Working in entertainment production is one of those things that sounds awesome - and make no mistake, it is.
It's just that it's also one of those jobs that means when your partner calls you at 1 in the morning to ask where you are, and you tell them you're out measuring lemons for Beyoncé... it's not a euphemism and it's not that weird.
Queen Bey wants a bowl of 15 evenly sized lemons for her dressing room, Queen Bey gets a bowl of 15 evenly sized lemons for her dressing room.
And because catering runners care about doing their jobs well and usually have a multi-tool on them anyway, Beyoncé is getting the sexiest, most uniformly sized, lemons we can find.
Reddit user Tacoma__Crowasked:
"What was the oddest job you’ve had and why?"
Lemons for the Queen doesn't even begin to scratch the surface, honestly.
Weight Ballast
"In small rural town, I (15M) close to 200lbs got a job as a farm Hand expecting to work planting and harvesting."
"I was quite a large athletic lad at the time."
"And I show up for my first day of work and the planting equipment on the back of the tractor was missing some parts."
"So my boss told me to climb atop the planting equipment to make sure it would plant deep enough"
"FML I got hired to be a heavy object, weight, ballast."
"I will never forget my first job as weight"- Logical-Tomato-215
A Google-izer Or Is It Googlee ?
"Googling stuff for people."
"I used to work for kgbkgb, which was this text messaging service where you could text a number, ask any question, and get an answer for $.99."
"This was before smartphones became super huge, so it was a bit of a helpful gimmick back then."
"However, for everyone that we got asking normal questions like movie times, or what restaurants were open near them, or stuff like that, we got A LOT more people asking very stupid things that I would have to Google."
"I have this album of a bunch of weird questions that people sent to us."
"It was an interesting job that helped cover some things when I was in college, but it also had me using Google for a lot of weird sh*t."- -eDgAR-
evan peters google GIF by The Orchard FilmsGiphyOne Day
"I was employed by JC Penney for literally one day."
"I didn't quit, and I wasn't fired."
"That was the term of my employment."
"This was back in 1998 and I was entering my senior year of high school."
"They had a huge sale in the store and they hired dozens of people to cover every department because they were anticipating huge crowds."
"This was not a Black Friday sale, but they anticipated correctly, nonetheless."
"One of the shift supervisors gave me some busy work to start the day, folding shirts or whatever."
"After lunch I was basically asked to walk around from time to time and pick up any knocked over merchandise."
"The last few hours got boring, so one of the other supervisors that I had been chatting with throughout the day invited me to hang out during his break."
"His words were, 'what are they gonna do, fire you?' "
"Good times." - ThePreachingDrummer
Ring
"I was the girl that crawled out of a fake well at a Halloween hay ride once ."
"That was actually pretty fun!"
"Why: I was 14 and after four weeks working Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays all evening I got $150!."
"Under the table of course."- CaseyBoogies
The Ring Movie GIF by Arrow VideoGiphyCorpse Uber
"Transporting deceased people who our county declared John/Jill Does to the proper county or city coroner once they were identified."
"Some obscure state law back in the 80's made it illegal to transport that particular type of dead person while the sun was up."
"Screwed up job, but it paid $15 an hour back in 1985."
"Guess it paid so much because most people were unwilling to do it."
"That was a hell of a lot for a college student to turn down."
"Interesting fact."
"When you hit a bump in the road, with an unprepared corpse, their bodies will gurgle, and sometimes air comes out of their lungs and hits their vocal cords."- Leftstrat
3D Pictures
"When i was a teenager I sold those magic eye pictures at a mall kiosk."
"Y'know the ones you have to stare at for a while till your eyes make out a 3d picture?"
"All day I had to try and help frustrated people try and see the f*cking sail boat."- Reddit
Fancy Title
"My first job was with a temp agency; worked in an accounting office going through boxes of records and making sure there were no staples or fasteners in anything."
"Then the boxes would go to another dept to be scanned onto microfiche."
"I had some fancy title, like 'Accounting Clerk' and was making over $11 an hr., back when min wage was still like $5 and change, so I thought I was living large'."
"A funny part of the story is that I started on a Friday, and came to work in khakis and a polo-Monday I came dressed the same way and got spoke to about dressing professionally because Friday was casual Friday and not normal dress code."
"Lol felt dumb having to wear business attire and a tie when I was in the back in a cubicle pulling staples out of documents."- HalfBeatingHeart
Cutthroat Cookies
"Worked for the girl scouts and ran the cookie sale for a regional area that included a major American city."
"Craziest and most stressful job I ever had."
"It seems all cute and charming until you have 30 furious cookie moms screaming at you in your office at 6:30 AM on a Saturday because the truck carrying 5 pallets of thin mints is stuck in a blizzard."
