Tag Archives: professions

strange jobs people have

Yesterday, G and I were sitting at a concert being curious about the throngs of people at Great Woods and we got to musing about the variety of jobs people might have. Part of it was that there were sooooo many high school students there and I was thinking about how many of them probably had a narrow idea of what jobs they could get when they grew up and that it’d be fascinating to be able to look around a crowd like that and just see the diversity of strange jobs adults actually had. And I was remembering seeing Errol Morris’ “Fast, Cheap and Out of Control” as a freshman in college and being totally intrigued by weird people having weirder jobs. So I posted to Twitter asking people to share obscure but fascinating jobs. Here are the responses that I heard:

  • @karlpro: sewer diver
  • @moonb2: my retired dad LOVED driving new cars from/to dealerships. Got to drive all the latest models
  • @flipzagging: professional origamist. Artist but also consults with industry – packaging, medical devices, spacecraft
  • @flipzagging: every job to do with Somali piracy… pirates have VC, professional negotiators, caterers, *timesheets*
  • @AndrewRatcliffe: Sagger maker’s bottom knocker.
  • @golan: I heard of a woman at the US Postal service whose job it is to read illegibly-addressed letters, when all others have failed.
  • @Jean_Macgregor: Baby alligator cleaner for Prada – true!
  • @grimmelm: Knife sharpener — yes, they still exist, they just have cooler tools.
  • @ModalUrsine: Strangest one I know off hand is “chicken sexer” who sorts male from female chicks. Bet there’s weirder
  • @timomcd: Check out newspaper jobs between the press room and delivery. While they last.
  • @Designomicon: I once saw an underwater dendrochronologist on TV. He even had an underwater chainsaw.
  • @musingvirtual: disney imagineer, or dc tourmobile tour guide? (Have done both, also some interesting things I won’t tweet about.)
  • @bertil_hatt: #fascinatingjobs Pearl seeder (3-5,000$/m., MSc. biology, work in paradise) Non-hotel Concierge (Less glamourous than it seems)
  • @paulesque: at a comedy gig once, an audience member (legitimately) had the job of ‘holding Tom Waits’ cigarette in-between movie takes’
  • @spacewhalin: funeral director’s assistant
  • @betabit: I was a lab technician for an artificial eye maker.
  • @saralovesyou: pig insemination. Seriously.
  • @msstewart: Some fun, strange jobs from antiquity
  • @msstewart: Chicken sexer
  • @kathrynyu: http://ask.metafilter.com/81653/Need-job-Need-fun-job http://www.mcsweeneys.net/links/unusualjobs/index.html
  • @DrSbaitso: I used to transfer 8″ reels to CD. Two years ago. Had a 6-month project transferring ~50 reels of a guy’s dead father.
  • @RichardCAdler: Judging by the number of people who look quizzically at me when I tell them I am one, I’d have to include ‘archivist’.
  • Kevin Schofield: do you ever watch Dirty Jobs on the Discovery Channel? The whole show is basically about that… with the twist that the jobs are always messy and/or disgusting.
  • Jenna Burrell: ‎’The Deadliest Catch’ is my latest fascination (along the lines of work depicted on TV). It’s about crab fishing in the Bering sea.

Feel free to add your own!!