What's The Strangest Job You Ever Had?

[Bama Red]

Title pretty much says it all. Ever had the job driving stiffs to the morgue? Been a cat sitter? Security guard to someone famous? Professional hat model (ala Utah Biob)? It's a slow Sunday, I cant go shooting. Let's hear 'em, funny, serious and evythîmg in between.

 

I'll go first: I used to deliver, poop,urine and blood samples from docs offices to the lab. Was also personal bodyguard to Dolly Parton when she came to town to perform - got asked for by name!

 

OK, folks - your turn!

[Ruff]

Howdy Red,

 

I have had several strange jobs. How about security at a morgue? Worked security and the company I worked for filled in at one of the local hospitals. So one night I got to hang out in the basement for trom midnight to 8.

 

Another time I guarded a freeway overpass. They were doing construction on the railing and had removed some of it. So they had us out there to keep the drunks from falling off.

 

Still another time got stuck guarding, patrolling to keep a section of a highway that had been extended between other freeways. They had us out there for a couple of weeks driving back and forth. Got good pay for that one and mileage. Actually made about half as much in mileage per shift and since I used my motorcycle I made out like a bandit..

[Noz]

Ribie goon!

 

Who knows what that was?

[Yellowhouse Sam # 25171]

Strange to some I suppose but how about studying the sex behavior of crop pests such as corn earworm, tobacco budworm, and fall armyworm moths? All with the goal of developing mating disruptants, etc.

[Yul Lose]

I was a typewriter and office machine repairman in my early twenties. There weren't no stinking computers back then.

[Tascosa, SASS# 24838]

I directed traffic (shut down lanes on secondary roads) for the Convoy movie. Got to eat with the stars... All good people back then.

[Alpo]

Ribie goon!

 

Who knows what that was?

 

A two-legged Agent Orange?

 

http://www.rmrs.nau.edu/publications/shaw_2010/shaw_2010.pdf

[Gunner Gatlin, SASS 10274L]

Dad

 

GG

[Tyrel Cody]

Dad

 

GG

+10000000000000000

[Noz]

 

A two-legged Agent Orange?

 

http://www.rmrs.nau.edu/publications/shaw_2010/shaw_2010.pdf

He's a winner. We pulled, root and all, the three varieties of gooseberry that were the alternate species for the white pine blister rust disease. the spores had to go from a pine tree to a gooseberry before it could infect other pine trees. Try doing that for every square foot of the St. Joseph National Forest.

The camp cooks were marvels. I never saw as much good food nor have I ever eaten as much as I did then. The cooks would shoot black bear out the door of the cook tent. Gun of choice? 22LR.

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

Driving stiffs to the morgue?

More to it than meets the eye.

Y'see, our ambulance service handled emergency, non-emergency, body transport and funeral duty.

One high top Cadillac ambulance, four Cadillac hearses and one 1962 Pontiac hearse for hauling hospital beds and oxygen tanks (which our service rented out. Beds and oxygen, not the car.)

Body runs were a one-man assignment.

I was sent to Springfield to pick up a deceased.

Between Columbus and Dayton the ground is flat as a file. At 4 in the morning it's black as your hat. In a driving thunder storm it gets interesting.

Especially when the stgorm cell is directly overhead and lightning hits the median about 1/4 mile ahead and I'm looking in the mirror at that moment.

You see, the dearly departed slept sitting up for a quarter of a century; upon death, laid down flat with no blood circulating, lactic acid built up in the tensioned abdominal muscles.

Just as I looked in the mirror, the corpse sat up -- broke the chest strap with the sound of a pistol shot -- I saw it rise in the sustained magnesium glare of the lightning strike -- it sat up and it moaned.

I had no trouble staying awake for the rest of the trip.

Told this to our Asst Chief and he laughed and said when he came back from the second war, a buddy of his ran a funeral home and employed him for the night shift.

They two picked up a deceased in a thunder storm and on the way to the funeral home the driver/owner was having a nicotine fit.

They pulled over somewhere in Canton at a new innovation -- why, who woulda thunk -- an all night convenience store! -- and went in for a pack of smokes.

The owner/driver went inside the store, Hoss was in the shotgun seat, knock knock on the window ... a sailor looking like a drowned rat, asked for a ride.

"We got room in the back but there's a body back there."

"With what I saw in the South Pacific, that's nothing."

Driver came out and didn't know he had an additional passenger.

The sliding window between front and back was open; he broke the seal on a pack of Luckies, that first fragrant blue cloud went rolling through the open window, and the sailor reached through, tapped the driver on the shoulder and said "Hey buddy, can I have one of those?"

They took out a telephone pole and a plate glass window.

[The Original Lumpy Gritz]

Dad

 

GG

Yup-Been one 5 times. Best job also.

LG

[Sparky Nelson]

Dad

 

Darn straight. My wife and I had to sign some papers at an office about 2 blocks from home. We left our girls, age 7 and 5, at home with clear instructions to not answer the phone and not open the door for ANYBODY. We were gone 10 minutes. When we got back both girls, the kitchen floor, and the kitchen cabinets to a height of 3 feet were coated in flour and dish detergent.

