An usual job that you've had

That sounds really interesting. I think I would enjoy that.

I've never had a job that I would really consider unusual.

When i was in college I was a manager of a sleazy "one hour type" motel in a bad area of town. I got paid minimum wage and worked the late night shift. We had hookers, drug dealers and people who cut apart the lamps to smoke crack. We also had a naked guy in a trench coat that used to frequent the parking lot. The whole thing was pretty crazy and funny over all.

Not that unusual, but to finance my first (volunteer) coaching gig, I had a day job in a press warehouse, lugging and stacking boxes (typically 60-70#) of books. It's the kind of work that really makes you value your college degree.

Can't compete with these others, but working on a Pepsi bottling line for a week was pretty interesting.

I used to write engine control software for military and commercial aircraft.

Mink/Fox = fur farm

I coached a skatepark camp for a few years in my last years of high school. I didn't get paid much, but I didn't need much then. I got to spend the whole day skating with an afternoon swim break. Probably the best job I ever had. I run into some of the kids I coached from time to time, a couple of them are sponsored skaters now, and one of em is living out in Utah as a pro snowboarder now.

When I was 19 I needed money quick so I worked a week at a pumpkin patch. I watched a goat eat an entire trash bag.

Spent one summer grading de-headed/cleaned/scaled salmon in a cannery in Valdez Alaska.

Spent another summer on an oil rig off the Louisiana coast.

Those are about the most offbeat of the many, many jobs I've had...

lab tech

soldier

costumed busboy

actor

SEM operator

Accounts payable clerk

librarian

paperboy

used car salesman

MLM entrepreneur

agricultural worker

bartender

about 20 temp jobs

After grad school, I went into management consulting...

I have built hiking trails on public lands out west while spending the entire summer living in a tent or off-the-grid cabins. Great way to spend a summer. Not great for a year round job however.

I used to clean apartments for a slumlord in a nasty part of town. You could always tell you were cleaning a black persons house because you spent an hour just cleaning grease from in and around the stove. Also, we knew someone was killed or died in a home if the carpet was torn up in one spot. Usually meant bio-haz people were already there to clean up the blood.

Boy Scout summer camp staff. One year I taught Weather and Nature merit badge classes. Another year I taught Archery when I was 14. You were supposed to be 16.

One summer I was on a blue max crew in a high rise. We just walked around the construction site putting blue Saran Wrap on windows so the paint wouldn't get on them. I got fired for absenteeism.

Building skateparks.

Art and picture frame restoration.

Meter maid

Maker of smoosh-ins at a local ice cream shop

Ran rat milk maze experiments for the head of a physiology psychology laboratory

Master dissector of rat pituitary glands for a molecular endocrinology laboratory

Laboratory technician responsible for PCR experiments, protein purification, created columns and ran gels

Ran/managed an electron microscope and confocal microscope facility

OddJobber wrote:

Spent one summer grading de-headed/cleaned/scaled salmon in a cannery in Valdez Alaska.

Spent another summer on an oil rig off the Louisiana coast.

Those are about the most offbeat of the many, many jobs I've had...

lab tech

soldier

costumed busboy

actor

SEM operator

Accounts payable clerk

librarian

paperboy

used car salesman

MLM entrepreneur

agricultural worker

bartender

about 20 temp jobs

Why would you consider cannery work or oil rig work "offbeat"?

If anything MLM entrepreneur would fall into that category.

Bang wrote:

When I was 19 I needed money quick so I worked a week at a pumpkin patch. I watched a goat eat an entire trash bag.

This made me laugh.

I worked as a fudge cook for a summer on Mackinac Island (located between the lower and upper peninsulas). The island is eight miles around and know for its fudge, tourists, and lack of automobile transportation. What people don't know is that after 2100 or so when most of the tourists leave it becomes a raging party for all of the kids who work there. We usually worked 50-60 hours per week, making just under $10/hour and by the end of the summer most kids had blown all of their cash on weed and booze, walking out with nothing to show for their summers. It was a blast, and I threw down a summer of 100+ mile weeks on the great trail systems they have, but I would never do that again. Too many dirty Jamaicans trying to get little white girls pregnant.

Ran a box machine that folded cardboard boxes for the Pear harvest.. Cleaned duck blinds for the ritzy rich so they wouldn't get their Eddie Bauer waders dirty while shooting ducks and geese..

Dressed up as a Blackberry mobile phone once doing a promotional job. Im glad no-one could see my face!

I used to work for the US Army. Got paid to command an M-1 Abrams main battle tank. Couldn't even begin to estimate how many rounds and machine gun bullets we sent down range.

They sent me to a 3 week school in Fort Benning one summer. We did a lot of pushups and pullups, then they made us get on these big C-141 jets and threw us out over some big field. Fortunately they gave us parachutes. Cool army surplus stores in Columbus, GA, by the way.