driving a tractor on one of the family farms in North Dakota. Up-and-back, up-and-back, all day long under a BIG blue sky while a radio station in Saskatchewan repeatedly played Christopher Cross's hit single "Sailing." Even 40+ years later, I can't hear that song without thinking of that tractor.

BTW: whenever I hear a teenager claiming that they want to get a job "working with their hands" after high school rather than go to college, I think of that North Dakota farmer. Shaking hands with that guy was like shaking hands with a baseball mitt - even his calluses had calluses. Do we still make Americans like that?

 

[NateW]

All my jobs were mundane, but I did have an interview for what I classify as an odd or whacky job. In the 1990s I interviewed with the National Bureau of Standards in Gaithersburg, MD for the position of nuclear reactor test engineer. Position was to set up and run experiments on the Bureau's small nuclear reactor for visiting scientists, per the scientist's needs. It required wearing a film badge to measure radiation exposure. I remember following the interview worrying quite a bit that I WOULD get the job and radiation exposure. Even though I did not get the job, I sure got a personal and excellent tour of the facility.

 

[JoeWras]

Shaking hands with that guy was like shaking hands with a baseball mitt - even his calluses had calluses. Do we still make Americans like that?

Not sure. We stopped shaking hands recently.

 

[Red Badger]

Not wacky, but grueling. Summer job after high school. Feed ballast (gravel) for the rail tamper. In other words, shovel rock eight hours a day. Some guys left at the end of the first day, others at the end of the week. Pay was great and when I arrived at Fort Dix that fall for basic training, pushups were nuttin'.

 

[MRG]

I was probably the source for some stories about the crazy foreman who didn't care. In the early 80s I was running a log yard for a walnut sawmill buying logs and double checking the field buyers logs. We also had a couple of two man teams who checked the logs with a metal detectors(walnut is frequently harvested around fence lines and old yards) so they wouldn't cause someone to die when the head saw shredded.

They had just hired 6 new guys and tbe superintendent gave me two of them. It was cold outside and these guys were in street clothes. By noon all six had been given to me and they all took off unannounced! Just ran away, guess they were cold. Superintendent and I chatted with the guy who hired them and explained they might need warm clothes. Guy said if he did that noone would take the job.

 

[nobody]

They had just hired 6 new guys and tbe superintendent gave me two of them. It was cold outside and these guys were in street clothes. By noon all six had been given to me and they all took off unannounced! Just ran away, guess they were cold. Superintendent and I chatted with the guy who hired them and explained they might need warm clothes. Guy said if he did that noone would take the job.

MRG might be a bit off topic but built a night stand in high school wood shop out of walnut right on the top of it has a bullet in-bedded in it. Came that way from the lumber yard. I think its really cool.

 

[MichealKnight]

I was a male stripper

At 240 pounds I have more impressive breasts than the female customers.

My niche was that they'd pay me dollar bills for each article of clothing I put back on.

Was a goldmine. I'm an entrepreneur.