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?
Reddit user Roentgenographer asked:
"Reddit, what is the strangest thing you 'have a guy' for?"
... and yeah... the Christmas Corpse in Your Car guy has some stiff competition.
Heh. Stiff. Get it? Cause corpse?
I'm not sorry.
Mike, The Homeless Homie
Police Fuck You GIF by Noise Nest NetworkGiphy"When I was a waiter in downtown Phoenix twenty years ago I had a street person on retainer."
"Parking was difficult for lunch shift, our restaurant couldn't/wouldn't validate employees parking, so we had to use the meters on the street. Since the meters had a two hour limit, you needed to park close enough to be able to run down and feed them in the middle of the lunch rush."
"Spaces were very limited."
"One day, soon after starting, I passed the same 'bum' for the third night in a row panhandling. He wasn't at all vocal, just tried doing funny dances and making people smile, then he'd tell you to have a nice night."
"Never outright asked for anything and was never rude or aggressive. I gave him a couple bucks a few nights in a row, and started to notice him during the day too once we became familiar."
"The first time I saw him after pulling in for a lunch shift I gave him a handful of change from my coin cup in the console and told him if he fed my meter with it all day I'd throw him some cash again after my shift. Found out then that his name was Mike."
"Two hours later it's noon thirty and the crew is dashing down to feed their meters, or asking whomever is going down to do it for them. I gave someone a couple of quarters and asked them to check on mine while they were at it, just in case."
"They were back in five minutes reporting that my car was good, the hostess' car was good, and two other servers bookending my car were good, all of us until after 2pm."
" 'Some homeless guy is feeding all the meters on this side of the block.' "
"The next day, as I was making my way around the gauntlet of one way roads surrounding the building housing my restaurant I saw Mike. He was standing in a parking space right by the bottom of the escalator leading to my work and as soon as he saw my car, he pulled his pants leg up and did a little chorus line dance move to get my attention."
"He'd been standing there 'holding' the spot for me for the past fifteen minutes."
"Thus it began. Mike held a parking spot for me nearly every morning for the next two years. He fed my meter and the meter of any other staff I asked him to."
"I started keeping car cleaning stuff in my car, windex, armor all, and would give him towels from the restaurant to detail it up once a week."
"He knew what bar I hung out at and where I sat. He'd track me down when meters were about to expire or he needed a buck."
"Everybody at the restaurant and the bar across the street started calling him my 'bum.' He was my friend, though."
"His name was Mike. He just didn't live anywhere because life is more complicated for some people. Mike and I stayed friends for years after I stopped working downtown."
"I wouldn't say we kept in touch (he didn't have a cell phone or any way to contact him) but I would still frequent my favorite bar occasionally and run into him on the corner and we'd catch up. Then one day he just wasn't there anymore."
"I asked around but pretty quickly found out I knew more about him than anyone else in the world, it seemed."
"Mike was homeless because he had been a career criminal in his youth. He went to prison a couple times in the eighties for kiting checks at a felony level (an old scam you can't really get away with anymore)."
"He was probably twenty to thirty years older than me at the time and had lived on the streets since the mid- nineties. He had no family, couldn't get hired anywhere with his record, and - to be honest - didn't much care for the idea of having a job and a home."
"Some people simply won't be domesticated. Mike was that way."
"But yeah, I had a guy once, a true downtown concierge."
- Stoopidmonkey73
Salsa
salma hayek dancing GIFGiphy"I have a salsa lady. The food, not the dance."
"She's been winning awards for it since before I was born. Fantastic flavor, balanced without too much acid or salt."
"Best salsa I've ever had, and I'm painfully picky about food."
"People have tried to get her to expand, but she sells out locally and doesn't see the need to ship. She just isn't interested in expanding."
"She's good just being the local salsa lady."
- MildlyAnnoyedMother
Someone Get Us This Guy's Number
happy sloth GIFGiphy"I have a sloth guy."
"He runs a USDA-certified wild animal rescue and has has his sloth for close to 20 years. He takes extraordinary care of all of his animals."
"Three separate family events over the last 15 years? I've called my guy and he's brought a sloth to the party."
"The sloth is not a performing animal- no one gets to approach, handle, or pet it. He simply brings it for a short period of time so that people can see it, and he discusses its life, behavior, and care."
"He does phenomenal work to protect and preserve wildlife- many of his animals came to him after being purchased by people who wanted an 'exotic' pet they quickly realized they could not care for."
"But yeah, I have a sloth guy - which is SO cool."
- Seeking_Starlight
"The Good Stuff"
Season 9 Joey GIF by FriendsGiphy"I've got a pineapple guy. You don't get good pineapples in the store, you gotta know a guy."
