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

I used to work on a bar strip in a popular city. I would dress up as a pizza slice, sing songs, beatbox, dance, take pictures, and sell pizza to drunk people. It was awesome.

I spent the summer of 2005 working a night shift as a writer/editor on the tv series Big Brother.

Very strange. I felt like Ed Harris in the Truman Show. But the best thing was, we were all at desks on the big sound stage at Elstree Studios, where films like Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark were made.

Under my desk in yellow chalk, it said GOTHAM CITY WEST as they’d just finished filming a Batman film there.

I once got paid to give out free samples of coffee at a gas station. I got there at 5am to be given this huge backpack with a giant container of coffee in it, and it had an air compressed nozzle that I would use to spray coffee into sample size cups.

I was told to approach anyone pumping gas and give them one and it was a disaster. The air pressure was too much so the coffee would blast out every time and get all over my clothes. I kept burning myself as a result. It was a heatwave so no one really wanted them anyways and people laughed in my face. Multiple people also told me I should have gone to college, which I was. This was just part of a summer job before my senior year.

It was humiliating and I never went back.

I posed nude for a photographer lady a few times. I felt pretty awkward, but hey, 100 euros is 100 euros. I needed the money, badly

I'm going to spin 'weird' here a bit.

The summer before my last year of college I worked at a moving company in a southern city where my two crew members were Julio and Sanchez. They always spoke Spanish to each other but once they saw I could pull my weight they would start including me in their conversations.

Man! Those summers got up to the high 90s and we were moving some heavy s**t, I mean like grand pianos up two stories. Julio and Sanchez were my guardians that summer and they were making $7.25 an hour...

Before that summer I was stressed about finishing my degree and getting a job - I felt like I had a new lease on life after that experience. I finished my degree and found a job after going through that.

I'm not saying everyone needs that kick in the butt, but it worked for me.

I was once a mall Santa. The problem is I am 5’4 and at the time weighed around 135 lbs so they had to stack a bunch of extra pillows. Someone I work with took a picture and I brought it home for my mom who puts it up on the fridge every year for Christmas…she says I look like Santa with advanced stage colon cancer.

When I was a teenager, I got a summer job working at a local "root and herb" production facility. My job was literally just dumping giant sacks of medicinal leaves, usually sassafras, into a giant industrial grinders, then shoveling the powder into a different sack to be sold to overseas markets. The thing was, we'd often have to mix in like anywhere from 20% to 40% filler material, usually some useless plant material, to make more profit because "the Chinese buyers will be none the wiser." The kicker is, the person that owned the business that did blatantly shady practices was also the mayor of the small town. Go figure.

Got called in to do repair work occasionally on a fish farm, dived down to the nets (18m deep about 10m diameter) and came up in a circle fixing holes in the net, the holes were caused by sharks trying to get in. The nets were full of metre long fish (barramundi) which constantly bumped into me. Then all the fish got some sort of disease and their scales started rotting so basically the entire stock died. They called myself and afew colleagues in to come and remove all the dead fish. The nets with all the dead fish were too heavy to be pulled up so we had to go down and scoop dead fish into nets which were then raised by a crane and dumped on a barge. The fish bones went through the wetsuit like hypodermic needles and I stunk like all hell for a fortnight. We scooped like half the fish into smaller nets reducing the weight until they could lift the whole big net out the water. Took us two weeks and I think it was something ridiculous like 20 tonnes or more of fish. But for 200 dollars a day for a fortnight, worth it.

My uncle owns a business and hired me to put stamps on over 10,000 letters. That was tedious and weird. But hey I made $100.

Taking paper bags full of cash to people no questions asked.

I once worked for a Seattle cellular startup that installed cell phones in the seat backs of American Airlines planes (this was back when they would not let you use your own). My job was to follow with a plane testing the phones, logging issues, educate flight crew on how they worked and giving free calls to passengers to promote the phones. I would fly all around the world in first class 3-4 days a week.

In Canada when I was a teenager in the 90's I worked for TransCanada Pipelines for a summer job. It was mostly cleaning stuff and shadowing permanent workers with any help they needed, but for a month during the summer 10 of us student and a permanent employee went out to walk the lines in eastern Ontario.

We split in 3 teams of three and we were basically walking over the pipelines with a sniffer to detect leaks. In a team we had one of us in front receiving a magnetic field from the pipelines, followed by another operating the sniffer and lastly someone sending the magnetic pulse so the first one could know where to walk.

Pipelines run 3 wide in this area hence why we had such a big team. We were very well payed and our work was totally useless as any leaks would be detected by the helicopter that runs the length of the pipelines every week. Vegetation would quickly die around a leak and it would be obvious, but because the company's insurance got a huge rebate if we walked the lines every summer, it was better for the company to pay us than to have an increase in the insurance policies.

I worked there 2 summers, best tan I ever had.

TL,DR: I worked as a line walker for a pipeline company. Totally useless aside from lowering insurance policies.

As a student I worked as an personal assistant for a guy in a wheelchair. He grew his own [substances], so part of my job was watering his plants and sometimes I helped harvesting and bag them...

Internship at a sex shop….
Don’t ask me how but my school managed to find a spot in the financial sector at a sex shop.

I kid you not, the lady was the only person working there and she had 4 interns managing the whole business whilst she was maybe a few hours each week at the shop.

At one point she even said f**k it, you guys are managing the shop as well.

We had no idea wtf we were supposed to do.
One time a customer came in and asked us if we could sell some [substances].
We said we don’t sell that here, he went away and we called our boss explaining what happened.
She yelled at us through the phone for not selling him [substances] because apparently she sold [substances].
Note that [substances] are allowed in our country but only to be sold at verified stores.

After that (this was like 1.5/2months into the intern ship and we were supposed to be there for 9 months) we were all like hell no, we ain’t getting paid so we won’t deal with this s**t.

She was unstable as f**k shouting at us if we did something wrong if she was at the office/shop so we left a note on the door that is was closed, locked the door, inform our school and left the f**k out of there.

I used to work for a humane society like organization...but only for cats...and they would raise most of their money by putting on plays...I would drive around and pickup the money for said plays. It was called "Cats Second Chance"

Oddly enough I also worked at a youth detention center as..idk a Narc? Lol I sat in my car with a walkie talkie and was to alert security if there was an escapee...however could do nothing to stop said escapee bc we were sub contracted lol...So I'd be like "Ya Tony we got a runner in sector 3...Good luck." The kids used to pretend to shoot me with fake guns and throw fake grenades at my car.