Friday OT:Strangest job you ever had

I was a camp counselor at the Michigan Sports camps.  Met Lloyd Carr briefly as he was walking through.  Mo was coach at the time.  I'm 80% sure I made Tshimanga Biakabatuka do push ups.  The kid was a jacked running back from Montreal and it was either 91 or 92.   (I actually made everyone do pushups. It was the football players suggested punishment because Coach Carr made them do them.)

When I was a kid, I worked lawn maintenance at a pet cemetery for two weeks.  Besides cutting grass, we also had to dig the graves.  
They started talking about how they’d bought another cemetery and we’d have to dig up those graves and re-bury them in our cemetery and I was finished.  
I was at least partly thinking they were messing with me.  I didn’t care to wait and find out.   I quit, no notice.  Sorry, not sorry.  

Apprehender at Meijer. it was quite eye opening....had no idea so much shoplifting occurs. Our location would restrain 20+ in a single friday evening on occasion...even with a parade of cruisers picking them up in front of building.

Gravedigger as a kid.

Also helped my dad with cottage care for a cottage association - winterizing, cutting firewood, opening cottages for season, trapping critters, docks and hoists, even a weekly "dump run" where we picked up trash and ran it to the dump. 

Learned the value of an education early! 

During the 1996 Olympics, a brother of one of the members of the Swiss Federal Council wants to go and hires me, a friend of a friend, as his security, because I'm American and therefore I know Atlanta like the back of my hand. (Thank heaven for the Mobil Guide.) Absolutely no one knows who he is so why the fuck does he need security ... he's a nice guy and all, but ... it's a weird couple weeks. At least the check didn't bounce. The most memorable moment is, we're in Savannah for the sailing events, he learns the park bench scene in Forrest Gump was filmed there and he about wets himself, so we have to go to the park bench along with all the other tourists.

I used to work at Chuck E Cheese and I was Chuck E himself.  Couple of fun facts:

- The sweat lingers from previous employees.  The sweat is stress based and so it stinks.  I remember putting on the suit and it still being wet.

- Children will try to do anything to see Chuck E's real identity, hence the stressful sweat.  When they gang up on you, it gets dicey.

- Wearing the suit does not make it any less humiliating.

First job ever: Not a strange job, but I worked landscaping for some douche for a week or so at age 15 because a friend said it would be decent money. Didn’t have a car/license yadda yadda. I had to take a shit one morning real bad and the guy wouldn’t let me use his bathroom because “the wife’s in there.” So I took a shit against a tree in his backyard. Quit that job very shortly after the backyard shitting.

I worked at a national women's magazine right after I graduated and one of my jobs was to read all the letters to the advice columnist and decide which ones would make it to her desk and which ones wouldn't. 

Tallied railroad cars by line from books printed in the 1800s. It was kind of interesting for a couple days, then I wanted to burn down the econ department. 

A bunch of jobs, mostly boring. I used to harvest donation tissue (bone and tendon mostly) in Miami for extra money during my fellowship. The coroner's office had a sterile OR suite.

I "refereed" the 1996 Mud Bowl. I missed the game against IU trying to shower off all the muck in South Quad.

Telemarketer selling trash bags and door mats for some Veterans group. I don't think they were legit. I lasted 3 days.

Back in the early 1980's, I worked at a gravestone company for a few weeks engraving headstones. Very humbling when you notice some of them are for infants or teenagers......

I taught in Muskegon Heights, Michigan.  The most fucked up place you could imagine.  To give you some idea the principal was in his first year and was from Flint.  He didn't move.  So he was commuting from Flint to Muskegon every day he bothered to come to work.  Which was about half the time before he quit in May.  The teaching staff found out on Mlive.  He was also a sexist prick and referred to the girls in school as "honeys" on a regular basis.

Worked at a combo go-cart track, putt putt and batting cage kind of place in college. All in all it was a pretty good job. Definitely could get pretty dangerous if you weren’t paying attention. 

The first summer I worked there, the carts didn’t have a way to shut them down remotely. So people would come into the pit at full speed and ram the line of cars in front of them. Resulted in more than one fist fight between angry high schoolers. Even had one come after me because I “didn’t do enough to stop the cart hitting his girlfriends cart”

The most dangerous Job though was fixing cars that were spun out up against the wall. They don’t have reverse so the only way to let the customer keep driving is to grab the back end and swing it away from the wall Which was pretty easy to do. Biggest issue is if you weren’t paying attention you were liable to get clipped by a passing cart. Happened more than once to some coworkers. Thankfully no significant injuries from that. 

Undercover bus schedule inspector, I had to take random buses and report if they were on time in their routes,  I just had to move around the city taking different buses...

Had quite a few interesting jobs during my small town youth: docking boats, bagging groceries, detassling corn, laying concrete, roofing, 6am-2pm+ factory job (where I would then work full-time as an engineer at their Warren office right after Michigan graduation). But the weirdest had to be when I worked at a marine salvage yard a mile from my house.

