35 Stories About The Weirdest Jobs That People Had The Opportunity To Experience

I used to live down the road from a cabaret club in Japan - like a place where you paid to drink with girls and talk to them, basically. Not overtly sexual but if the cabaret girl was willing it could be. I used to stay up late back then so often bumped into them coming back from work around 2-3am. Some of them were basically my neighbors and I offered some supper once. They rarely ate properly if at all and drank too much at work so they took to the supper with the type of gusto you only get when you're drunk-peckish.

I guess they liked my cooking. And I was a decent listener I suppose, so they hung around more and more and got guilty about eating too much of my food.

That turned into me getting this weird gig where I got paid to essentially make food for 5-6 cabaret girls per night and let them drink bottled tea and b***h about their clients till they sobered up. Sometimes they puked or had to crash at mine because they were too wasted; if that happened they often paid me a bit more out of embarassment despite me insisting they didn't have to. Some of them made BANK. 10k to 15k USD per month on average. I was paid like 40 per head so could make 200 per night in cash usually. Did that 2-3 days a week while I was living in Japan. Weird but really not all that bad and supplemented my living costs nicely.

At the end of the day, they just wanted someone to talk to after a long day and homemade food to come back to.

One of my friend's aunt works as a professional shoplifter 😀

Her work is to go into shops and try to shoplift. Later they analyize the act and discuss it with management how to avoid it, what training could the employees go through or what security systems could help them prevent.

I was a stand-in boyfriend for girls to take home during festival periods. Just so the girl don’t have to deal with the parents / grandparents grilling them for being single / leftover woman.

Was a fun gig, I got free food, meet some nice and interesting people. Stopped now that I’m married but my wife still wants to [sell] me out for that extra $ LOL

Making glockenspiels. I still have that amazing and weird job

Took a job mowing grass at the town graveyard.

I was 20 at the time.

Oddly enough certain parts of the graveyard had a….weight or feeling - some parts felt light, welcoming and peaceful; other areas felt dark, depressing and heavy. I remember not liking to mow certain areas or tombstones.

It was definitely an interesting job and one I’m glad I experienced.

When studying a year abroad in China, I was paid to attend a conference on petrol/chemical developments to make it look more international. Basically listened two days to stuff I did not understand in a cheap suit in a random Chinese industrial city.

Underwater videographer for a National Geographic documentary shoot on Tiger Sharks.

There were always two of us underwater for the filming. One with the camera and the other one just behind and above with a long aluminium pole with a crossbar on the end. We called it 'the Defender Pole'.

If any shark came too close (these were some very large sharks) to the cameraman, you'd give it a gentle boop on the snoot with 'The Defender Pole'.

Fun times

EDIT: Thanks for all the updoots, comments and interest.

Some further background on the Tiger Shark doco - it was headed by a guy named Greg Marshall, who invented a device called "Crittercam" to attach to wildlife such as sharks, turtles, lions and stuff. He was the Nat Geo producer, and along with the amazing Birgit Buhleier, headed the documentary project.

Monkey Mia in Shark Bay, Western Australia is a very remote beach resort famous for the wild dolphin population which comes in close to the beach most days. The greater Shark Bay area is home to a huge & diverse range of marine life - including a s**tload of sharks of course.

There is a resident group of international scientists who come from all over the world to study there (dolphins, sharks, turtles). One of the PhD candidates was studying Tiger Sharks (Mike Heithaus) and Nat Geo teamed up with him to film his research as part of the documentary storyline - including putting Crittercams on the dorsal fins of the sharks to see what they did in their natural habitat. The sharks would be temporarily caught on static lines, then measured, blood samples taken etc - and then the Cam would be temporarily attached to the fin.

A lot of our filming work was to be underwater during the catch and release stage - Ian Kellett (the Head Cinematographer and great friend from then on) & myself, one of us filming, the other on Boop Snoot duties with The Defender Pole as the shark swam away. The Crittercam would automatically release after some hours, we would retrieve the device and they would study the footage. It was fascinating af

I was a Fortune Cookie Writer.

I had a Chinese translator who used to write my quotes in Chinese on the other side.

Delivering beverage ice to a nudists retreat. People are not attractive...

I once asked a guy what he did for work and he told me he 'drove a granny stripper'. I assumed this was slang for some road building or agricultural machinery, but nope... He was the driver for a 70 year old stripper.

