What's the Strangest, Funniest, or Worst Job You Ever Had??

You guys are doing a great job of keeping this interesting and entertaining.

Vince, I'll bet there haven't been many Rolls Royces painted like that. That's quite a story.

Jackknife, I'm glad those last few years in the shop didn't do you in. That transition you made would be tough as hell.

Canine, I know someone else here goes by Duckman, but it sounds like you qualify as well.

Foilist and db, those are good anecdotes.

Sixgunner, sounds like you had some real close encounters of the weird kind. Working closed psychiatric wards can be risky at times, for sure.

Hey Mike, I truly don't associate you with loser jobs. I'm more likely to associate you with humor, creative writing, and excellent camaraderie. I can definitely relate to that labor intensive farm work you're describing. It seems that like that TV show "Americas' Dirtiest Jobs", a lot of the focus here is on barely tolerable jobs, which is only natural, as they tend to stick in our memory banks.

One of the most fun jobs I ever had was about 38 years ago when I drove an ice cream vending truck for the Ice Cream Man Company in Austin Texas. We drove old International Scouts with a chest freezer in the back full of dry ice and every kind of popsickle and the usual fare. 1969 in Austin, cruising the campus drag on a hot summer day with a truck full of cold ice cream was a great way to meet UT girls. "Hook `em Horns." :)

I'll bet Blues and Bastid have some good tales to tell.

Keep `em comin' folks. This is fun.
 
I did all sorts of things when I was a kid, including mowing graveyards, hauling hay for the entire months of June and August (in Texas), clearing fencerows and building fence until and between hauling hay, and hauling firewood during the winter. I got paid twenty dollars a day for the mowing, but nada for the rest. Although as my dad used to say, "I'm feeding you, that's plenty."

The crappiest job that I got paid for was working as a lumper in a grocery store warehouse; it wasn't actually that hard, but it was totally mind-numbing, and I breathed a heck of a lot of dust. I saw some really odd stuff, too.

James
 
I've had a lot of jobs over the years running from after school jobs as a supermarket employee to baking bagels in a bagel factory in NY. (The bagel job was the only one I was ever fired from. Long story.)

When I was about 18 or so after my first year in college I took a Summer job with "Fuller Brush" going "door to door" (from office to office) in Manhattan .

The job really sucked and I hated sales but it was an outstanding way for a young guy to meet great looking girls that worked in the various offices.

One of the toughest jobs I ever had was working in a factory in Brooklyn in the machine shop. We worked on subway brake shoes and submarine desalinization systems. Since I was the young/new guy, besides running the typical machines (lathe, drill press, band saw etc) I had to carry the raw material and long steel rods up and downstairs all day. It was exhausting work and the fiberglass splinters I'd have up and down my arms were really irritating.

Some of the worst stuff I've ever had to do workwise was part and parcel of my career in law enforcement.

Many a time I had to go "dumpster diving" to retrieve evidence. (Millions of dollars in cash (literally) as well as narcotics "abandoned" by the bad guys to avoid capture. Lots of fun rooting around in some of those nasty bins.)

Once, after a particularly large seizure of narcotics which had been secreted in 55 gallon drums of guava paste which had been shipped to South FL from Colombia, we spent weeks in a hot stagnant warehouse having to open each of about 90 drums, stirring and following a technical process in order to separate out the cocaine from the mixture.

In the heat of South FL and in the closed environment of the huge warehouse, the combination of the smell of guava and the fumes from the drugs and chemical precipitates was bad beyond description.

To this day my stomach turns if I see or smell guava even in small quantities.

Anyway, I've been fortunate to have had a lot of interesting jobs (too many to enumerate here) over the years, including selling mountaineering equipment at the original Abercrombie & Fitch back on Madison Ave in NYC in the seventies.
 
Those are great stories you guys.

JAlexander, I love your dad's comment of "I'm feeding you, that's plenty." Words of wisdom for sure.

Elliott, thanks for sharing some of your interesting experiences here. Dumpster diving sounds a bit like my oilfield dent-removal adventures, except all I ever found was sludge, and it was never interesting.

I can sure see how the smell of guava could make you sick now.

And I'll bet sniffing coke was never the same after that either...:eek: ;) :D

(In my best Saturday Night Live high pitched voice: "Just kiddddinnnnngg!")
 
That's snorting coke, Ford.
(As if you didn't know. "I'm just keeedddinnng." :p ;) :cool: )
 
My funnest job. For about a week I got to push down a few old buildings with a Dozer.
 
Blues said:
That's snorting coke, Ford.
(As if you didn't know. "I'm just keeedddinnng." :p ;) :cool: )
Click to expand...

Actually, I tried snorting a few times, but I kept having to go to the ER to get the damn cans removed from my nostrils....so I went back to sniffing. :p

Anyway, I never inhaled. :D

CocaCola12ozUSADomestic3.jpg
 
A friend was once working in Fiji in 1997 and met a couple of folks from LA who were professional party promoters (their other claim to fame was that they made the Woodstock movie). They wanted to put on a grand festival to celebrate the new millennium in Fiji. Fiji sits smack dab on the international dateline, so it was the first place in the world to hit 2000. They wanted 50,000 people to fly to Fiji to attend. They didn't know if they could do it. My friend convinced them to hire me to go to Fiji for a month to do a feasability analysis for such an event.

