What unusual jobs have you had? (And who decides what jobs are unusual?)

In HS I worked at a lake marina with a fleet of aluminum fishing boats (100+). We'd pull them onto a rack, pick up all of the trash, flip them onto their side and then hose them out with a 2" hose fed by a 10hp gas power pump, flip them back down and go grab the next one. It took about two hours to clean the whole fleet on a busy day. 

In the Air Force I watched for anyone doing above ground nuclear weapons tests (nobody has done that since the 60's), or just firing them off in general. I sat right next to the red phone that was directly connected to NORAD.

My current job is fairly unusual. I draw circuits on computer chips. I've worked in a CPU memory group for the last 15 years. It's a pretty small field (no pun intended).

I worked one summer on a dairy farm, and decided university was where I needed to go. Summer job inspecting .22 shells for adequate primer at the rate of 1000/minute.........summer job tinning wires for electric blasting caps........summer job working as a draughtsman in a design department, back before computers. We drew on mylar with pencils........graduated and became a project engineer in a plant that made ammo, detonators, black powder fuse and detonating cord (fun job!!).......transferred and starting building bulk explosive operations in open pit mines and got to make stuff go "BOOM !!"......then I went into the automotive industry for 25 years of uninteresting stuff.

bbbbRASS said:

Spent 8 years as a whitewater raft guide, but more unusual was paying for college by cleaning bathrooms at the county fair. 

I was a whitewater raft guide for a summer

DeadSkunk (Warren) said:

...summer job working as a draughtsman in a design department, back before computers. We drew on mylar with pencils...

Ahhhh, good old plastic lead.  I never really enjoyed working with it, but I was good at it.

Also, apparently I have led a really boring existence.

For a few summers in college my job was working on, maintaining, upgrading, cleaning and prep for a rich guy's sailboat.  I had the hard job of spending most days on the boat on Cape Cod, doing whatever needed to be done and also sailing and racing the boat, including delivery to the Caribbean and back from FL for the new boat one.  Swan 38 and then Swan 53.  
 

Most days didn't suck. 

Just out of HS I got a 3rd shift job mailing off cashed checks at a big bank in Pittsburgh. We got to see the Penguins and Pirates salary checks pass through the 1000s of checks each night.

Rough sight getting $10/hr (decent money in 1989).

- Scenic construction for a p*rn film production company
- Driver of the Short Bus
- film and TV actor, including training videos for the CIA (until my character was blown up in a car bomb)
- Installed lasers in a government facility.  I wasn't allowed to know what they were for, I just had to install them and make sure they pointed at a specific target, and I had to wear one of those badges that turns black after radiation exposure but never did.  So many questions.
- Horse handler, although I know nothing about horses.

In reply to Curtis73 (Forum Supporter) :

I'm sorry Curtis but I can honestly say that I've never noticed your scenery work.

In reply to ShawnG :

Actually, neither have I.  I have pictures of it, but never saw the [surely high quality] video.

In reply to Sonic :

I wonder if you ran across my pal Derek, who also had a job captaining a rich guy's yacht for a few years back in the 90's. It was an 85' maxi that won the Transpac several years running, but also had a very nice interior... I got to help on a shorthaul crew from Seattle to SF once, it didn't suck a'tall..

Paved roads all over North Georgia, Eastern TN, and Western NC for a summer in college. Family business, my cousin owned it, my uncle was her foreman, and he brother ran the striping side of the business.

First day on the job the waterpump on the spreader took a dump in the Hardee's parking lot in Sylva, NC. Shoveled the freshly dumped 2 tons of hot pavement, and dug into the motor compartment. Took 3 hours to get a J Deere replacement from Asheville, and we'd hand spread the 3 loads that were onsite by then. Tough work for sure. Ran pretty much every piece of equipment we had by the end of the summer, and spent countless hours on the road running stuff all over creation. Got tan like I'd never been, and ripped. I'll never look at a road the same way, and don't miss it much. 

Made getting my @ss in gear and finishing up an engineering degree a priority!

Props builder at the the (Canadian) National Arts Centre while doing a degree in Industrial Design at a nearby University. I learned that just everything you would find in an old fashioned hardware store had at least three completely different uses to a props builder.