[Closed] Odd jobs

Never did it myself, but as a kid often saw adverts for a 'pig sexer' at a local farm. Never did find out what the job entailed...

gender reassignment for a fibreglass reindeer

Pawnbroker.

Jeffrey Archer's 'friend' Monica Coghlan was a regular customer. Nice woman.

heh! I've done a few.

Chicken shed cleaner (nasty job!)

Rat catcher at various establishments. I was also asked to deal with other vermin too. Bigger vermin. Ones that traditionally catch rats. That was quite hard actually.

Kitchen porter is a terribly underrated but back breaking job. You'll come home every night covered in crap....hot, sweaty and exhausted. But it's a great way to pull waitresses.

Drayman - Jebus those guys are strong. Spend a summer working with them and come out with a back and arms that are very impressive. And they drink a pint at every pub! That'll be 15 pints easy by the end of the day. I bet that's changed nowadays.

Clay shoot puller. Fun.

Pirate venison butcher. This was an interesting one, not technically legal but very well paid. We'd pull up in a car park in a van, another van would pull up next to us, a couple of deer (dead) would get lobbed across and we'd depart. I never really got skilled enough to butcher the deer correctly but I learned a lot about how mammals are put together.

illustrated letters page for Which? magazine and other feature spreads.
Illustrated Childrens book written by Childrens Laureate
Illustrations for Guardian, Nat West, New Scientist, all sorts of stuff.

Tbh I've done a few.....I picked up camel dung in Egypt..they burn it as fuel.totally dry cos of the heat. Worked in a bank sorting out money...that was a bit of a hard one,didn't have any cash yet spent all day sorting it out.loading a furnace with notes is a bit odd

Turkey Wan@@ng is my best one!!!

Bobby at work, I've counted money in an underground bunker as well. Dirty dirty job!

Used to have to take down hay stacks and re stack them in barns/stables (cash plus as much hay as I could carry home)

ripping fitted wardrobes out of houses. fun times

Cleaning fat from clogged sewer systems. Awfully smelly & filthy work, also not good if you dislike bugs & spiders.

Once had a job throwing bowler hats at spies.....

Other than that picking cabbages for transplant

Brewer in a pub micro brewery.

Spent a summer as a Deckchair Distribution Technician. If you imagine bikini clad young beach babes corvoting around around the beach playing beach ball? More like OAPs tipping you the wink. Not saying there wasn't any young beach babe action. 😉

2 summer months as a cycle courier in that there London. Got knocked off a least daily. Made me an angry cyclist for a while. I didn't have a clue.

Stripped a factory of all of the copper wiring. Then stripped the insulation off it to get a better price at the scrap dealer. Not sure if that one was strictly legal?

Pirate venison butcher. This was an interesting one, not technically legal but very well paid. We'd pull up in a car park in a van, another van would pull up next to us, a couple of deer (dead) would get lobbed across and we'd depart. I never really got skilled enough to butcher the deer correctly but I learned a lot about how mammals are put together.

Handy that for disposing of the wife.

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job I ever 'ad[/url]
Classic.....

An ex of mine worked as a hairdresser in a rough scheme. A couple of the local neds started demanding protection money from one of the shops who paid, then tried demanding from others who didn't. Instead, they paid a couple of friends and partners to guard the shops. I was one of them. Effectively, I was a bouncer in a hairdresser's shop.
Lifeguard - on a boat which tied on to a bridge and stayed there all day every day all year round as a safety boat to the painters who, like on the Forth Bridge, were permanently employed to paint the bridge.
Motorcycle courier - not very odd, just really, really good fun
A one off job mucking out around a hundred horse stables on a farm in Germany. Didn't really speak German at the time, but they gave me a pitch fork and pointed me to the stables.
Cinema projectionist - 2 projectors and film reels that were 20 minutes long. Load 1 projector, set it to 8 seconds before the sart of the images, start it running 8 seconds before the end of the running reel, then switch over by shutting off the light source which was a massive voltage arcing between 2 carbon rods (watch an old film on telly, keep an eye on the top right hand side of the screen, every 20 minutes you'll see a white circle or oval followed by another 8 seconds later, first one is get the next projector running, second one is switch projectors). Then rewind the shown reel using fingers as a guide - no fingerprints on thumb or first 2 fingers.
Barmen - not odd, but it was in France and I didn't speak French, well not for a week or two, but you pick it up.

I was once Sammy the Seal at a sea life center.

Lord of the Flies 8)

Choc Ice Straightener

(16 hour shift watching choc ices jump from one conveyor to another. About once every 2 hours, a choc ice would need straightening very quickly so as not to clog the packaging machine.)

