Weirdest/Strangest Job you ever had....

[MisterTinkles]

Perhaps my oddest job (which I still have a hand in, though I'm not accepting new customers at this time) is what I call a "proxy mail order" biz. At first I intended it to help secretly get mail order gifts for others but it quickly grew into getting all sorts of controversial magazines (from the paranoid to the horny) which I'd get and discreetly deliver without them worrying about people knowing they get that, the government watching me instead of them, and the spam would come to me. It was far more profitable than I thought, and when one guy thought I was about to drop him as a client he panicked and offered me double pay on the spot. But in addition I DO get a lot of spam, I especially love the color catalogs which I'd bleed with lacquer thinner onto freezer paper and sell as gift wrap (however, after I ran out of my thinner I haven't found any that wasn't at an outrageous price and have thus discontinued that service for the moment).

Some of my odd gigs are worthy of commentary. I guess the weirdest one was where a Russian American friend of mine got me a gig playing the "Snow Maiden" at a Russian Christmas/New Year's party (being held in America they had it in December as their jobs allowed). Sure, they were grabby and condescendingly sexist, but I didn't have to strip or have sex, just put on a performance of the Snow Maiden, a somewhat playful but naive (yet intrigued) granddaughter of Ded Moroz. But the drunker they got the more generous they got, they were actually competing to give me bigger tips (including hundred dollar bills)...holiday spending was not an issue that year.

Perhaps the funniest one time job was how a computer instructor at a community college was frustrated at trying to get his vox to work (definitely an example of how you can be brilliant but have no sense), and saying he'd given up on it I offered to fix it for $20. He was happy and I called up the manual online and instantly went to the "if it's not working then stop being stupid" section where I was quickly inspired to make sure all the screens match on both phones with the vox. One didn't and after I fixed that then it worked. I think it was like 2 minutes to fix and that includes getting the manual! I waited a couple of hours and lied about how it took me the entire time to figure it out so he wouldn't feel so bad and to be sure I got my $20. That had some amusing consequences down the line, too, but that's another story.

But I think the most surreal was how I made my own plushes & dolls but called them "originals" which allowed me to make well over 10x profit in selling them...and amazed that I got away with it I was doubly amazed when I saw the store that bought it from me more than double the price (approaching a hundred bucks)...and they sold within 3 months! :eek: I came close to focusing on my own "originals" after that but I'd had have to cut off some customers who really needed my services (making, mending, refitting for "specially sized" people--which can mean tall & thin as much as anything else, any size considered to trivial for big business to cater to), and it just felt shady somehow anyway.

Oh, btw, quick tip for those good with repairs! I was checking a bin at a Goodwill and found a nonfunctioning musical keyboard which I got for a single dollar and took to a friend of mine figuring he could fix it (and if not then I was only out a dollar) and sell it with a little of the profit kicked back to me as a "finder's fee." It took him less than an hour and less than $10 of parts and then he sold it within a month for $300! And my cut was $75, and he insisted I take that rather than take out the money for parts and advertisement, but probably to help himself feel better as after that he cut me out of the middle and went to find junk to fix and sell himself and made a pretty decent living at it on the side (with no kickbacks to me).

Gawd!!! You are doing good! Every "home" biz I have tried has failed. People want my stuff, but they expect me to give it to them for free....nobody wants to pay for it.

I would be interested in knowing more about this proxy mail order biz. Im still interested in something I can do at home, but so far I have not found anything that costs very little to start up, that I can do from home.

[MisterTinkles]

Mule......................................

You mean "big ass"?

[hank]

This is a fun topic. My weirdest job hands down was whenI worked for a trucking company. They hauledliquid latex in tanker trucks to various manufacturers. Liquid latex as you could imagine is quite thick and viscous. They used to just run their trucks back empty but they found the capacity ofthe tankers was getting lower and lower. So they decided to pay meand a few of others, handsomely I might add to squirm into the tankerand peel dried latex off of the inside of the trailer. It took me about 8 hours to peel the giant condom off of the inside of a tank trailer dueto squirming around the walls inside the tank. Once the fleet was picked clean of dried latex, we would ride with the delivery drivers and again squirm inside the tank and use a metal squeegee to scrap the liquid latex off of the inside of the tank.

I had to leave the job when I developed an allergy to latex.

[findingmyway]

Well, to be honest, I really haven't had a lot of strange jobs. Perhaps the strangest job, if I could classify it as such, would be when I was a witch hunter with Hansel and Gretel. They both talked in German, so I didn't understand a single thing that they said. We had some good times trying to destroy witches who wanted to bake us in ovens and eat us. I looked forward to the movie adaptation of our lives, but then I saw that they cut out my role. Budget reasons. So typical of Hollywood.

[Pix]

Gawd!!! You are doing good! Every "home" biz I have tried has failed. People want my stuff, but they expect me to give it to them for free....nobody wants to pay for it.

I can share plenty of experiences on that, too, and it's amazing how many get angry when they screw you over and then you refuse to do business with them ever again. It's one reason I found dependable clients and stuck with them, they're to be treasured. And if you can offer a service that no one else can then so much the better. It helps to remember that they need what you're providing, because if you seem desperate then many will take advantage of that.

ETA: it's early in the morning for me but I was suddenly wondering if I should share the details of my mail order biz as I did before I went to bed...after all I'm selling anonymity, not delivery. Let me think about it and maybe I'll repost, at least after I make sure I'm not compromising my service by sharing.

[CellarDweller]

I never had any strange jobs. LOL. Oh well!

[VileKyle]

I guess I haven't had anything too strange. I did have one job cleaning out storm drains with a giant vacuum truck, but that was really more dirty than strange. Other than that, I've been a life guard, fast food bitch, retail bitch, UPS bitch, Air Force plane mechanic (also a bitch), and assembly line bitch. I guess I've mostly been a bitch.

[sillyboy86]

I don't think I had a strange job, but sometimes I had strange tasks to do, maybe more interesting than strange. When I was working in a shop, my longest job experience I was doing also the windows-dressing, thanks to my creativity and the initiative of my bosses we did some similar 'themed-exhibitions' in the windows of the shop, and time after time it becomes a regular kind of setting for the windows.
For example we dressed a setting with very old books provided for a period from a collector, then the sculptures of an artist, then another, a motorbike etc etc etc...
So I had experience as a window dresser/visual merchandiser.

[partis]

Ive put cauliflowers in ready meals on an assembly line that never ends (if youve ever had a ready meal and asked yourself "how did that cauliflower get there" now you know i put it there

Ive made christmas wrapping paper… well i fed it out of a machine… well i tried… i destroyed more christmas wrapping paper than i produced

Theres some other things i did for money but thats not a job :p

[MisterTinkles]

I never had any strange jobs. LOL. Oh well!

Putting up with ME isn't strange?