<p>I was prompted to create this thread when my son posted to Facebook that he had found a listing for a part-time job in France as a Beer Pong Ambassadeur. Incroyable! </p>
<p>When I was a student, we used to have competitive conversations about Strange Jobs. I was often able to win on the basis of having counted cars–literally, we were left on the side of the road and spent hours counting how many cars turned each way at an intersection–and working in a fish-packing plant, where my usual task was picking worms out of fish using tweezers. (The outfit alone on that one was a winner: sea boots, a huge rubber apron, voluminous plastic sleeves, and a pea green shower cap. And then there were my coworkers…sometimes I think that every middle-class kid should have to work in a factory for a month or so. Illuminating.)</p>
<p>But my reign ended when I met a person at the U of C who had had a job cleaning the flesh off human bones. FYI, or perhaps TMI, at the very last stage they soaked the bones in Biz enzyme detergent, which consumed anything that was left. Shudder.</p>
<p>I can’t come close to that, except for a brief stint when I’d been “promoted” in the Psychology Dept and was no longer “just” a student typist. I was assigned as an undergrad teaching assistant to one of the Sr. Profs…Whoo hoo! Since he had all kinds of grad students really doing work, I was assigned to feed the experimental rats and hose their rat dung out of their cages. With warnings like, “THAT one is extraordinarily aggressive due to some recent brain surgery” or “Watch to make sure the momma doesn’t eat the babies…” I lasted about a week, then was saved by someone in the Dean’s office. Ewwwwww.</p>
<p>Mag-- H was that guy. He was a “medical teaching associate”–back in the late 80s/early 90’s he made $25/hr to allow med students to practice genital/rectal exams on him.
He also was paid to fake symptoms of other ailments to test students’ diagnostic abilities.
(Another shameless thing H did for $–delivered singing telegrams, including gorilla-grams, Groucho-grams, and Captain Fun-a-grams. . . )</p>
<p>When I was in Peace Corps, I knew a volunteer who was assigned to work on an agricultural research project. Her actual job was to count how many times cows chewed when they ate certain types of plants. First, she had to go out and FIND the cows. . .
She quit after a few weeks.</p>
<p>The strangest thing I ever got paid to do was to test ride roller coasters.</p>
the guy must be pretty desperate to be willing to take it up the rear…</p>
<p>I’ve heard of an undergraduate research assistant spending hours doing this thing (forgot what it was called) where he would sit for hours in front of a powerful microscope, in the cold, using some special tweasers to take samples of a polymer strand that’s less than a micrometer long, and putting it into a sampler for xray scattering or something. Normally, a job like that costs hundreds per sample. Instead, this kid was paid minimum wage. so sad :(</p>
<p>
LOL
on her CV: investigate grazing behavoir of cows in various natural habats.
reason for leaving: difficulty locating suitable specimen</p>
<p>Yes, we were desperate–and $25/hr was a lot of money back then.
(now a physician, H has certainly “given” more than he “received”. . . and now the “victims” pay him.)</p>
<p>My uncle had a job while a college student pulling cows’ teeth from slaughtered cows in a meat packing factory. He had to use giant pliers and a lot of muscle getting the teeth out of the dead cows’ mouths…my uncle said it was a really hard, messy job. The slaughter house sold the teeth to a dental college that used the teeth for research or maybe for practicing drilling.</p>
<p>I had summer job in college working in a cannery - standing at the end of the canning line pushing newly-canned green beans off a table and into large carriers to be taken away and cooked in large walk-in steam ovens, for eight hours a day.</p>
<p>After a few weeks my talent was apparently noticed because I got promoted from beans to beets. The beet people were special and the work required special akills because the beets were in (breakable) bottles instead of cans. Only the elite got to work on the beet line. The money was the same (minimum wage) but there was a definite prestige associated being a beet person.</p>
<p>I was soup stock maker for the vegetarian dining co-op that I belonged to (in college, we all had jobs to run the place and I got stuck with this) which meant every week I had to boil all the veggie scraps that the cooks/prep crew collected during the week, removing the stuff that was incorrectly put in the stinking refuse pots like banana peels, etc. in a huge caldron and then strain it for vegetable stock. It was hot, stinking and miserable - but not as bad as what you all posted up top!!</p>
<p>I made $50 for an hour’s work of med students looking at my cervix through a microscope. Seemed like good pay at the time!</p>
<p>I always win the prize for most surprising location of my first job. (Not surprising if you know my background.) It was Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.</p>
<p>In grad school the driver safety research program was testing how much you actually had to drink to be drunk. We were drinking ginger ale mixed with grain alcohol. I got a spastic esophagus (at least that was what I told my reaction was) during the first experiment and dropped out of the program. Made $25.00.</p>
<p>coureur: one thing about our experiences is that we will never look at a jar of beets or a fish stick again without thinking of what people go through to make them! I should add that while I was picking the worms out of fish, I was standing next to a big bucket into which beheaded, halved fish carcasses fell after running through the skinning machine. Every time one fell in, it sprayed me from head to toe with bloody salt water. :D</p>