The oddest jobs I've had

We all have to work to survive, in some way or other. And there are many odd jobs in the world to be had. In fact, I’ve worked over a hundred jobs in my life so far, and many of them were pretty odd.

Were they all legal? Technically, I doubt it. Was the pay decent? I gained experience, mostly. That doesn’t pay the bills, but it will build character. Here are some of the strangest jobs that have built my character.

Yard Worker — An old guy who lived behind the community swimming pool once paid my sister and me a few quarters to pick up fallen branches from his yard. Did he really need the help, or did he just wanted to see little ten-year-old girls in bikinis bending over?

Thankfully, one of my parents came out of the public restroom and got us very soon after we started. But how was this even allowed to begin in the first place?

General Store Clerk — At age thirteen, I minded a whole store on my own. One of my parents worked just downstairs at a ceramics business and wanted to keep an eye on me after school. But I guess it was better to potentially break child labor laws than to risk have me going off on my own to vandalize some nearby property after school.

Wood Tick Remover — During summers, I removed copious amounts of wood ticks from our dogs. The ticks would be all green and bloated with blood. The big, tough guys in the family wouldn’t even go near those ticks, which would then prompt me to chase the guys around with a handful of them, because I guess I was kind of an asshole back then.

Fire Starter — I’ve always been a little bit of a pyro, and so it has often been my job to get the family home’s living room fireplace going. I was especially handy when the wood was a little wet and everyone else who had tried to get the fire lit just ended up filling the house with smoke. Some people just have a way with a match. I can light a cigarette in a rainstorm with one, but don’t recommend it.

Dog Extinguisher — Speaking of fire, I could also stop what I started, because our dog’s tail burst into flame a lot and I had to deal with that. You see, she liked lying by the fireplace when it was full of burning chunks of wood, but every so often the fire would spit out an ember.

Then the ember would land in her fur and begin filling the room with smoke. Whenever that happened, I would have to leap off the couch and extinguish her big, fluffy tail before she noticed. Which thankfully, she never did. She would just lie there, wondering why I was slapping away at her fur and what that burning smell was.

Broken-Glass Handler — For some reason, my grandma loved broken glass, and kept handing bags of it to me and my little sister when we went to work in her yard. She had lined her yard with these cinder blocks and we needed to fill the holes in the blocks with glass. It was actually pretty sweet, the way the colorful broken glass glittered in the sun, though.

But it sucked when we would have to remove all those shards of glass from the cinder blocks, remove the weeds that were growing within them, and then place all the shards of glass back in. Our hands would always be bleeding by the end of the day. Where was OSHA back then?

Paper Jogger — Did you ever wonder how the pages of a book are stacked neatly together? That doesn’t happen by accident. They have something for that. A paper jogger is the name for a vibrating table, and also for a person who straightens stacks of paper. The vibrating table is a printing company’s tool of choice for wrangling tons of pages into neat stacks.

My coworkers made several bawdy jokes about what else a vibrating table could be used for. It was a real boring job and our imaginations ran wild.

Coupon Victim — You know those annoying little coupons that fall out of newspapers? Well, they’re a lot more annoying when a bindery machine is dumping out thousands of them on you, and you’re supposed to be putting them into newspapers, but the machines are going way faster than you are.

I often got buried in ads while standing, dazed in the assembly line, just like that scene in I Love Lucy where the candy factory’s conveyor belt goes out-of-control on Lucille Ball. Except unlike her, I didn’t get any chocolate.

TV Juror — I got paid to be a juror while watching ex-spouses battle over car custody and stuff, sometimes throwing their subpoenas and shit at each other. Judge Judy once told me to zip it because a plaintiff made me laugh.

Judge Joe Brown was more subdued, though. He just kind of flirted with all the ladies in court. Talk about justice in action! It was fun to feel like I was making a difference in the world, or at least pretending to for the cameras.

Famous Person Photographer — Speaking of cameras, remember the “Cootchie cootchie” flamenco guitarist Charo, and the “Tiny Bubbles” guy, Don Ho? I used to be a photographer at their clubs, snapping shots of their audience members. Then the stars would autograph those photos and I’d sell them back to the crowd. It was fun because most people were pretty thrilled to get their souvenir photos.

I could do my sales pitch in both English and Japanese, which helped double my tips. In fact, I even met other famous people this way, such as NFL star Jim McMahon and ex-First Lady of the Philippines, Imelda Marcos. Neither of them wanted their photo taken though, and they were pretty firm about that.

Student Waker-Upper — I worked for a company that had clients who needed me to wake them up. Some of them just needed the extra help because of their overbooked schedules or medical conditions. The students I roused were always just as irritated as they were appreciative.

So if you’re lucky enough to have a job, it’s probably not the worst one in the world. In fact, it might be more interesting than you realize. And if you’re currently in between jobs, don’t worry. There’s a whole world of weird shit out there to do, which means it won’t be long before someone’s paying you to work an odd job, too.