I was 14-15 and a the mom of a friend was a cook in a diplomatic residence. She told me that they were looking for a responsible guy to be a valet. Since it was about to be new year's eve I assumed it was just for the party and showed up. Hired on the spot and went to work. All went well and in the morning the head of the staff told me that I had January 1st free, but I was expected the next day at 6AM and that they would have a new uniform for me. I realized then it was not a one time gig, and kept my mouth shut because the money was good.

I did wonder how many cars would enter everyday to a residence that they needed a fulltime valet. The answer was two. At most. It was the most boring job ever. I even offered to help around the house or the garden and I was immediately and drastically reprimanded by the head of staff, which left me confused at the moment. I later realized it was because all the staff had just the one job with one task and they were also making bank, so they wanted to preserve the status quo.

I worked as Night Auditor in a hotel. Was getting ready to put out breakfast around 4am one morning and had a windex spray bottle in one hand and a small towel in the other, for cleaning the sneeze guards. Someone came down the stairs behind me and said "Excuse me?" When I turned around there was a large man a few steps away moving toward me without a stitch of clothes on. I instinctively raised the windex bottle and towel like a gun and shield. As if that was going to do anything. He put his hand up as if to signal "don't shoot". I laughed and he laughed. He said he was locked out of his room because he forgot his key. I asked him if he had a piece of ID on him. Of course, I could see he didn't... Somehow we managed to wake someone up in his room who could vouch for him. Surprisingly enough, it turned out rather innocent. Of course intoxicants were involved. Best part is my manager gave me security video from that night so I have a VHS of the whole thing.

I used to work for the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, Weights and Measures Division— I was in charge of making sure all rulers were exactly 12 inches long.

Worked on a public health research project going out to bars and clubs at 1am, chatting to the patrons and asking to do saliva [substance] tests and breath tests. When people realised I wasn’t a cop they’d get all their friends to join in and see who could get the “highest score” on the breathalyser. Had a lot of people swear at me, and quite a few hit on me. Was super weird, but heaps of fun.

As a teen I counted the coins in kiddy rides and public phones. No machine to help me, just a 15 year old lugging around sacks of coins and then counting them by hand in a spare office.

I was also a mascot in various animal costumes at shopping centres and sporting events.

And I would sometimes work as the mascot minder - your job is to stop kids from kicking the mascot in the groin or ripping off the costume head. You learn to spot the evil kids and cut them off at the pass, intercept the blow and apply a painful (but non obvious) grip to convince them to bugger off.

I was the guy who scraped ice smooth on a bobsled track. Weirdly fun job actually

I worked in a place that made prescription orthopedic insoles.
You would get plaster molds of feet from the doctor, clean them up, and then mold an insole for the patient.
I mostly did finishing stuff and cleanup. Entry level stuff.

The craziest part was that the molds were considered medical records, so you had to keep them on hand for six months. So we just had shelves and shelves of plaster feet molds, and every day you would go to the shelf from six months and a day old and throw away a bunch of feet.

I was the shop hand at a smalltime auto body shop for the better part of last year. The boss just had me do his errands when there was nothing for me to do around the shop.

I’d drive into the city and pick up his prescriptions. Pick up his booze, misc groceries, water softener, stuff like that. He got me to clean his BBQ once. Pull weeds from his man made beach which surrounded a pond he had that he had on his property. Cut his grass. The guy was loaded and he paid me well for what he had me doing. But it was just such a funny job, my boss was quite the character too. Just an old drunk, but a sweetheart.

Edit: also I think the reason he got me to do all this running around for him was because he would drink all day in the office. He would try to hide it but we all knew.

I worked for a very wealthy guy for several months in my 20s. Five times a week I showed up at the office that was set up just for me to use, sometimes went out with him to try new restaurants, worked on his new ventures, went to auctions, amusement parks, did random things he had in his mind that day. He usually carried stases of cash, probably at least 30-50k worth, for him to spend on that evening for entertainment, like hanging out with beautiful women.
I think he kept me around to kill his boredom and loneliness but mainly because I never cared for his money and was able to hold intelligent conversations. He was a classy guy in his 60s and treated me with respect. I left because I decided to go back to school but my mom who introduced me to this guy kept in touch for a while.

Worked as a private engineer to a rich family in Portugal. I maintained they're mansion and two super yachts. They paid me good money but after years of being woken up in the night to change their bedroom AC up or down one degree I felt like more of a slave than a highly trained engineer so I quit and now work as a Hydraulic engineer in the super yacht industry.