When Steve and I first started dating, we instantly bonded over our mutual love of salt and vinegar potato chips. Shortly afterwards, we realized that we had another important thing in common. We had worked our way through college by working in the cafeteria dishroom. It was true love.
When you get assigned to work in the cafeteria, you get some choice about what you do. You can swipe the food cards, slop the food, stock the salad bar, or work the dishroom. I usually chose the dishroom. Why would I pick the grossest job possible? I mean I reeked at the end of my shift.
Well, there was this beautiful boy, Adrian, who was back there, too. Can’t deny that was a factor. But it was the dishroom culture that amused me the most. The stoner townies who worked back there full time were a riot. At the beginning of the shift, we would sit around drinking cokes and messing with the stoners. Then the trays would start trickling in through the conveyer belt. Then they came faster and faster. Bang the plates into the garbage and slide them in the rack. Dump the liquids in the trough and fit the glasses in their trays. Cutlery and trays last. When the trays filled up, they were thrown into the steamy washer. If you slowed down, the trays would back up on the conveyer belt, get stuck behind the hole in the wall, and crash on the floor in the dining room. Applause. You HAD to keep up. We would be yelling at each other to get it together and go faster. I liked the challenge. Some shifts were grosser than others. Chicken wing night. Pancakes with syrup. But mostly nothing bothered me after the first tray or two.
Question of the DayWhat’s the oddest job that you’ve even had?
Apt. 11d 
Soap factory. I put the rope in soap on a rope (among other things … one night I got to put caps on bubble bath. I felt very Laverne & Shirley).
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I worked as a magician’s assistant. I got cut into three pieces.
I am still sworn to secrecy about how the tricks worked.
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I was the night transcriptionist at a children’s hospital. I spent each evening listening to little tapes the doctors made while doing rounds for preemies in the NICU, typing it up on sticky-backed paper.
I wonder if this kind of work even exists any more? Probably doctors just type their notes straight in these days.
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Jen:
ROFLMAO.
Doctors are going to have to start entering more of their patient records into computers as we turn to electronic files, and replace those little slips of paper on which they scrawl notes at each appointment with datafiles. But their transcription notes? If I live to see the day when doctors think it’s better to type those up themselves, rather than speak into their little tape recorders and pass the tapes along to someone else … well, I won’t. Neither will you. It’s too much data, spoken too quickly. It’s never going to happen.
I never had a very odd job. I do still remember, vividly, the smell of the walk-in freezer at the hospital coffee shop where I worked as a waitress. We had to bleach the surfaces once a week, and there were all these weird sticky substances that mingled with the bleach and made a very distinctive odor. The pickles were stored in five-gallon white barrels and I would bleach the lids. Pickle juice and bleach. Eew.
I did get to eat a great patty melt for free on every shift. Probably took five years off my life in the nine months I had that job.
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Housekeeper at one of those Catskills hotels featured in Dirty Dancing–except that now everyone who goes to them is well over 70. The employer didn’t feed us enough, the town was four miles away and had only horrible kosher take-out, I shared a double bed straight out of Dickens with a friend, and one of the nice old Jewish ladies insisted on teaching me how to do Israeli folk dances. One of the less nice old Jewish ladies insisted on calling me “Millie”, because that was the name of an Irish maid her family had had in the thirties. When one of her companions gently pointed out that this was not, in fact, my name, she blithely replied “Oh, the Irish don’t care about things like that.”
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Substitute teacher for a medium-sized school district would have to be the job that gave me the most stories. I taught everything from 6th-grade writing to 12th-grade geometry, at every level from “behaviourally challenged” (meaning, you need armed police in the hall and your doors open to feel safe) to IB-track.
Banquet bartender would be next–lots of stories about drunks.
But neither of those jobs is strange, even if they do give me plenty of stories; for a strange job, bulldozer safety backup would probably top my list. My job was to stay in sight of the bulldozer, and call for help if something went wrong–so I sat in the shade of the truck all day, watching the bulldozer operator push trees down and move dirt.
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Working on the grounds crew at the BYU campus in Provo, Utah. Not a particularly strange job, but I got an assignment up on the hill at the Provo Temple which overlooked the campus, and I worked the daybreak shift. First job every morning was to walk the perimeter of the temple and the surrounding lot, picking up trash. It taught me a lot about what bored and presumably mostly Mormon teenagers (and some adults) do at night. The stuff we’d find…socks, tennis balls, broken frisbees, underwear, empty cough syrup and Scope bottles, a strangled kitten. I wish I had as good stories as the guy I knew who worked security there, though.
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I think the oddest job I ever had was putting together packages for and packaging radon detectors. It was out of some evangelical environmentalist’s basement and it was paid by the box, so I got really fast. It was very very short term, thankfully. Otherwise, working in a rare books library gave me some interesting insights into the quirks of the librarian personality, but sounds quite a bit ritzier (and less odd) than it was.
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I spent one whole summer removing staples from paper, by hand, one by one, at an insurance company in New Jersey. Because I was 18, I wasn’t deemed responsible enough to process the de-stapled papers through a machine. They let only the office alcoholics do that.
I also worked for a shady catalog company specializing in shoddy health-care products. When we ran out of mail orders to enter into the computer, we were told to enter fake orders. When the computers crashed, they sent us to the warehouse to remove used socks, trusses, and (cough) personal massagers from returned orders.
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One miserable day as the driver (is that the right word?) for a bicycle-taxi in the touristy part of town. I utterly lack salesmanship; I just sat there waiting for people to come tell me they wanted to go somewhere else and had chosen me to transport them, when the business is really more part of the horse-and-carriage-ride tourist trade than it is part of the taxi industry. Lost money, since I had to pay to rent the pedicab and was supposed to make it back on tips. Gave exactly one ride, and quit after 12 hours, never to return.