I spent a month talking to government officials, airlines, bus companies, hotels and village chiefs and had a blast. I had a rental house and car. I was literally getting paid to sit on hut floors drinking kava from coconut shells and BS'ing with the locals about having their village host campers. The villagers put on dance shows for me. A chief invited me to swim in his waterfall. I scuba dived. I was involved in fierce drinking games.

The answer for my clients? No - not feasable. There were 1,500 hotel rooms within a 50 mile radius of their chosen site. Airfares would have cost double normal rates because of all the empty planes on the return leg. It was cyclone season. Camping in sugar cane fields in the hottest time of the year would not be pleasant . . . etc. etc.

That was the best job of my life.
 
Ahhh, Kava. Tastes like a mud puddle looks like it should taste. Some of us in out detachment in the Sinai used to work with some of the Fijians, including their Sergeant Major. We would get invited to "Grog" parties. It wasn't until years later that I was able to place it as Kava.

They were great singers too. We were sitting around a gathering one night, big grog bowl in he middle, and a guitar was being passed around and songs sang. I realized suddenly that I recognized one song, even though they were singing in their native language. Imagine my surprise when I realized it was "Please Daddy Don't Get Drunk This Christmas!" So I just chimed in in 'murican and sang along!

Wish I could have made it to Fiji. Yeah, rough job ya had there. :D
 
Hardly the worst, but certainly the most memorable, was camp maintenance man at a Girl Scout camp in the Colorado mountains. There were thirty or so college aged women trapped up there (the counselors), and even discounting the lesbians (wouldn't the parents freak!), it was a target rich environment since there was only one other guy up there. The horseback staff was my personal playground. Those gals would ride horses all day long and be so worked up that just a caress would cause an orgasm. I had never felt like such an amazing lover. I was 20 years old and the world was my oyster.

Rick - former staff, "Flying G (spot!) Ranch"
 
fewpop said:
In particular, I thought it would be fun to share some of the strange, funny, or really worst jobs you've had along your pathways to paydays.
Click to expand...

I could write a book about some of the horrible jobs I've ended up with. I'll stick with the top three.

1. Counting trees. That's right. One summer vacation or spring break from high school (10th grade I'd guess) a friend of my parents was running a state run tree farm. My job was to count tree seedlings into bundles of 10 as they moved along an "assembly line" of sorts. Two weeks of that and I was ready to scream. Fortunately they allowed us to bring our Walkman radios and listen to music all day. Probably the only thing that got a 15 year old through that experience!

2. You know those leaf bags that come out in the fall that are orange and look like pumpkins? I had answered a job opening for "warehouse help", supposedly running lifts and other general warehouse type work. Well, my job ended up being taking the bags our of a big box and putting them, in groups of 10, into a smaller box. That lasted a day and a half. Would have been less, however I was friendly with the agency that placed me in the job and I wanted to give them a chance to "fix" that situation. They didn't. I was probably 22 at the time.

3. Another of the shortest jobs I ever held was at a dairy. They decided it would be a good idea for me to stand in a room off from the yogurt packaging room by myself and stack the cases of yogurt on skids (pallets) all day. That lasted a day I believe. I was probably 18 or 19 at the time.
 
On the scale of this this is pretty minor but interesting.

I volunteered to help remove wooden sand casting casting forms from a 100 year old warehouse. The warehouse was attached to the current casting operation still in business. The business wanted to reclaim the space for use and some community activist guy thought it would be cool to salvage these wooden forms and clean them up and sell them.

So the company let volunteers in on the weekends to take stuff out. The day I showed up there was only one other guy, no one there to let us in but we found an unlocked door. We got in what was probably a 100 year old freight elevator, ride it up to the 3th floor, get out and there's one 60 watt light bulb at the elevator door, no other lights at all, no windows at all, and it's in the middle of summer so if pretty damn hot. And this being a foundry, everything is covered with probably .25 inch layer of soot and grit.

Can't see for shit, we firgure out there are racks, floor to ceiling, 5 shevles each packed with wooden forms, so dark we could even tell what they where, just something to grab onto. We would put them in wheeled carts, fil a load of 6 carts, ride each cart down the elevator, out the door, up the ramp into a truck. Drive the truck across town to an old cannery building, roll each cart off the truck, around the factory floor, to another elevator, this time taking it to the 6th floor, and finally unloading each cart and finally discovering what it is we actually hauled over. Unfortunately 99% of the time is was rectangular tool box forms. Very occasionally there was some cool recognizable machinery part or perhaps a large gear for a locomotive or other train part.

We spent all day there, cleaned I thing 1.5 floor to celling racks, taking 12 cart load across town. My estimate was there where probably over 40 shelves. I was so dirty it looked like I literally rolled is foundry dirt/soot.

Finally at the end of the day the activist guy came back and said I could take a few of the foundry forms home, so I picked out a couple of tools box forms figuring they'd make good flower boxes, one of the literally 1000's, and a decent form for a gear about the size of a dinner plate.

The activist guy pitched a fit I was cherry picking the best stuff, I was so tired hot and dirty I just dumped the form in the back and drove off, otherwise I was tempted to deck him.

When I got home the wife wouldn't let me in the house and I had to strip, hose off naked in the back yard. Adding insult to injury she didn't really like the forms/flower boxes, and my gear cracked in two a few months later!

I never follwed up what happened if they ever got that warehouse cleaned out.
 
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