Name It. The Most Fun, Weird Job You Have Held?

[The Big D]

Dough slinger!

Summer job working at Morton's Frozen Food plant in Crozet, VA, in 1968.

Primary job was mixing dough for the pot pie line. Grab three (3) 100# sacks of flour from a pallet, lift the bags to a big mixing bowl, add pre-packaged salt, water, and what have you to the bowl, then start the mixer. Once done, move the dough to a conveyor belt.

Easy, you think? Hardly.

We made something like 50000 pot pies/shift and conveyor only stopped for problems...mainly mine when I first started. Literally could not keep up. Lifting the 100# bags was rather easy when the pallet was high...like waist level. Now try bending to the floor and lifting, turning, slitting the bag with a knife, and dumping. Kinda all in one motion. Oh, once the dough was ready, you scoop as much as you can with your bare hands and hoist 30-40 pounds head high onto a conveyor feeding the main line.

I brought production to a halt many times in my first week or so. But I was soon in the best shape of my life and did my job easily. Though it surely was not easy. Reckon that's why the newbie got the assignment.

Be safe.

 

[chief38]

When I was a teenager I spent 3 summers as a Lifeguard on the Beach. Girls - girls - girls. Those were the days when I could wear a Speedo!

 

[Onomea]

Not the most fun, but maybe the weirdest: Making cooler pads in Tucson. Wet straw, cheese cloth, and a staple gun. 15 cents a pad. My right hand was a mess that first week. Switched to a day laborer gig in search of easier pickings.

Most fun: I'm with the chief. Lifeguard, hands down.

 

[pawngal]

Pilgrims post reminded me of another fun gig.
Late 60's had pipeline crews working in the area, I tended bar part time in a little redneck joint. Most of the guys were from Texas, Oklahoma & Kansas but one fellow I'll always remember was from Lost Cabin, Wyoming. Every night he would play guitar, harmonica and sing. Sounded just like Hank Thompson.

All those guys were members of the "work hard, play hard" group.
Man, could they drink!

 

[BearBio]

"Pelican Cowboy"==detailed to the Salton Sea one summer due to an outbreak of botulism. We went out at dawn in airboats and we would charge into floating flocks of pelicans. We assumed any unable to fly had botulism. Netted them, wrapped them in a wet t-shirt. Took them back and kept them hydrated, then one of us would drive them to the vet at Sea World.

Bad part: the HEAT, hours, HEAT, working on maintenance in the HEAT, getting bit (brown pelicans were "OK" but the whites were NASTY=serrated bill and the ripped sideways when they got ya), the HEAT, and did I mention the Heat?

Good part: the buddies I made, doing good for the animals, and seeing, literally, a half million birds a day (including wood storks, eagles, two flamingos, herons of several different types, ospreys, peregrines, and many, many more)

 

[DeathGrip]

Drilling holes in the ground and dropping a stick of dynamite in them. Wire about ten together and put some electric to it all. This was the beginning of lake front properties all over West Broward in the late seventies.

The best was when a stick got jammed in the muck and was only a few feet deep. Sod and muck would fly in all directions and some were pretty good size chunks. I always hid under the drill rig.


The worst part was opening the locker in the morning, instant headache from the nitro fumes.

 

[Coot47]

Drove an ice cream truck for Wally's Ice Cream in the Detroit area when I was 18. Got tired of the 8-track blaring calliope music all day, so I shoved in a cassette of the Stone's 'Sticky Fingers'. Somebody's mom called Wally. That was my last day.

 

[sheepdawg]

Driving the tractor that picked up golf balls at a driving range when I was 16. Thank God for the cage cause you're a target when you're out there. Got to play a bunch of putt putt, that's where the girls were.

 

[mdf9183]

When I was about 17 I had a job running a machine that put the glitter on christmas cards. Some times you have to work at jobs just so you learn what you do not want to do for the rest of your life. That was one of them.

 

[Doug627]

First job in high school was caretaker at a cemetery. That included opening and closing graves. Four years as a respiratory therapist. Attending code blues and emergency traumas was an education. Thirty years as an attorney. I started out working child abuse cases. I've seen people born. I've seen people die. I have seen everything in between. It truly is God giveth and God taketh away. We have little to no control.