Next to that, my standard campus jobs (vaccuming the ten-acre persian carpet in the middle of my prep school library’s lobby; the campus coffee shop in college; a stint cleaning restrooms in a campus building) and my longtime summer job as a grocery bagger/ cashier all seem pretty routine.
Russell– the cough syrup and Scope bottles are pretty funny. (The kitten not so much.)
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packing bulk hotdogs into 10 lb boxes at Oscar Mayer. not quite freezing, but very, very cold.
harvesting sunflowers – big combine, nasty noise. hot.
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I, too, worked in the dormitory dishroom. Rose to the rank of “utility” which meant I got all sorts of fun jobs like running the dishroom, fixing the machine when it broke down in minor ways and also doing all sorts of morning breakfast chores (including cooking up batches of scrambled “eggs”). I think I even earned $.05/hour above minimum wage.
But I wouldn’t call it an odd job.
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Selling rocks of various sorts in a store that sold all sorts of minerals as geological specimens, and a certain amount of semiprecious jewelry. This was in the late 80s, at the height of the ‘crystals’ craze, and we were encouraged/required to engage with and prescribe for the customers seeking to medicate themselves with appropriate crystals. A typical conversation would go along the lines of “Hey man, are you having some kind of relationship issues? Because this piece of rose quartz is really resonating with your energies.”
I rather enjoyed the bullshitting, until one day a woman came in asking what sort of crystals were helpful for mind or brain problems. I told her that amethyst resonates with the third eye chakra, and sold her a big chunk in its matrix for a couple of hundred dollars. As I was wrapping it, she said she was going to heal a friend’s brain cancer with it. I did not, but wanted to and should have, say “Jesus, lady, don’t bother your friend with bullshit like this, she has brain cancer.”
I quit about a week later.
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Ancarett — Yeah, I suppose dishroom duities were more fun, than odd. My summers working in the office of solenoid valve factory were more probably more odd and less fun.
My dad has some good stories about his odd jobs. Like timna, he did the food factory. He stirred the vats of Velveeta in the kraft factory. He said that sometimes some the goop would fall out onto the floor and they would just scoop it up and plop it back in the vat. He also worked in the steel mills during summers off from college. Third generation in the mills. He has some good stories about that. He periodically mentions starting a blog. He wants to call it Geezerblog.
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I had lots of weird jobs doing archaeology, but the absolute strangest (and most disgusting) was when new construction in the middle of the campus at U of Michigan hit the dump from the 19th century hospital and we had to map the strata. Amputated limbs and other body parts, hair, medical tools and bottles, and a stench so bad we wore gas-mask-like respirators. Luckily I wasn’t involved in the toxic/biohazard/historic artifact removal, analysis, or reburial, though it was pretty interesting how the university dealt with it, and how bodies for medical research were acquired (and disposed of) then.
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During my college years, I did odd jobs to make money during the summer so I wouldn’t have to take some boring fast food job. At times, people asked me to do all sorts of weird stuff.
One that stuck with me was the people who had left a bunch of bricks at one end of the yard from when their house was built 15 years or so before they hired me. They wanted them all moved up the hill to their back porch, which they planned to expand with the bricks. My friend Clay and I spent 12 hours hauling bricks uphill in a wheelbarrow.
This was in 1990. The bricks are still sitting unused on the back porch.
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I spent a summer typing invoices for the American Symphany Orchestra.
One semester as a TA I was asked by my advisor to steal photocopies from the NYS Dept. of Health Library. She made me drive across town, sneak in the building, and creep around the library so she wouldn’t have to spend grant money on photocopying articles. I was eventually caught and told to never come back.
My TA duties for another faculty member involved me carrying his briefcase across campus to his classes, and then meeting him at the end of class to carry it back.
My job with the best stories, however, is McDonalds, where I was forced to watch 12 training videos back to back as punishment for running out of fries during the lunch rush. I learned so many interesting things from those videos, such as how to behave during a robbery (did you know that fast food restaurants are much more likely than convience stores to have a robbery?) including how long you can survive in the cooler without getting hypothermia.
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I worked for two summers flipping burgers and polishing the stainless steel appliances at a White Castle in Calumet City, IL (home of the Blues Brothers, for trivia buffs). I kept that on my resume for a long time, sort of as a lark. It was invariably the first thing that people asked about.
I have to tell you, as I sometimes say, I learned as much about human nature from the night shift at a Midwestern White Castle as I did from four years as a psych/english major at a pretty decent college. The most memorable night had to be the time a fight broke out, and blood ran down the clear window in front of the griddle, and the Whities lifers were a trip too (White Castle often had employees that stayed on for 5, 10, 20 years due to pretty decent benefits/promotions, etc., at least it was that way back in the day).
Ah, Whities. You haven’t really known humiliation til you’ve taken the order of a former high school friend at 2 in the morning while wearing a hairnet and too-short polyester bell bottoms. When I see the cute polo tops and khakis fast-food workers get to wear now, I do grumble a bit.
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Dancing girl in a vaudeville revival–to fund my last summer of my Masters degree. 🙂
It wasn’t sexy, just tap, jazz, dancing, and singing, but it was fun, we entertained a lot of tourists, and only ONE of my students from my “day” job ever came to the show.
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Krill Oil
There is a intresting post on “11D: Question of the Day — Odd Jobs” which I found relevent to improving brain health with krill oil and I recommend that everyone drop by and read that post…
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