What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever been paid to do?

When I was 14, I ran the merry go round  at a small amusement park in Long Beach. I was paid $1.40 an hour. I saved enough money to buy a 1970 DT1 Yamaha. I  have also harvested cranberries and was a commercial clam digger. When I worked on the cranberry farm I had Blue Cross health insurance for $50 a month. Clam digging I could make $100 to $150 a tide, which was good money in 1976.  Even tho those jobs helped shape who I would become, I have no desire to do any of it again,

There might be some others, but these 2 stick out in my memory right now.

 When I was working for a developer I had to burry a horse.  I don't know the history of the horse, but  it was unhealthy and needed to be put down. They had me dig a hole, walked the horse over to the hole and  had the vet inject the horse with the meds and then literally leaned on the horse so it would fall into the hole as it passed out . The hole had water in it and the horse was floating, as I was backfilling the hole the floating water was pushing the horse up and made it almost look like it was trying to get out of the hole. I was in my late teens, early 20's and have always been an animal lover , i had nightmares after that for a while.

 Another strange thing was wrapping a coffin for a customers father who always had me make something for his cars or bikes. I've wrapped and made graphics for  so many things . 

I know that there were some odd things  that my bosses wife had me do.  Fun times, frustrating times, crazy times.   

There is something I want to get off my chest. It's about that summer, when you went away to community college. I got an offer to do Playgirl Magazine, and I did it. I did a full spread for Playgirl Magazine. I mean spread man, I pulled my butt apart and stuff. I was totally nude. it was weird, I... I mean you probably didn't hear about it because I went under the name of Mike Honcho. But I just wanted you to know that. If you can hear me, if it got into your brain somehow. That I spread my buttcheeks as Mike Honcho.

I didn't get paid for it but I helped dig a grave, shovel style in an old country cemetery. 

I one modeled as the “after” look for a penis enlarger device. Rather flattering, actually.

Done all sorts just to earn money when I was young (legally!!) But picking vegetable's/fruits in North Qld was an eye opener, not a lot of money but fun times were had and it paid the bills........just.

But the best was I was paid to prune Mango trees after the harvest, freaking all sorts of stupid shit was going on from people who could not ride in the back of a ute or they would fall out, the farmers dog catching cane toads and licking them to get off his chops and then could not walk a straight line, the freaking giant scrub python.................and I mean giant it was at least 4m long that used to come out of the shed we were sleeping in at night and go off to hunt, the farmer knew about it and said don't try to touch it and it wont hurt you 😥

Then the best. I was up in one of the Mango trees pruning and there it was, the juiciest, ripest Mango that you have ever seen, it was like a gift from God untouched by the birds and insects, not a mark on it, I put my hand under it and it just dropped in, I sat up in that tree and gorged on it, thinking how good is this??...............whilst being paid all of $3.00 an hour or so!! 

Pick up a Rental a box truck , take all of the carpet / demo stuff out of a showroom in Elk grove Village and deliver it to a guy in Chicago $ 100. Cash on a Sunday...again im 19 ish...

Took an hour easy to load all of these displays up..the guy in Chicago receiving  it was pissed...

When I got back to the guys Pelential Estate on a Lake , his home office was a full blown Casino , roulette table on and on...

Do to my Baptist upbringing I never took another gig from that guy again.

Lol

I got laid off while I was a tool and die apprentice,I took a job with a friend of a friend cleaning out bank foreclosur houses to get them ready to auction. My last day on the job I was sweeping the basement floor . There must have been 1000 piles of dog shit ,all of it dry . The amount of dog shit dust in the air was disgusting.  Of course I had no mask to wear. I told the guy to never call me again.

Did you do that in the middle of the night?

Under the light from an old lantern

I take pride that it wasn't shallow, with a smattering of leaves and twigs to cover.

I've said too much.😐

I guess I haven’t done any strange jobs but in my younger years definitely some crappy jobs

Two that come to mind: cleaning out a chicken house and the other putting together a swing set that was bigger than the house I grew up in 

I was a bartender for a short period of time and a well off customer, somewhat drunk, said he would pay me $50 if I could stand on my head behind the bar.  Easiest $50 ever.

Took a chick home from the bar one night and woke up in the morning to her begging for more. I was hungover and didn't feel like it so she finally asks, "What do I need to do make this happen?" Remembering that my pickup needed gas, I told her that I could be persuaded for $40. She got out of bed, walked to her purse in the kitchen, came back, threw $40 on the dresser and we went to town. Those were strange times for me.

I got paid five times what you got for the before photos and all I had to do was stand in a walk in freezer for a few minutes in the buff to make it more realistic. 