 

[TIMETRIPPER]

During my college years I worked as a fishing guide in Quebec, above La Verendrye Park. Made $15 a day plus tips. Room and board was provided and though the latter was pretty good, the former was a drafty old shack heated by a barrel stove. Slept in a sleeping bag the whole time. Caught lots of big pike and lake trout and boatloads of walleye. Cooked shore lunch darn near every day every to the point that I got tired of eating fresh walleye. Took up smoking to keep the black flies away, a habit that took 20 years to lose. Got to see the northern lights and a night sky filled with more stars imaginable. On a clear moonless night the milky way hung across the sky like a white sash.
Met lots of interesting people: local Indian and Quebecois guides and staff, and customers from all walks of life.
I'd come home with $1000 or so and priceless memories. The money is long gone but not the memories.
Best job I ever had.

John

 

[Usmc5811]

When I was 18 I got sent out from Virginia to Washington state fighting forest fires in the Okanogan forest. That's where I decided I wanted to go the military route. And a few summers back I did some part time work being a hiking guide in the morning and kayaking guide in the afternoon.

 

[Rustyt1953]

Most fun: being on stage playing for thousands of revelers.

Most odd: separating trash at the city incinerator and re-setting rat traps at a licorice factory.

 

[Old TexMex]

Fairly recently and long ago, far away.
There was some stuff in between that was fun at the time, and..I wouldn't take a million bucks for but I wouldn't give a dime to do it again....time changes a man.

I'm really selling myself short, cause my life is more fun now than it's ever been, and my life has been a damn good ride.

 

[Golddollar]

Probably the job I enjoyed the best was when I was a title examiner/title insurance underwriter for real property. When somebody bought and/or mortgaged real property, I looked at the documents from the courthouse and constructed a chain diagram (flowchart in computerese) of the history of ownership of the property. If a property was not shown on a recorded survey, I could use hand tools and draw the metes and bounds description of the property set out in the deed (go North 32 degrees 10 minutes 55 seconds East to the old stump) and end up with a picture of the property to make sure the legal description was good. I found a lot of deficiencies in property titles and gave directions as to how to fix them. Other people were amazed how I could look at documents and draw things out all day long but I guess I was blessed with patience and a steady hand. It did lead to an advanced position with another company overseeing the company's agents but when the recession hit I was laid off in 2009.

 

[bigwheelzip]

Not exactly a "Job", since I didn't get paid, but I used to "Work" when I had some free time, as an international courier which allowed me to have free air travel on two-week duration trips abroad.

All I had to do was pack my personal items into a carry-on, then hand-carry onboard, an envelope of excess luggage claim tickets for shipped parcels, which I handed to a representative on arrival. Then repeat the process on the return leg two weeks later.

 

[HOUSTON RICK]

Worked in auditing at large firm uncovered:

1) Large construction fraud where subsidiary executives were subcontracting multi billion dollar construction project indirectly to their relatives, lead crooks left the country, FBI was involved, I was prosecution witness.
2) Fraudulent inventory of target company greatly overstated value, we got a massive price reduction.
3) One of our plants was being sold and they moved several railroad trains of raw material off premises so that it would not be included in the value of the sale or the beginning inventory.
4)Subsidiary had a department of highly paid young ladies who had no duties or skills. They were attending college on company dime full time. When we got reviewing medical benefits, the HR director threw himself across the records room door and had to be removed by security. After much digging, subsidiary was paying for female surgery related to adult relations for the young ladies by cash bypassing insurance. They went to school in the day and out with the subsidiary executives at night.
5) Subsidiary CEO was entertaining another CEO on a duck hunt, they got so drunk that they shot the guide's dogs. They tried to bury it by breaking the large sum into small checks in petty cash.

Much more and much litigation support, I finally realized that the lawyers were getting paid four times what I was just saying what I told them. Light bulb goes off and I went to law school.

 

[vytoland]

flippin burgers at mcdonald's.....before there was indoor seating and a burger cost 15 cents......grilled 'em 48 at a time...earned $1.20 an hour and all the burgers and fries i wanted on my break time....i was one happy 16 year old kid.....

 

[joe44va]

Being a Marine Engineer on merchant ships. Got around.

 

[ladder13]

Not weird but fun, my first real job while still going to school.
Worked in the garment district in Manhattan, when there actually was a thriving garment industry before it all got sent offshore.
I worked the summer of '67 for $1.25 an hour, walking the mid 30's on 7th Ave, picking up boxes of clothes being shipped all over the world from the top designers of the times.
We used hand trucks and packed boxes as high as we could, bringing them back to the shipper, then heading back out for another load. Repeat all day long.
I had a great time, met a alot of great people both at the businesses and out on the street, and earned a princely $40 a week after taxes.

Sort of what it looked like trying to move amongst the masses.