 

We both about popped a spleen trying to not laugh while lecturing the girls about trust and responsibility.

[Guest Milo Talon SASS #23163]

Picked up eggs on an egg ranch when I was a teen. Dirty and kind of gross, had to snap a few necks every day to put some of them out of their misery. Didn't eat chicken or eggs for two or three years after that.

[J-BAR #18287]

Chicken phlebotomist.

 

I was hired as a lab gofer by the Agricultural Engineering department at the University of Missouri for a summer job. They were doing heat stress studies on chickens. Since I was a veterinary student, I got the job of drawing blood samples from about 500 chickens. Had to do it several times for each bird over the summer. I was supposed to do it without killing them, but the volume of blood required for the various assays made that a challenge. We could not even eat my failures.

 

The blood samples were stored in a freezer for later analysis. I found out two years later that all the blood samples had been discarded by mistake by a graduate student.

[The Shoer 27979]

Picked up eggs on an egg ranch when I was a teen. Dirty and kind of gross, had to snap a few necks every day to put some of them out of their misery. Didn't eat chicken or eggs for two or three years after that.

I grew up in Petaluma California, use to be know as the egg basket of the world back in the '50s. I worked on a couple of chicken ranche gathering eggs also work at a couple egg processing plants, I take great delight in eating eggs and chicken

[Three Foot Johnson]

Due to high blood lead, I was once removed from my regular pipefitter's job in a lead smelter and sent to hand pick deer droppings out of the yards of the manager & foreman's housing complex next door to the plant for several weeks til my lead count went down.

[Marshal Mo Hare, SASS #45984]

I have picked up eggs but shoveling the poop out of the house was worse. Shoveled poop for chickens, cows, and pigs. But that doesn't hold a candle to some of the jobs I did when I worked at the packing plant.

 

There were some jobs I did there that I recall as being among the worst. Sometimes I did odd jobs on the killing floor. They got an order for about two days' kill of brains. I got to run this huge slicer blade that had a slot in it about where the cow's brain would be. Play the skull in the right place, push the button, the blade came down and spilt the skull in two. I had to reach in and pull the brain out and put it in a tub. If the skul bones shattered and I felt a lot of bone shards in the brain, the whole skull and brain went to rendering (where they normally went anyway).

 

Working in the hide cellar was not very enjoyable. I didn't mind most of the jobs I had on the killing floor but trimmed weasons would activate a gag reflex something wicked. There was a black guy who normally did that job but when he was on a bender, I had to do it. Had to take the weason (esophagus) as it came from the eviscerated carcus, turn it inside out and skin the throat lining off it. When I got backed up some just went to rendering.

 

Sometimes I got to do the dogfood delivery. This was not the USDA type dogfood. The slaughterhouse had an old, no longer passable refrigerator that was used for storing udders, tripes, and lungs until they could be put into rusty barrels and taken to the dogfood factory in East Boston. Some tripes and lungs went out as USDA and had better refrigeration but not these.

 

There were a few times that I did a special delivery of "a package" to someone. Didn't ask any questions at the time but in restrospect, it was probably a payoff and related to something illegal.

[Badlands Bob #61228]

I was about 16 years old and a buddy of mine asked me to take over his job for 2 weeks at Y.D. Maddox's meat processing shop. I had to go in there every evening at 6:00 p.m. after all the meat cutters had gone home. They had been sawing, grinding and chopping up cows all day and had made a big mess in this concrete room. My job was to clean up everything in the room. It took forever the first night and it was pointed out the next day that it still wasn't right. I finally got better at it after 2 weeks but I decided I had no future in the meat packing industry. At least in the cleaning part of it.

[Krazy Kajun]

YD Mattox...now there is a local character. Look at it this way...the job prepared you for your current position!

 

I guess the most different kind of job I had was mowing the sides and tops of the containment berms in a tank farm at a gasoline refinery...used to be called Cities Service (Citgo). We used a Gravely scissor mower that had two loops welded on the frame. Two guys would walk on top of the levee holding ropes tied to the loops to keep the mower from turning over sideways while mowing the side of the levee. Another guy would walking on the side of the levee running the mower. The tank farm was close to the river and we found our share of water mocassins and other assorted creep crawlers. There was also a plethora of yellow jackets or hornets that had their holes/lhomes in the sides of the levees. Nothing stirs up an angry nest of those buggers more than running a mower blade over the top of their hole. The guy walking behind the mower would get bit (hit) from behind. All hell broke loose when a swarm of those things swarm out of their hole.

 

Second candidate was working at that same refinery doing what is called a "turn around", a planned maintenance shutdow, on a catalytic cracking unit where crude oil is refined into gasoline. We go to clean the inside of tall smoke stacks. We started at the top and basically scraped the insides walls working from the top down. We had air blown in at the top of the stack while we worked...wearing resperator masks and long sleeved jumpsuits and gloves and working at night. It was awfully hot and muggy during the summer months in South Louisiana and then you factor in the heat stored in the metal walls of the stacks. We sweat buckets when we were on that project.