"I had to break up fist fights between parents because someone 'stole' someone's spot outside of a grocery store. It's cutthroat."
"Anyway that job was decades ago and I still have stress nightmares about it!"- Neither-Copy785
episode 19 GIFGiphyKitty Sitting
"Not a job exactly but one awesome day."
"I used to work in the concrete business."
"We once had a job pouring a slab for residential parking and a neighbor nearby had a kitten just a couple months old."
"It would not stay out of the concrete as you can imagine it thought us picking it up and washing its paws was a game."
"Eventually the boss told me to grab the kitten and go hold it hostage in the truck."
"So I spent the next six hours sitting in the truck with a super friendly kitten sleeping on my chest."
"I got paid to babysit a kitten."- Sectaguy
GiphyKept That Swamp clean
"Swamp Janitor."
"Official title was 'invasive species removal technician' but really I was a swamp janitor. "
"There was this invasive aquatic plant that would completely take over swamps and choke out all the native life, so my job was to go in with a rake and pitchfork and literally just clean up the swamp of this devil plant."
"Some parts were cool, watching eagles fish, seeing turtles come up for air and big fish swimming in the water but a lot of it sucked."
"The plant had sharp seeds that would pierce your skin and your waders."
"You'd get leeches, tics and mosquitos on you all day."
"Physically exhausting with lots of sun."
"You'd have to haul the plant matter to giant compost heaps that were full of snakes, for some reason the snakes liked it."
"It was a unique but grueling job."- UniverseBear
bathroom stall GIFGiphySee the Pyramids Along The Way..."
"Multi-Level Marketing."
"Kid told me about a really cool energy drink company back in high school."
"I wanted money."- 992882
Smooth Operator
"A bank was digitizing their records."
"I got paid to remove staples and creases from paper so all their old records could be scanned without issues."
"10 hours a day, just removing staples and creases."- Both-Grocery-7008
Not The Job, But The Clientele
"I'm a host at a local restaurant and I have met both the most mundane and weirdest people ever."
"My favorite story is that a few months ago I had 3 different people, all men in their 40's to 50's, come in one after another say almost the same thing."
'They all said 'can I get a table for [large number here]'."
'I have to say, they were all in different parties, completely strangers that walked in 5 minutes apart with the same line."- f---thezodiac
Lisa Simpson Restaurant GIF by The SimpsonsGiphyHappy, Despite People Looking Down At You
"Shoeshiner."
"15 year old female and I needed cash."
"Would shine shoes at car washes and country bars, usually made $100-300 a day."
"Oddly fun and met a ton of people, got other odd jobs from businessmen like hostess check in at events and functions."- Starlettohara23
Left Them Feeling Blue
"Got a job through a temp agency working at a scrap metal plant."
"Because I wasn't 18 yet, I couldn't operate most of the heavy machinery or the fork trucks."
"So they put me in a side room and had me siev cobalt."
"So for a while, I would run the positive motion conveyor, which was just a big table hooked to a rotary motor so it made all the stuff on it 'hop' from one side to the other."
"At one end, they hung a 1-ton bag of cobalt over the conveyor."
"At my end, I had a metal grating over a bunch of barrels."
"As the conveyor advanced, the dust fell through into the first barrels."
"My job was to pick the big chunks of cobalt off of the grating and toss them into another set of barrels."
"It was hot and humid, and cobalt dust is blue, so every day I came home looking like a damn smurf."- Hephaestus0308
GiphyPaid To Pillage?
"I (14NB) had a gig exploring abandoned places to take stuff out of there."
"It was interesting."
'I didn't record but I explore abandoned places."
"For my job, it was houses."
"For my hobby, I did schools, funeral homes, summer camps, hospitals, day cares, etc."- Lonely_Person_1670
Better not have snuck a sip!
"Serving beer when i was 10 years old with my 9 year old friend in the most alcoholic country in the world."- Old-Command-7706
A Sign Of Bad Things To Come.
"So not really a job but when I worked for this restaurant in my home town I got called in on one of my days off."
"I only worked like 3 or 4 days a week, and I was 16 and thought I could use more money."
"So I go in to see about 7 people with my same position there, I was a dishboy, and I was so confused I ask the manager what they needed because they didn't disclose it over the phone."
"They asked me to scrub all the trash cans as if someone else couldn't have done it and it was a very slow day."
They weren't happy about it and just told me I couldn't go home until I did it."
"Now I hadn't even clocked in yet and I was unaware that I could've just left but I was scared of losing my job so I did it and I think I lasted there for another 2 or 3 months before I was like nope I'm done."- nuchiha44
Trash Can GIFGiphyWeird Can Often Be Fun
"Working in an old brick quarry that was now a landfill."