"He gets me the good stuff: a variety called the Sugarloaf Pineapple, White Pineapple, Kona Sugarloaf, Kona White, honey cream, etc.."
"It's a pineapple that is sweeter and, crucially, has significantly lower acidity, so it doesn't hurt your mouth or tongue if you eat too much of it."
"I don't know how my guy gets his pineapple, I don't ask and he doesn't tell. That's the whole point of having a guy. I give him money and he gives me the pineapple, no questions asked."
"It's good to have a pineapple guy."
"And yes I mean actual pineapples, not weed. Now that weed is legal does anyone even need a weed guy anymore?"
- 52ndstreet
Disposing Of Mattresses
Mattress Everybodylovesraymond GIF by TV LandGiphy"I have a mattress gal."
"She runs a high end mattress shop and is supposed to 'dispose' of any returned mattresses."
"I take care of disposal by showing up at the customers place to pick it up, then bringing the disposal mattresses around to any friends or family in need of a mattress upgrade."
"I got a sweet $4000 king bed for free (aside from hauling it) because it was a return."
- LiterallyADiva
A Fat Guy
Bill Nye Scientist GIF by NETFLIXGiphy"I have a fat guy. If I need to get fat I call up the fat guy and I get some, he does breast reductions, tummy tucks and such."
"Fat has lots of stem cells. I used to have a brain guy."
"I do medical research."
- Chris4evar
"I was the tissue guy for a while!"
"We had a list of 'wants' from different labs on campus. Anytime we did a necropsy on a lab animal, after the lab had collected the tissues they needed for their research, I would go in and grab tissue for other labs."
"I had one lab that was doing tissue scaffolding that needed 1 inch by 1 inch squares of proximal gracilis, another lab needed whole eyeballs, one wanted intact bladders."
"It sounds gruesome that my job was to cut apart bodies for their pieces, but nothing went to waste from a necropsy and labs that just needed control tissue or a source of healthy tissue didn't need to euthanize a whole animal just for a bladder."
- daabilge
Old Varieties
mr t conan obrien GIF by Team CocoGiphy"I have a guy who deals in old apple varieties. Want a special tree? He's got it."
"Cousinot, not a problem, Filippa's apple, yes, Northern Spy, of course. We are planting a rather big orchard and I love listening to him extolling the virtues of historic apple varieties."
"The old varieties are healthier. They contain more polyphenols which are apparently the reason why these apples are particularly good for people with food allergies."
"They are often better adapted to soil and weather in our region. And they are beautiful. And the taste is amazing."
"Some taste of almond paste, and honey, others have a more lemony taste. It's like sampling wine."
"He's currently trying to get us a young pear tree from a variety that has only four known living exemplars left in our region. I'm absurdly proud to be the receiver of such a rarity. He just called and I'm excited."
"It's good to have an apple guy."
- Tuedal
The Metal Genitals Guy
terminator 2 GIFGiphy"I got a guy who will mold your genitals and cast it in the metal of your choosing."
"That's his specialty. He does other stuff like jewelry and general handicrafts. but he's happy to be known as the metal genital guy."
"He primarily works with vaginas. He's done some penises, but mostly just friends or local porn stars. If he's to be believed, he's molded around a thousand vaginas."
"It's probably in the hundreds, realistically, but that's still a LOT of metal genitals."
"Dude's a character."
- GrumpySarlacc
Tamales
Food Kiss GIF by AsIf.tvGiphy"I worked in restaurants for years."
"I learned that Hispanic communities really do have a 'guy' for everything, at least where I live - there's a car repair 'guy' they all go to, a tax 'guy,' etc."
"Well, my buddy Felipe introduced me to the Tamale Guy, and I go see him almost weekly ever since I was introduced. You just drop by his house, and go in the kitchen door in the back and he's in there, like six days a week."
"F*cking rad."
- nono_baddog
The Sabbat Guy
helping schitts creek GIF by CBCGiphy"I'm very old. By reddit standards I should be dead."
"When I was a kid I was "sabbat goy" for the elderly Jewish couple next door. They were very orthodox and there were a bunch of things they wouldn't do on Sabbbat, like turn a light off or re-light the furnace."
"They weren't allowed to 'work' so I stepped in to help with that stuff."
"It was O.K. for me to do it for them, as long as it was voluntary and not a paid arrangement, because I'm not Jewish. They gave us produce from their kitchen garden, but that was not "payment."
"He had the tattoo. Maybe she did too, but she always wore long sleeves."
"I was glad to help them."
- BobT21
Do you have a 'guy' for something interesting? Is there a local tradition that people in your area have a 'guy' for that would seem strange somewhere else?
Spill your stories, folks.
Want to "know" more?
Sign up for the Knowable newsletter here.
Never miss another big, odd, funny or heartbreaking moment again.