[SaukValley Sam, SASS # 66557]

As Ernie Ford used to say, I was a pea picker - first summer out of HS. DelMonte Foods, Mendota, Illinois (Ran a pea combine as big as a tractor trailer pulled by a Minneapolis Moline G1000 farm tractor.)

[Marlin Buckhorn,SASS 51727]

I, like Marshal Mo Hare, worked in a slaughter house in my youth. Most interesting was the "Condemned Room". The USDA inspectors actually locked you in a large cage. All the condemned organs, cattle & unborn calves came down a shoot to a table in the room. Just had to sort and cut hunks then send it into a big grinder. But the unborn calves were special. Had to pump the blood out of them through their umbilical and collect in special bottles for cancer research. After that was done you had to skin them. Not pleasant at all.

 

Also shoveled cooked blood & etc away from the auger in the basement of the plant. Hot, stinky and so many other nasty things.

[Cat Brules]

Strange to some I suppose but how about studying the sex behavior of crop pests such as corn earworm, tobacco budworm, and fall armyworm moths? All with the goal of developing mating disruptants, etc.

 

Did y'all try putting the mother-in-laws in with the mating pair?

[Chili Pepper Kid, SASS #60463]

Worked security at a Milli Vanilli concert.

Portrayed "Wintergreen" one of Santa's elves.

Elvis impersonator

[Professor Tull, SASS #66742]

Installing sirens, radios, red light [one, the size of a bubble gum machine], shotgun racks, steering wheels [smaller diameter], 'spec' tires, back seat restraints, light flashers, larger radiators, and a more efficient, but smaller air cleaner, high performance shocks and sway bar, on Studebaker Larks that were being delivered to the Tulsa Police Department in the early 60's for use as patrol cars.

Tull

[Yellowhouse Sam # 25171]

 

Did y'all try putting the mother-in-laws in with the mating pair?

We tried just about everthing Cat...you wouldn't believe half of it!

[Yul Lose]

Installing sirens, radios, red light [one, the size of a bubble gum machine], shotgun racks, steering wheels [smaller diameter], 'spec' tires, back seat restraints, light flashers, larger radiators, and a more efficient, but smaller air cleaner, high performance shocks and sway bar, on Studebaker Larks that were being delivered to the Tulsa Police Department in the early 60's for use as patrol cars.

Tull

After my stint as a typewriter repairman I got a job installing two way radios. About six months after I started the local Police Dept. got a VW Beetle to use as their DARE mobile. I had the job of making everything fit, i.e. Light bar, siren, Unitrol controller and all of the other stuff that would go on a cop car back then. In addition they wanted us to install this voice activated cassette recorder that would broadcast over the siren speaker a comedy routine between the talking DARE mobile and the DARE officer that went around to all of the schools. Well the techs that built the system thought that it would be a hoot to make another cassette that would prank the DARE officer. Instead of Drug Awareness Resistance Education they got the DARE car to say Drugs Are Really Excellent when the officer tried it the first time out in the shop in front of my boss and the police chief and some others that were there. I damn near lost my job over that one and I didn't even know what was going on.

[Badlands Bob #61228]

YD Mattox...now there is a local character. Look at it this way...the job prepared you for your current position!

 

That's true. I did get over being squeamish about dead things.

[Rye Miles #13621]

Packaging kazoos and slide whistles

[El Sabre]

Not my job, but it's too much fun not to tell.

 

Early in 1969, I was in USAF basic training and clobbered up my leg, so I spent a couple weeks in Wilford Hall Hospital, Lackland AFB, Texas. Fellow came in from Vietnam, had burned his face on a hot truck muffler after diving under there to avoid incoming mortar fire. He was from the area, it turned out, and had worked at one of the many turkey farms around central Texas.

 

His job? "Extracting" the turkey semen for injection into the females. That's all I have to say about that.

[Captain Bill Burt]

I was paid to slip dollar bills into the gstrings of exotic dancers. Tough work, but someone had to do it so I cowboyed up.

[Frio Kid, SASS #31915]

Pulled the tassles off corn when I was 11 years old, you were supposed to be at least 12 but I lied about my age. Those corn rows were a mile long and the corn was 6' tall or better, all you could see was corn everywhere. Sometimes you would start to wonder if you were ever going to get to the end of the row. Once in awhile a pheasant would jump up next to you and wake you up a little.

[Marcus Aurelius L'Ollonois]

Not necessarily strange, but I was a corn detassler corn during my Junior High and High School years...

[Rye Miles #13621]

I also worked one summer in a cemetery! That was fun!

 

In my teens I sold apples door to door and eggs too.

 

I also had a part time job once delivering brooms, towels and oven mitts for a charity group.

And the best summer job I had when I was 17 I drove an ICE CREAM TRUCK

 

DADDY JOE'S ICE CREAM AND TREATS!!!!

 

The song was Pop goes the weasel!!!

 

Rye

[Forty Rod SASS 3935]

I was a pearl diver at Yellowstone National Park one summer.

 

Really and truely, I was.