My best friend's dad had a few avocado trees on his property that were becoming laden with fruit. He told us to pick as many as we could and pile them into the truck so we could sell them to the farm stand guy down the hill. He said we could keep the money for ourselves, so, being broke high school students, we went to work.
I thought it would be a half-hour job, but I'm not kidding when I say there were hundreds of avocados on each of those trees. It started getting into the afternoon when we were done, and we must have picked two thousand pieces. We went down to the fruit stand, thinking we'd get a buck for each one, but lo and behold they were the wrong type of avocado, and we had bruised them up pretty badly anyway. The guy took pity on us and offered something like a nickel for each one, so we took it. Helped him unload them and everything. And that's the story of how I ended up splitting $100 with my best friend for a whole day's work out in the sun. 

Sounds about right. 😀

Back in the mid 1980's one year there was a shortage of pickers to pick cherries. So the local media put the word out to anyone who wanted to make some money and the noble act of helping farmers to go pick cherries for a day, get the crop in.

So you had adults and a BUNCH of teenagers including my 14 year old neighbor (Tom)go out into the orchard for a day. So Tom goes to his neighbors cherry orchard all excited to make some money,... and as the story goes,... he had to rent from the farmer the fancy sack and shoulder harness to put the cherries in and was going to be paid piecemeal. 

So with no instruction Tom spent the day picking but he didn't leave the stem on cherries thus making them not acceptable to the packing house and at the end of the day he owed money for the rental of the fancy strap and bag. I think that's how the story went.

Edit to ask: Do you remember the year I'm talking about Apleman? 83 or 84?

I just keep hoping profeshenol (or however he spells it) chimes in, that has got to be one hell of a story (or stories)!

@profeshenal125 

Back in my cheep child labor days. My dad had a wholesale and retail nursery. He was also a contract landscaper. Anyway from the time I was 7/8 years old. On Saturdays when all my friends were having fun. I got to go spend it watering and planting trees at the wholesale nursery. Taking 5 gallon trees and planting them into 15 gallon containers. The nursery was probably 5 acres, so there was a lot of work. This would have been 1969 till 1974. My dad passed in 73 and mom sold  his half to his partner. First few years I was free labor. Last couple I made $5.00 a day. To this day I can’t believe I had to do it. I did get to drive an old pickup with 3 on the tree around at 10 years old. 

My current job is strange, working in a federal prison. It's a whole different world inside. 😂

Not surprised. Inmates sue everyone for anything. 

During Covid, I was paid to wipe down railings (with sanitizer) and all the touched surfaces at an Airport package-sorting facility. The first week I was making about 5/6 rounds a shift, by the end of the month I would do 1 round at the start of my shift, sleep in 1 of the storage rooms for a few hours, then sneak out an hour before shifts end while lazing through my second round of wiping. 

 On the same subject. Where I work I had to go out to the parking lot every morning and take every employees temperature, document and sign next to them before they could enter the building and start their shift… strange times. I can still feel those 5am winter mornings blowing cold air. We had roughly 75 employees at that time. 

See now.

This why politics should be allowed in non moto.

Shit like this gets swept under the rug when we are censored 

Working on surgical instrumentation for "Trans Anal Total Mesorectal Excisions", or removing colon cancer from people. Worked on a technique that was less invasive, and I learned a lot about butts and sizes of butt parts...One component of the system I had to design was an "introducer" which was basically a butt plug to prep you for the procedure. Patent images were pretty hilarious.

Packed up prototypes into my bag and travel through an airport, where my bag was searched, before heading to a conference where other surgeons get to try things out on cadavers. Airport security folks probably thought I had a very weird fetish...The cadavers are usually just torsos, where the heads and arms/legs are cut off and crudely sewn closed. And you'd have 20 of these lined up on tables.

My mind was kind of blown when I realized these dudes would learn a new technique by doing it once on a cadaver with the leading surgeon over their shoulder, then go back home and start performing it (and dialling it in) on real patients. It's also surprising seeing how small some internal parts are when you see them actually removed from people. I've sat in and observed a good amount of live surgical cases as well.

I also designed what I called the "boob jiggler 3000", which was an R&D tool for a large breast implant company where they wanted to jiggle boobs in a controlled lab environment that mimics real world conditions so they could benchmark and compare how different implants behaved. I was paid to learn how big boobs jiggled, then replicate it.

Speaking of boobs, one summer as a kid I volunteered with a church group and ended up serving ice cream at a Jessica Simpson concert at a minor league baseball stadium. People were pissed as I sucked at swirling it well. Mostly ate a lot of ice cream and chicken fingers in the back.

Another summer as a kid I worked at a shit plant. I worked on a machine that steamrolled shit and removed the moisture from it. They then shipped off the dried shit and it was burned.

I'll leave it at that, already too many words.