[i]Turkey Wan@@ng is my best one[/i]

As long as you didn't have to gobble.

I was once a fruit chopper in a cocktail bar in Liverpool

Always wanted to work in a condom factory as a tester but apparently you have to work a week in hand first (buddumm tish)

Professional mourner. Had to work a wake in hand.

Litter picker at a land fill site.

Was a "patient" for junior doctors examinations for a couple of days. Had my patellar reflex tested about 70 times by guys who didn't really know what they were doing. Had a sore knee by the end but apart from that I just had to sit there!

shift supervisor in a bed testing facility - often had to wake a hand at work

Also worked at a biscuit factory....first day made myself sick on Jaffa cakes,didn't eat them for a year....

Got the task of laying a road down a very steep incline...never built a road before alway wanted to go back to Corfu and see if its still they're...about 500m long too.best job for a lazy scamp was a jet ski attendant,swam to work every morning and basically lazed around in the sun on a floating pontoon giving freebies to hot ladies...very chilled!

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life model.

bigblackshed - Member
2 summer months as a cycle courier in that there London. Got knocked off a least daily. Made me an angry cyclist for a while. I didn't have a clue.

shark feeder

Spent a summer as a Deckchair Distribution Technician. If you imagine bikini clad young beach babes corvoting around around the beach playing beach ball? More like OAPs tipping you the wink. Not saying there wasn't any young beach babe action.

A friend did that - he had to repair them too. H took one apart and put it together in such a way that it looked right but no matter what you did you couldn't put it up. He'd give it to arsey customers - no matter how arsey they were not one of them was arsey enough to bring the chair back and admit they couldn't set it up.

I once worked on a crumpet making machine, which is a fantastic big clanky sizzly thing. Sorting crumpets into stacks for packagin also gives you baby-smooth hands.

I also briefly cleaned loos/bathrooms and did the dishes on Royal Navy battleships when they were in port. (Devonport dockyard). You'd get to wander around all sorts, and the sailors were very decent to us -I always imagined they were pleased they were getting a few weks off the crappiest chores... Sometimes you'd finish your shift, come out on deck to go home and find you were a mile out in Plymouth Sound. 😯

In a past life, I worked for a construction company building kids' playgrounds. You know those 'soft play' things with ball pits (bazinga!) and suchlike that used to be popular in McDonalds? Those.

Interesting work, but bloody back-breaking. We worked 12 hours a day, seven days a week when out on site (because the boss was a tightwad who wanted to save on hotel bills). Lugging heavy components about, lots of manual labour, and I'm only little.

Spud packing, back breaking shifting 25kg sacks all day as a 16yr old was very strong at the start of the rugby season though! 🙂

Tomato picking, whole day in a green house the size of a foot ball pitch, so hit and you'd turn the shower green because of all the pollen!

Waste water operator everything on a sewage works never felt the same about sweet corn and rice since!!
I always chose the best job money wise if it's honest why not it paid my way through Uni!

Best job I crewed on racing yachts in the Caribbean just great as a 23yr old!! Met Mrs Wookster out there best thing that's happened to me.

LBS monkey

Once spent a day dressed as a gorilla giving out leaflets,with a girl dressed as a tiger, by mid afternoon we dumped the leaflets and indulged in some cross species experiments in her flat. we got paid as well

nicko74 - Member
bigblackshed - Member
2 summer months as a cycle courier in that there London. Got knocked off a least daily. Made me an angry cyclist for a while. I didn't have a clue.

Really curious as to how you got on at this - were you a fit cyclist beforehand? Afterwards? How did it work out cash-wise, and quality of life-wise?

I only did it for 2 months. It was a time of my life spent bumming about, I'd work hard for a bit in dead end jobs then go travelling somewhere. Never to far off places, just the UK and Western Europe. A freind was working for a traditional motorbike couriers which were looking to get in to the short hop cycle courier biz. This was the summer of '93. I only agreed to do it for 2 months as I was off to France for the autumn surf season.

I thought I was reasonable fit before! But bimbling about the woods for a few hours was not good prep. It was the stop start nature that was the killer. Also hanging about waiting for a job. Some days I barely made a fiver when I stupidly sat in coffee shops in Soho to get out of the rain. The best day was when the tip off one guy doubled my earnings to over £40!!!!!!! It will not make you rich.

The social life was good at the time, I was single, in London, reasonably fit and was "alternative looking". The money was virtually non-existent. The company folded just before I was due to leave, never got the £200 they owed me.

