Man
Who Watches Paint Dry
Unless
you are a skydiving lion tamer, chances are your job tends to get tedious from
time to time. You might even compare it to “watching grass grow” or more
commonly “watching paint dry”. For some folks though, such a comparison is
downright insulting, seeing as they have made a career out of observing drying
paint.
One
such person is Keith Jackson from the UK, who for the last 30 years, has been
assessing the time it takes for his company’s paint to dry. By gently touching
test area on his work station wall, Mr. Jackson times how long it takes for a
paint to stop being wet. It might seem horribly unnecessary, but keep in mind
that there are places out there which have to occasionally be painted in record
fast time (like subway stations or freeways), and it’s up to Mr. Jackson to see
just how his company’s formula is holding up.
This
certainly isn’t a career option full of laughter and excitement, but “watching
paint dry” must be a fantastic conversation starter.
Coconut
Safety Engineer
This
profession is unfortunately only available in tropical paradises like the
Virgin Islands, but luckily it requires very little training or special skills
other than the ability to swing a big stick. The job of a coconut safety
engineer is to go around to private properties like hotels and resorts and
whack their coconut trees until all potentially dangerous nuts fall down.
This
is done to protect their guests from falling coconuts (some of which can reach
well over 3 pounds in weight) sparing the hotel/resort owners any unnecessary
lawsuits. In fact, a falling coconut can do significant damage or even be
fatal. The job might not pay that much, and there is no word if a CSE can keep
the coconuts he knocks down, but it is a job which concerns itself with the
public’s safety, making it quite noble and well worth the effort.
Plus,
think of all those “Coconut Safety Engineer” business cards you will get to
pass out at parties.
Mosquito
Gatherer
Malaria,
a mosquito transferable disease, is still a huge problem in certain parts of
the world, so science is constantly on the job trying to find ways to cure it.
In order to do that however, they need mosquito specimens. And that’s when it
gets a little weird.
It
turns out one of the easiest ways to attract the little disease spreading
bloodsuckers is to roll up your sleeves and let them start feasting on the red
bloody goodness inside you. That is the job of a mosquito gatherer who turns
his own body into an All You Can Eat buffet for mosquitoes. After they latch
onto his skin, the mosquito gatherer sucks them up through a straw and deposits
the insect vampires into specimen jars for further studies.
The
job’s risks include contracting malaria and up to 3000 mosquito bites a day,
making it without doubt the suckiest non-prostitution-related profession in the
world.
Chicken
Sexer
This
is one of those job titles which could be easily misunderstood, causing less
than hilarious mix-ups with certain less than well adjusted individuals. In a
sane reality though, a chicken sexer is the person who checks the sex of chicks
in poultry sorting facilities.
Today
everything is industrialized, even and especially animal farms. What happens
there is that a clucking adorable sea of yellow chicks comes down a shaft and
onto a conveyor belt or something similar while the factory employees stand
around them sorting out the males from the females. The females later go to other
farms to lay eggs while any number of things can happen to the males, but most
often they get chopped up and put in dog food.
You
would think that they could have come up with a snazzier name for this job
though. “Chicken Sorter” or “Avian Willy Finder” mean basically the same thing
and looks roughly a million times better on your resume than “Chicken Sexer.”
Egg
Breaker
You
might be thinking – “Egg breaker? Hot dog, I’ve been training for that job all
my life!” but sadly professional klutzes have been in very low demand in the
last few decades and no one is currently interested in paying you to be clumsy.
Actually, the job of the egg breaker is to manually separate the egg whites and
yolks in food service industries, additionally keeping an eye out for spoiled
eggs.
Modern
technology can do wondrous things like send communications from one end of the
globe to the other in half a second, but we still need humans to separate our
eggs, apparently. This is good news for all of you worrying that your job is
going to be taken over by robots in the future. Whatever happens, at least you
will always be able to find a job breaking eggs.
Butt
Wiper
Let’s
talk about Sumo wrestling. Have you seen how huge those guys are? Flipping hot
heck, some Sumo wrestlers get so big you could stab one in the back and not
have the knife reach any internal organs for like a week. This is, of course,
one of the many sacrifices these wrestlers have to make to achieve fame and
glory in the ring, but their size often comes at a much more terrible price:
the inability to wipe.
Indeed,
a few Sumo wrestlers tend to get so big they no longer can reach down behind
and below them to wipe after using the toilet. Not that long ago, this actually
was the job of the “freshman” at the school the Sumo wrestler attended, but
since finally discovering the concept of basic human dignity, many Japanese
officials banned this practice. But there will always be people willing to do
many terrifying things for money.
The
professional sumo-butt wipers are of course most often hired as full time
nurses but the implications of their future tasks are made quite clear in the
interview process. Bizarrely, many still take this job willingly.
Fart
Smeller
Yes,
turns out one of the many names kids used to call you back when you were
younger is actually a real thing. Incidentally, “Poop Eater” continues not to
be a real thing (at the time of this writing), but someday… who knows?
The
Fart Smellers have been first described in 2005 in “Popular Science” concerning
an experiment performed by Dr. Michael Levitt. Levitt, a gastroenterologist,
paid 2 evidently desperate people an undisclosed amount of money to smell and
rate farts from his test subjects, according to their noxiousness. The
experiment used gasses collected from 16 healthy volunteer after eating pinto
beans and concluded that the worst smelling parts of farts are hydrogen
sulfide.
It is
at this time that you should consider two things. 1) This experiment actually
had a budget. Real money was spent on it; 2) There are starving orphans in
Africa. That is all.
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