I did a lot of sanding/painting outboard engines for resale. Mowed the lawn in the hot summer heat, while listening to a lot of NWA/Easy-E, good times. I was 16 and everyone else there was in their 20s/30s. at 5pm everyone started cracking beers to go along with smokers that have been hanging out of their mouths all day.

The craziest part of that job was that I had to feed their two doberman watch dogs every day. They were mean motherfuckers, I was scared to death of them. They had them leashed up to a running clothes line between two trees. So when I went to feed them I would throw a stick or something to get them to run to the other tree, then I would sprint in and drump their food into their bowls, then sprint back out of their line range. I am not joking or exaggerating. It was fucking terrible.

I think I got paid $3 under the table per hour. That was damn decent money when you're 16 and gas costs around a buck.

Lifeguard for UM rec buildings. Specifically, the time my boss asked me if I would work a Sunday morning at the IM building pool. The IM was closed Sunday mornings, but The Flounders rented the pool to play water polo. So Sunday morning, a bunch of grown men came in, took off all their clothes (no swimsuits, bare-assed naked), jumped in, and played water polo. So odd.

I haven't had a strange job really. First job was at Little Caesar's. First place I smoked weed. Almost everyone there when I first started smoked.

We sometimes made what we called dough bombs with a friend who didn't work there but would often come by when we closed. I closed Fridays (4 - 1am) so that I'd never miss college football on Saturdays. Put dough in an empty 20 oz pop bottle while still cold so it would expand in the bottle. After a while, you could toss it in the air and it'd blow up and throw dough around. Nothing dangerous. Then one time we had the bright idea to upgrade to a 2L AND add pop. We left it at a friend's place and it exploded in the middle of the night. Pop and wet dough all over his living room.

FWIW, people have horror stories from working in restaurants, but at least at our location, in a quaint suburban town, there was nothing like that. Everything was pretty fresh. No one was spitting in the food.

Let's see, there was one summer job with the FDA where I had to fumigate trailers loaded with hay and alfalfa that had been backed into large tents. Once the large tent's flap was closed I'd give it the gas (literally). The point was to stop various beetles and such from being spread from Michigan to other states, and vice versa. An hour of work and seven and a half hours of tedium...every day. Also got to hear a lot of truck drivers bitch about odd things, which was like poison to my happy-go-lucky demeanor.    /s  

Had another weird job where I sat in the doorway of a helicopter in a foreign country and people I didn't know shot at me. Thankfully, they always missed, but this job made me miss the aforementioned fumigation gig.

I was drinking beer with a friend on my porch in ann arbor and guys were redoing the sidewalk on the corner of mckinley and packard. They came and asked us to watch it dry and they would buy us more beer and big ten burritos.. so we set up shop and watched concrete dry for the rest of the day on the corner making sure no one ruined it

best job i ever had 

My dad somehow got me a job as a phlebotomist and I worked at a hospital for 3 summers. No idea what it was walking in and I drew blood 3 times that first day (all from volunteers). It had its moments. One I remember is a guy was throwing up blood into a cup while taking a crap. I told the nurse station that I'd come back and they started screaming at me to go draw his blood right now. I was 19 so I went and asked him and he stuck his arm out like it was no big deal. 

In college I did a bit of delivery and pickup of thick envelopes for a legendary Detroit area bookie.  Didn’t really understand what I was getting into at first. 
 

Later on I was in a sales job for a construction company.  The controller of this company had to also do accounts receivable collections.  When we had annoying little amounts like $1,000-$5,000, she would call them and tell them I was on the way to pick up a check. “On the way” meant I was like 3 minutes from walking in the door.  I would wait there until they cut a check.  It was a fun little game and we probably got 75% of the amounts owed.  Company owner loved it.  

It wasn’t strange at the time, but I am showing my age… My last non-professional job was a full-service gas station attendant in Bloomfield. We had to run out to the cars and check the oil, coolant, tires, fill the tank and wash the windows.  

Summer after freshman year in college, three months working for $1.60 an hour in a factory that manufactured plastic bags. I had to assemble cardboard boxes, applying glue with a small paint brush to seal the bottom and sides of the box, then delivering boxes to the work stations where the line workers (mostly women) took piles of plastic bags off conveyor belts, stacked and boxed them and waited for me to fully seal the boxes and load them onto a pallet. Then, when the pallets were filled, I used a hand-operated pallet truck to move the pallets to the loading dock for shopping.

More than 50 years later, I still have great appreciation for factory workers, knowing that their work often is difficult, tedious and not very rewarding.

