Your unusual worklife
 

What's the most interesting or unusual thing you have had to do on the job?

I've witnessed the signature of lots of people in hospital beds (i.e., execution of wills in extremis.) I've cataloged the contents of a dead woman's entire house.

And, hey! I went to the Supreme Court! :blush:

I have worked on the guess your weight scale at a carnival ,
on a scale less than 100 yards from 2/3d of the US nerve gas supply ,
I helped some engineere mount strain guages on a prototype prostetic leg once ,
I have helped move the dead cows away from a scale in a rendering plant :yuck :
I have volenterred to go install scales in a handicaped workers program on the weekend with out pay ,
I work around the DOT ( State Troopers ) guys reguerly , in steel mills around the furnace ( it is SOOOO loud your ears shut down , even with ear plugs , and your teeth rattle ) etc,,,,,,

I had to spend three days repainting the bilge in a tugboat. Not cool.

My favorite was spending weeks on end preparing some burned out camp barges to be sunk in deep water after they had been burned in an accident. Well maybe it isn't my favorite, but it was definitely unusual.

At various recording sessions, I have:

--been bitten by a capybara
--been detained and accused of poaching animals
--had the cops called on me by a troop of girl scouts
--had a male sportscaster give me makeup tips
--encouraged two amateur wrestlers to hit each other with metal chairs repeatedly
--led 150 employees in the Atlanta Braves chant on the parking lot roof

Akward: For two and a half months I had to drive around every day to different auto shops and ask burly looking men if I could take pictures of their hands.. just a little weird
Cancerous: Also when I was a lifeguard I had to help the chlorine delivery guy every two weeks pump liquid-green-oozy-chlorine-something into two 55 gallon plastic drums. We didn't wear nor have any gloves, just rinsed the hands off afterwards and went back to my chair.

Exploited daily.

Exploited daily.

PICS ?????

Wow. My stuff is starting to seem kind of run of the mill ...

Restraining a naked male former state hospital social worker after he ripped the purple velvet pants he was wearing to shreds.

Having to assist a drunk paraplegic man in his attempt to self-cath.

Dodging balls of spit.

Attempting to interview someone whose entire vocabulary consisted of two words, "Fuck" and "You."

Attemping to interview someone with an extensive vocabulary who had no grasp of syntax or meaning.

Failing to keep a straight face when someone who did not otherwise seem psychotic told me that he had an alien encounter.

Turning over the soil in the flower bed looking for needles, crack pipes, and weapons.

Dumping a cup of water onto the ashtray on the front porch because it caught fire. Again.

Geeez wolf....bore us again....lol....

number two on your list is weirding me out..... do I want to know?

I was getting ready to say that I haven't done a single interesting thing at work, ever. (At least, not interesting to non-computer geeks.) But I was wrong.

My last job was at a college. Among other things, I ran the public computer labs. It being a somewhat peculiar college, all exams were unproctored and students were allowed to take them whenever they wanted within the designated exam week. So there were lots of take-home exams and papers in lieu of exams.

The exam week ended at a specific date and time (usually noon on a Friday), and the Dean of Students was adamant that all work was to be handed in at that time.

What this arrangement meant was that a student who had kept up with their work all semester and was on top of things could finish exams at the start of the week and head home. Any student who was still hanging around trying to finish something at 11:00AM the last day of exam week was therefore seriously behind the 8 ball.

Since the Dean wanted exam week to end at the designated time, she requested that the computer center close the public labs at that time. So I had the privilege of going around and closing the labs at noon. This always involved 3 or 4 students who were feverishly (but unsuccessfully) trying to finish. I'd be lying if I said I didn't take a certain amount of pleasure in removing them from the lab with their half-finished papers in hand (I only had to threaten to call campus security once). They were usually quite crestfallen when I told them that if they wanted more time to finish, they could petition the Dean for an extension.

Probably not, but ...

It's like this.

Dude was a bad drunk before he fell down a flight of stairs and snapped his spinal cord, a worse one afterwards. Mr. Winky didn't work no more, so in order to keep his fluids from either backing up or just randomly pouring out into his boxers (which, given the amount of liquid intake necessary to get yourself to a blood alcohol level of over .400 happened quite often) he had to insert a catheter to relieve himself. Well ... of course, dumbass gets hauled in for driving his motorized wheelchair in traffic, and we end up with his drunk, obnoxious, and smelly ass.

Usually giving him his little cath kit and the urinal is a job handled (ha ha) by one of our menfolk. Just my luck, there are only female crisis workers on that night, the ambulance was out picking up some other crazy guy, and I couldn't Tom Sawyer anyone in Nursing to take care of this little problem for me ... they were too busy with stuff on the ward.

So, there I am, having the unpleasant task of holding the urinal in position, while Mr. Dumbass is drunkenly fumbling with his malfunctioning unit and basically spraying pee all over his lap and my ambulance litter because he can't hit the broad side of a barn with the end of the cath, much less not twitch long enough to get it into the urinal.

I do not get paid anywhere near enough to do this.

I suppose the weirdest was trying to ditch my drinks when working as a hostess in an after hours club. The girls who had been doing it for a while had lost of great tricks (which they were certainly not going to share with newbies) but I was like something out of a really obvious farce.

It just went against the grain to spit rather than swallow if you'll excuse the seedy image.

sundae - what the hell do you mean?

I've had to shovel human feces, dead chickens, watched teenagers catalog human deaths from military simulations in a high-security facility that I had to be escorted into with a bag over my head and hands because I did not have the clearance for the rooms that I had to pass through to get into that room, while a warhead followed my movements because they thought it was "funny" to tell it to track me. I can't talk about a lot of stuff from that job.
A bouncer is a stranger job than most could ever imagine. Some of my acting roles have been strange, been in contact with serial killers to prepare for a role... not something I would want to do again, but glad I did it kinda' thing.
I helped train SWAT trainees for a while, that was odd and I did not gain a "new respect" for them, quite the opposite.

This one time I was reading a Lotus Notes memory dump and...oh, nevermind.