<p>^Consolation, my eyes are watering at just the thought of the smell that must have pervaded that factory…peeeeeeyew!!!</p>
<p>tsdad - S was paid very well to drink beer and have ct scans of brain done. He would have been happy with just the beer.</p>
<p>In HS, I used to test skin creams for a fair amount of money. Before bone marrow transplants were ‘common’, I was paid $100 every month or so for having a bone marrow aspiration done.</p>
<p>It would be pretty funny to combine the job in post #3 with the job in post #17…</p>
<p>D worked one summer testing car horns. Beep, beep put it in a box. I agree, they asked her at the end of the summer if she wanted to stay on. Heck no, that’s why I know I need to go to college.</p>
<p>I had a job where I had to pay calls at the fish processing plant. OMG the smell! The workers joked that cats followed them after work.</p>
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<p>Actually, green beans haunted me more than the beets did. I’d literally see green beans in my dreams at night.</p>
<p>One thing I found out about working in the cannery is the reason for the difference in quality between their own major-brand label and the generic or house-brand labeled cans. You often hear that cheaper generic or house brands are a bargain because they cost less but are the same beans canned at the same facilities than the higher-priced ones. And that statement, as far as it goes, it perfectly true. But it’s not the whole story.</p>
<p>You could always tell without looking whether they were canning for their own premium brand or a cheap house brand by how fast the lines were running. An early part of the process was the fresh beans would get dumped onto a moving conveyor belt that had lines of women (they were always women) standing on either side of the belt sorting the beans - picking out inferior beans and debris. </p>
<p>So when they were canning for their own premium brand the line would be running nice and slow, with the beans spread only one bean deep on the sorting belt. When they were canning for a cheapo brand the line would be running so fast we could hardly keep up with the process. And the beans would be stacked so deep on the belt that there was no way the women could spot all the inferior beans and pick them out, not to mention the rocks, sticks, dirt clods, candy wrappers, and dead mice that rode in with the fresh-picked beans.</p>
<p>When I was 20 yrs old, I spent part of the summer between my junior & senior year of college working in the bottling cellar (Flaschenkeller) of a German brewery. I sorted bottles according to size & color as they passed along a conveyor belt to be sterilized & re-used. Every Friday, production in the factory shut down for routine maintenance: machinery was dissembled, cleaned & lubricated; as part of the lower-paid worker corps, I helped sterilize the floors with diluted hydrochloric acid. During breaks, I would go to the cafeteria, which had all-you-can-drink beer dispensers, & drink … hot chocolate. :eek:</p>
<p>The most dramatic event while I was at the brewery was when a conveyor belt transporting the finished cases of beer to street level jammed. I watched 2-3 pallets, each containing 72 cases of beer, collide. Over 5,000 bottles of German beer toppled and shattered everywhere. Oh, the tragedy.</p>
<p>S1 had a job one Christmas vacation working for FEMA monitering loads of vegatitive debris stacked and burned. He sat all day and counted the number of dumb truck loads of tree branches that were piled into a pile and then burned. He made good money doing this.</p>
<p>A friend of his worked at a lab where they tested people’s driving abilities under certain circumstances. His job? To get people drunk. He did it by giving them Kool-aid and grain alcohol. Worst part of the job? He had to drive them home after the testing.</p>
<p>I had a job testing life jackets in a wave tank in the engineering building. They lowered us into the tank, fully clothed, and then threw the life jacket at us. They timed how long it took to get into it. Then they started waves, at different heights, and we were supposed to hang in the water quietly and count how many waves broke over our noses.</p>
<p>Seriously. </p>
<p>I had no idea there were so many different kind of life jacket/preservers. Also had no idea how cold you could be (there was a heater and hot chocolate room set up for us to try to warm up in between tests. Brrr!)</p>
<p>DH was a chip picker. He worked on an assembly line at a potato chip plant. When the chips came out of the hot grease he had to pull off the burned or clumped chips. He said it was miserable.</p>
<p>^^^My sister worked in a potato chip factory once. She made good money but it took a long time for her to eat potato chips again. I remember that the bottoms of her sneakers rotted off from stepping in grease all the time. She never wanted to work in a factory again. I learned from her and never did.</p>
<p>consolation - no exotic jobs here, just ho-hum office work and teaching - but it is interesting to me to learn that people get paid to pick worms out of fish. When I was first on my own, I stopped eating fish for about a year after having opened a package of fish from the supermarket and finding a couple of live worms that were curled up and even starting to move as the fish thawed to room temperature. Ewwwww…</p>