Worked at a greenhouse the first two summers of college.  6 am start time with no known quit time. It was up to the owner how long we worked each day.  Afternoon break included the manager buying our crew of 3-4 under age manual laborers a case of beer.  Two cases on Friday.  We were often operating heavy machinery after break.  I still can’t believe no one got killed or injured.  Occasionally, he would bring in an ounce of some nasty weed also.  Crazy place with endless stories.  Maybe I will write that book after retirement.

I'm a lot older than most of you guys. This story is from the 70's.

My GrandPa was a Teamster. High up on the ladder.

The Summer after I graduated High School, he arranged a no show job with a concrete company. I never even saw the work site. I was a basically a servant to a group of Union guys. Running errands. Washing cars. 

One day, one of them told me he had a job for me. He gave me an address and told me to go clean the place. All the supplies I needed were already there. He told me to never tell anyone about it, and that no one would interrupt me while I was there. He had guys outside to make sure of that.

It was a small house on the East Side. When I entered, I caught a waft of a familiar smell. It's the smell when you open a large pack of steaks just when you realize you need to be opening them in the sink because of all the blood.

I cleaned the place up the best I could. Later in the week a saw an article in the Free Press. I recognized the address. House fire on the East side. Same day I was there.

I never told anyone. 

I had a summer job installing trailer-hitches on vehicles.  Not weird in itself but the cast of co-workers were quite interesting. The job entailed putting cars on hoists and drilling into the frames.

After a day or 2 my boss, a grisly but affable fellow, asked how I was doing. I said it was a little tough to avoid the hot metal filings flying off the bit. Stan grabbed the drill and said,

"Pain is a manageable sensation. You can even learn to enjoy it."  With that fired the drill into the car frame, no googles, metal filing searing into his neck and face. Here was a guy who loved his job for some pretty strange reasons. 

Another uncommon job I had was working in a zinc, silver and copper mine. I was in the mill that treated the ore, not underground. The building was about the size of a 1800 student high-school and manned by 4 miners. I maintained the furnaces that baked the minerals. These consisted of 2 60-foot rotating cylinders with a series of curved tubes that contained large ball-bearings that smashed into the cylinders knocking the zinc off the walls.  It was loud!

It was also unbearably hot. In the summer, if it was 80 degrees outside, it was 160 in the furnace room. It got so hot you couldn't touch the railings. To compound the discomfort, there was a haze of very fine zinc dust in the air and about 3 inches deep on the floor. I wore gloves, googles, a mask and hardhat for protection.  And, despite the searing heat, a full set of clothes including jeans underneath overalls. Although I was double clothed, because the dust was so fine, I was black at the end of each shift - head to toe. At the end of the week, I would scrub my body with Comet for an hour to get clean. 

Depending of the quality of ore coming up, the job was usually quite simple. I would just make sure things ran smoothly.

The ore went into the furnaces via these chutes. Normally it flowed without assistance. When the ore was impure though it was more challenging. To encourage the slop into the furnace I used an air pressure system. This consisted of a 4-foot steal lance connected to a large metal valve that weighed about 20 pounds.  This was connected to a hose that supplied the thousands of pounds of required pressure. I would jam the lance into the sludge, open the valve and hopefully the ore flowed into the furnace.

One day it was running particularly foul. As per usual, I jammed in my lance but the sludge was so thick the instead of pushing the ore down, the lance shot backwards causing me to lose my grip and nearly decapitating me. As I caught the hose of the flying valve it split. The valve went crazy and nearly ripped my arm off and the air immediately filled with zinc dust. There was literally zero viability. I knew there was a shut off valve but I didn't know where. So, I got on the floor and tried to follow the piping while avoiding this 20-pound valve propelled by thousands of pounds of air pressure that flew around wildly attempting to take me out. Obviously, I wouldn't be writing this if I didn't find the valve but after I shut it down and the dust settled enough, I found my shattered hardhat.

When I took the job, I thought wow this is great money! After that night I didn't think it was enough.

Between Freshman and Sophomore year at UM, I worked in Montreal, Halfax - Nova Scotia, Toronto, Cleveland and Dearborn for Ford Body Engineering. The job involved measuring the amount of rust on Ford vehicles, to make sure it would be cost effective for Ford to add an extended warranty guaranteeing no rust within a certain number of years.

The job was simple enough. What was crazy cool was having great rental cars, a significant per diem covering all possible expenses, nice hotels, and a flight home (or elsewhere) every other weekend. Of course, I suppose for those of you who are road warriors, this all sounds very standard. But for an 18 - 19 year old college kid? Pretty cool.

The other kind of bizarre job was taking care of a barn for Dominos in Ann Arbor:  milking goats, bringing in the eggs, mucking stalls, taking care of the cows, the pigs, the sheep. I was "Farmer Steve" for a short period of time.

Chimney Sweep.

Fell off a roof doing it.

Fortunately it was only a one story house at the time and I fell into the bushes, which broke the fall.

Shoveling Angora goat shit...