What amusing or unusual jobs did you do before settling down?

[ByRoseSnake]

I was thinking back to some of the odd jobs I worked as a student and young adult to scrape by, before landing my 'serious grown up' jobs. Some make for great stories.

Before I left to study my MA, I lived at home for 1 year to save up and worked as a fishmongers assistant (after a failed attempt at waitressing). I remember my friends saying 'wtf?' but I actually really enjoyed it 😂learning to gut and fillet fish was pretty interesting. I would do it again!

I also worked as a life model briefly. Lots of people ask me if it was empowering. It was mostly just really boring. Apart from the occasion when they hired 2 models and the other woman, who was nonchalantly day drinking carton wine, fell off her stool hammered and naked on to a nail in the floor. Usually there would be one retired old muso who made gushing comments like "you remind me of a pre-raphaelite muse" (bleurgh)

What amusing or unusual jobs have you previously worked?

Not sure its that interesting, but from age 14 through to finishing my degree, I worked in a pharmacy. Various job roles there, but one was using their mini processing lab for rolls of film. 1 job was emptying the giant vat of used, liquid chemicals down the sink! No gloves or protective equipment either. It was always interesting to see who would collect the more saucy pics that were printed 😆

Relief milker, tutor on film set, life model.

I also once had an unofficial job artificially ageing the papers of an elderly poet who’d had an approach from a US university which was buying up the archives of many Irish writers. He was poor and in crap health and had kept virtually nothing down the years, so was mocking up past drafts etc (which I didn’t have an issue with. The US institution had crazy money and even what little they were offering him was going to make a difference to him and his wife’s lives.) So I was sourcing old paper, and ageing new stuff by dipping it in tea, putting coffee/wine rings and stains on it, making it smell smoky by stashing it at the flat of a chain smoking friend etc. I left the country and lost touch, but as far as I know the purchase went ahead.

I did some mystery shopping as a student.

Most of it was really boring, lots of mobile phone shops where you had to act really clueless and see if they tried to sell you a ludicrously expensive phone contract.

But a few were pharmacies where you had to go up to the counter and ask questions about something potentially embarrassing (like haemorrhoids for example) and see if they handled it discreetly or bellowed your request out for half the shop to hear!

This is brilliant

I worked in a fancy dress shop. Best job ever! I got to dress up every day, could keep my mad hair as I wore wigs most days!

They sewed costumes for theatre productions so it was very lovely there.

Closed now but I dream of it sometimes!

I worked in a crepe van for a while which opened late so you’d be selling crepes to students after the pubs kicked out.

I am still excellent at making all sorts of pancake

I spent a summer collecting sperm from stallions at a showjumping yard for artificial insemination of mares.

trying to make the transferable skills relevant to later jobs in research hasn’t been very easy 😅😅

When I was a student one of my work experience jobs was at a research institute where we had to collect lamb faeces to examine differences in hill or lowland grassland.
Putting nappies on the lambs was part of my job. They were specially made canvas bags with plastic inserts not Pampers 😂

I was a cigarette girl in a nightclub, then offered a job as a bunny girl at the soon to be opened Playboy club in ttown.
I refused, those fishnets were murder on your feet when you were stood up for hours.

Private detective in Brentford.
Cant remember the name of the firm. I was only 19 and turned up for an interview and got the job 😳

Fascinating and boring at the same time.

I had a tempting job in the sexual dysfunction unit of the local hospital. I was very young and inexperienced, and learnt a lot working there!

I also had a job that involved a conversation with a very embarrassed customer about allergic reactions to chocolate body paint.

Not me but a colleague used to “help pigs mate” on a pig farm when she was a student. Apparently they often need assistance 🤷‍♀️

Tequila cowgirl- going round the pub with a shot belt and v skimpy daisy dukes selling tequila shots to people.

picking blown around litter off the security fence at the tip- stank but got a really good tan and better than putting pin up perms together which was the alternative.

school uniform fitter- I got in trouble for telling people not to buy the PE bag as none of the kids use it but I felt bad as some of these parents were clearly on the bones of their arses and could do without wasting 20 quid on something that was social death.

i worked in a very tame sex shop when I was at college. Mostly it was just naughty undies and hen party goods. I used to do my homework sat at the desk as it was just down the road from college. I never remember it being very busy!

Quality control in a pizza factory during the long university vacation. Got promoted the following year and did sandwiches, baked potatoes and cauliflower cheese. Degree was chemistry... Then a stopgap a few years later, for three months, was mince-packing in an abattoir. Five tons of mince passed through my hands each day.

When I left school I went to work on a stud farm. One of my many tasks (with gloves on thankfully) was washing down the stallion's - er - equipment, after - er - use.

That is an excellent typo given the context!

Haha! Well spotted!

Was meant to quote @Slumgullion .

Some of these had me howling today hahaha. Especially the ones assisting livestock in reproduction and the lambs in nappies 😂

Keep em coming

I just remembered that I also used to work at Harrods bookshop as a sales assistant - job itself not unusual, but the uber wealthy clientele contrasted with regular tourists certainly were. One second I was selling a Paddington bear book, next second I was dispatching £20,000 worth of art books for a hotel lobby in Dubai.

People would casually lose Rolex watches, Hermes scarves and baggies of cocaine in the toilets. Lost property was a treasure trove - if no one claimed something back within 3 months, the finder was allowed to keep it (not the cocaine obviously lol)

Money laundering also rife

Student job at the Disney Store thinking it would be loads of fun.

Horrendous. I lasted about a month of part time shifts.

The fulltime employees were all the worst kind of Disney adult and the customers were feral - they would virtually destroy the shop every single day.

The worst part was that the cuddly toy mountain was just one toy deep tiered shelving.

Oh, and they made me buy my own horrible beige chinos and white trainers and socks, which I never ever wore again.

As a student I worked in a packaging factory for two summers running. Our job was to test drugs in their packaging as they came out of the machine, so I did contact lens solution and had to put them under a press to make sure they didn’t split when squeezed.

The money was brilliant - 12 hour night shifts of 4 days on, 3 days off. The environment was utterly toxic though. The permanent staff who’d been there for years hated the students because they thought we were ‘posh’. A few of them took a particular dislike to one of the male students and on his final day, they stripped him down to his undies and shrink wrapped him to a trolley and and then wheeled him round the factory floor. The manager actually laughed and thought it was funny. Poor kid was laughing along but you could tell he was humiliated.

I was due to finish up myself the next week but after that, I went home and called in sick and never went back.

Community Soft Play manager.

Cleaning it was fun. Especially the slides.
The day a kid got a toilet seat stuck on their head wasnt as fun.

I hand sewed risqué underwear for a few weekends suffice to say its not on my cv as I can't sew for toffee.

My very first job when I was 15. Working in the busiest Woolworths in Manchester, on the busiest counter (stationery) There were thousands of different items, and I had to memorise the price of every one of them and add them up in my head before I tallied the final total up.

I used to have nightmares about pencils and erasers.

Gosh, I feel almost normal on this thread! That is quite a novelty for me, I must say!

Depending on who I'm with (it's less unusual in the farming world), some things sound a bit odd. I've milked cows, sheep, goats and buffaloes, shorn alpacas and sheep, artificially inseminated cows (I'll leave that to the professionals, though...), done a few lambing seasons, and a whole host of other farm-related jobs. I'd love to have some experience of butchery and working in a fishmonger's, and know of someone who necks people's Christmas turkeys every year. I still haven't quite got around to "settling down" in the traditional sense, but I'm OK with that!