Obscure jobs you'd never thought about ...

[Joey Shabadoo]

Chicken sexer.
Until speaking with a farmer some years ago, it hadn't occurred to me that male chicks are largely useless to the poultry industry.

Fed for 38 days, chopped into 9 pieces and sold to KFC I believe

 

[screenman]

Hod carrier for Lego, or a test pilot for Airfix.

 

[MichaelW2]

Chicken sexer.
Until speaking with a farmer some years ago, it hadn't occurred to me that male chicks are largely useless to the poultry industry.

I did that for a while.
I also put the bits of paper into magazines, the ones that fall out when you lookie loo at WH Smiths.

 

[ColinJ]

Oh, here's one I found the other day ... The Queen's Guide to the Sands!

 

[mgs315]

Fed for 38 days, chopped into 9 pieces and sold to KFC I believe

Wouldn’t surprise me that’s what’s done these days. My partner used to have a mate at uni who did it but at the time they used to have a meat grinder next to them for the males.

 

[DRM]

Chicken sexer.
Until speaking with a farmer some years ago, it hadn't occurred to me that male chicks are largely useless to the poultry industry.

I thought they were dispatched, frozen & sold as food for birds of prey owned by falconers (frozen day old chicks) there is also the job of dipping heads, legs & spines in blue dye, then chucking them in the unfit for human consumption skip at the abattoir.

 

[MontyVeda]

In the days before bar codes, I worked for Edenvale pricing up yoghurts with a price gun. Arrive at supermarket early doors, unpack yogurts, put in fridge cabinet, price gun. That's it.
Except that your fingers got so freezing you couldn't feel them so you used to get little cuts from the metal lids without noticing so lots of yoghurts got sold with little bits of blood on them! Ewwww!

I had to do that in the days after barcodes... the store did have barcode scanners on the tills, and half the products were 'on the system', but the rest needed good old fashioned price tags. This was somehow more efficient that just putting everything on the system... it wasn't the only method they had of being totally unproductive

 

[Baldy]

Oh, here's one I found the other day ... The Queen's Guide to the Sands!

There used to be "The groom of the stool" that was the bloke who wipped the King's bum for him. The king being far to posh to wipe his own bum.

 

[KnittyNorah]

My first 'full time' job was in the school summer holidays I turned 15, in a factory in the nearest town, stuffing candlewick teacosies with sheets of kapok. My dad made lots of weakly-crude jokes about my new career ...

 

[Debade]

There are 2,000 watermelons on a 18 wheel truck. Each one was tossed out the back door to a produce manager who caught them and put them in a shopping cart. The first 500 or so are not so bad. The last 500 hundred 10kg melons began to get real heavy, especially when unloading the trucks without a side door. Those melons had to be carried about 8 meters before tossing them to the produce manager. You did get paid a bit more for the trucks without a side door but I was too tired to spend the money . The drive between the stores was the rest period.

Loading the melons on a pallet in a wooden cage was easier on your arms but harder on your back. You must lay them down carefully and reaching over the 'cage' especially for the first row or two is a long bend over the cage.

The positive part of the job was dropping a melon each day and eating the middle of it. It Just seem to happen most days. And having a choice of the sweetest melon was a delicious pleasure.

Next time you eat a watermelon, give thanks to the 18 wheeler driver loaded up on speed because he is paid by the load. And to the people who move it from the truck to the cage or the store. They along with the picker helped to make your picnic a success.

 

[gbb]

Until i saw it, ever even knew it existed...
Meat sniffer.1977 on, i used to work at a factory supplying frozen product to Pedigree Petffods. We used to get a quality inspecor from PP, he would arrive with a big meat cleaver , inspect various slabs of offal by hacking into the frozen meat and sniffing it. He could detect poor quality meat with his nose. To me, frozen meat has very little smell.

 

[classic33]

Until i saw it, ever even knew it existed...
Meat sniffer.1977 on, i used to work at a factory supplying frozen product to Pedigree Petffods. We used to get a quality inspecor from PP, he would arrive with a big meat cleaver , inspect various slabs of offal by hacking into the frozen meat and sniffing it. He could detect poor quality meat with his nose. To me, frozen meat has very little smell.

Salvasens?

 

[bruce1530]

Met a friend-of-a-friend for the first time. Got chatting. He told us that he was a "healer".

We had visions of him laying his hands on sick people and them being miraculously cured.

No. He was a "heeler". He worked in a shoe factory.

 

[Profpointy]

Fed for 38 days, chopped into 9 pieces and sold to KFC I believe

You can buy frozen blocks of day old chicks mainly for feeding to pet snakes and monitor lizarsd and such. We knew someone who got them for their pet eagle owl, a huge impressive bird to say the least, and we took some home for our cats who went absolutely mental for them. The owl also got given road kill pheasants.

 

[presta]

Counting sheep.

There's a bonus if you don't fall asleep on the job.