"Collecting and sorting scrap metal for recycling."
"Also operating heavy equipment, a john deere drot and a cat d7 bulldozer."
"Best job of my whole life, so much fun."
"Super dangerous but had a blast 10/10 would do again."- dowend
Okay so we've measured lemons for royalty, been a taxi for dead folks, and been an overpaid staple remover with a fancy title.
You're up, readers.
Got anything that competes with that?
Just the other evening, I was walking home, and I barely survived.
I tripped on a dead tree branch.
The next thing I knew, I was flying in the air and landing on my back.
My belongings were strewn about.
And my to-go burger was dead.
A simple walk.
A simple dead branch.
And almost lights out.
Redditor Typical_XJW wanted to hear about the times people eluded death, so they asked:
"How did you almost die?"
Don't even get me started on any and every car ride.
We're always moments from the end on highways.
Back in the Day...
Hunger Games Student GIFGiphy"Almost drowned when I was 5 or 6, been hospitalized twice for sepsis between 2016 and 2019, and had a stroke this year. I'm 29."
ChristmasKid88
On the Disk
"MRSA infection in the disk on my lower spine between L5 and S1. Showed up two days after a cortisone shot but the hospital said it was from something else. Was in hospital 25 days multiple emergency surgeries."
EatA**FromBack
"I worked for a doctor who did these in-house and other procedures, and it 100% made me not trust medical facilities, cleanliness, and sterilization procedures. Had about twenty patients all come down with the same gut infection, 'coincidentally,' the same patients who came in for endoscopy procedures the same day."
dimlylit_
Saved
"Saving a younger friend from drowning, he panicked and almost took me out."
loztriforce
"Had that happen with a younger cousin when we were kids. His brother and I went to save him, he climbed on both of us and pushed us under. Lifeguard didn’t even see us until he pulled younger cousin out of the water, then we popped up gasping for air."
coffeejunki
Shucked
"16-year-old farm kid me, stepdad told me to go pick up a load of corn seed for planting. I had gone with him many times before, and driven the truck (full ton dually diesel) and hauled light stuff with it. Nobody told me how different it is to haul 10,000 lbs of seed on a big flatbed trailer on gravel. I had a lot of common sense and was driving slowly and carefully."
"Still… 10,000+ lbs pushed me down a gravel hill skidding, praying to god I stopped before the stop sign at the T intersection to a busy highway. I came to a grinding halt JUST as the front of the truck crossed the plane where the gravel turned to asphalt. A semi was coming from one direction and regular cars from the other. I shudder thinking about what if on that one. Don’t let untrained kids tow potentially deadly, heavy trailers, with zero training."
datnetcoder
Finding Tracks
College Sports Sport GIF by Sealed With A GIFGiphy"Was backwoods camping in Yellowstone and if I hadn’t considered for 30 seconds if I REALLY needed to get up and go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, I would have walked out of my tent headfirst into a brown bear, which I heard before leaving and found tracks of next to my tent in the morning. Spookiest moment of my life in hindsight."
danvo5
Bears are a no go for me.
Camping is an even bigger HECK NO!!
Several Strikes
Reassuring Jimmy Fallon GIF by The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy FallonGiphy"Twice. 1. Woke up to my apartment on fire."
"2. Hit head-on by a drunk driver on a small bus, just after everyone got off bus exploded."
lizard_king0000
Oh Barb
"Lmao okay, so I was getting my teeth cleaned, and I got nitrous oxide because I have so many exposed roots. Well, my hygienist at the time was this lovely lady from Minnesota. Kinda flaky, but super sweet, and talked about her family all the time. So I'm in the chair and she hooks up my mask, and away we go. I actually fell asleep! Except not so much."
"Turns out Barb had forgotten to turn the oxygen on and had been feeding me straight nitrous. She only noticed because I started gasping for air while unconscious. So that's how I almost died at the dentist. I never saw Barb again, but I tell you, that was the best nap of my life!"
CharismaticAlbino
Climb Up
"I was snorkeling. I had my other stuff stored on a rock by the water, about 3 meters high. When I got out, I decided to climb straight up. Almost at the top, the rock I was hoisting myself up on came off and I fell back first onto the coral. If a friendly wave hadn’t come in, I would have broken my back, at least."
Yugan-Dali
Blood Loss
"I was diagnosed with a rare fatal blood disorder from birth, doctors projected I’d live till about 6 and then die from massive blood loss. As this was the mid-90s, they tested the idea of using stem cells from my sibling's umbilical cord; administering the first successful stem cell transplant from a sibling donor and I’m still here to tell the tale!"
Material_Cry1697
These were some tremendously close calls.
Do you have any near-death experiences to share? Let us know in the comment below.