In short, if you like being on your bike all day every day, whatever the weather, in a city where every car/bus/van/lorry wants to kill you, the motorbike couriers throw shit at you, delivering "packages" to miserable people who only seem to care that you are late, Go for it. You will become fit, although for the first few weeks all you will do is eat, sleep and complain about your arse.

Oh, and black snot.

I am a part time logger, started off just collecting wood for myself to burn, but soon started doing tree felling for friends and neighbours, well its becoming a part time job with the demand for seasoned woods recently.

So did my chainsaw licences, got my insurance sorted and now work 2-4 days a week taking down unwanted Trees.

Did 30, 40 year old Ash and Popular Trees last weekend.

My proper office job is flexi, but it looks like I am going to be cutting the hours down quite a bit next year if it carries on like this!

Chopper ski 😉

Wine merchant (couple of qualifications in tasting etc)
Countryside warden at Avebury. New age traveller bouncer 😯
Ran kitchen on a mobile Mexican kitchen that went round festival, best job ever 😀

Once had a job serving drinks using a robotic arm at after-funeral ceremonies. Often had to work a hand at wake.

i did the clay pigeon trap operator thing as well, it was hell.

loads of people you wouldnt normally trust with scissors are given a shotgun and told to point it at the sky and shoot things. I was behind a single piece of corrugated tin firing off these damn clays praying to god each time i heard the gun cock.

the worst traps were the ones that fired the clay vertical straight, if they missed it, you had to dodge out of the way. they had another trap that was on top of some scaffolding, it was so badly put together that when you released the clay, the scaffolding would wobble. Health and safety would have had a field day at that place...then we had to go around picking up the ones that they missed and hadnt racked on impact.

I have also had to interview bankupts straight from the court, not odd per se but pretty wierd experience as you sit infront of them cutting up their credit cards and asking about the value of their house, their car, savings etc etc

I used to work for a "large telecommunications provider" - where my job was basically to make nuisance calls on an industrial scale.

I worked in a team working shifts managing the predictive diallers for a 2000 seat call centre. Theoretically these things were supposed to automatically adjust the dialling rate based on the number of agents available, average talk time etc, In practice the technology was in its infancy and they needed near-constant tweaking to avoid silent calls (and the resulting wrath of the regulator) etc and to maintain the hit rate.

The kit itself was hosted offsite and at the time filled most of a gloomy hangar-like bunker in Swindon - getting in there was like getting into the Roswell airbase and nearly as strange.

We'd target specific demographics and parts of the country at different times of the day and week. Had a wall of tellies in the office so we could crank up the calls at peak times around certain TV shows- we'd get a fantastic hit rate in places like Eastbourne and Southend just at the end of Cash in the Attic!

It was really well paid as it was shift work (we worked overnight to process data etc), and got loads of free time during the day when I was on lates, but can't say there was much in the way of job satisfaction and it all left me feeling a bit empty. A classic case of a job where you don't actually feel you're doing anything useful.

On the positive side, it got me a foot in the door into IT, which I still work in, so I guess it wasn't all bad.

I got paid £25 to watch Kim Wilde and Michael Jackson. Was working in a burger van at the "Bad" tour gig at Aintree racecourse: as soon as the music started we shut the windows and said "not allowed to serve while the music's on". Still one of the best gigs I've ever seen

I worked at Tussauds on the Jeremy Beadle exhibit - I had to work a weak hand

grape picker in Oz... early mornings, knock off at 11 as it is then too warm. lots of redbacks. lots of weed.

hawking in Oz... i lasted a day. i'm not a salesman.

bike guide... lots of riding.

flat-pack furniture erector... had a period of no work so got some leaflets printed, parked up at Ikea on a weekend and flyered all the cars in the car park offering to put their furniture together. got lots of work from it in the end.

recently built a floating stage in a roof-top swimming pool in one of Munich's poshest hotels.

I used to work for a "large telecommunications provider" - where my job was basically to make nuisance calls on an industrial scale.

I had a friend at art school who really had the gift of the gab. In the holidays he'd do call centre work and always seemed to be given the weirdest brief. One of them being to cold call old-folks homes and try and sell packs of council-display scale fireworks. In July. He managed to make a 2 sales for every 100 calls!

Another guy used to have to put together lists of numbers for a telemarketer - by calling directory enquiries (this was before t'internet). At the time directory enq calls from a landline were charged, but from a call box they were free so they'd have him standing in the call box across the road from the office all day with a note pad and a thermos.

(watch an old film on telly, keep an eye on the top right hand side of the screen, every 20 minutes you'll see a white circle or oval followed by another 8 seconds later, first one is get the next projector running, second one is switch projectors)

[TylerDurden] In the industry we call those "cigarette burns" [/TylerDurden]

Did you ever make soap? 😉