Les Jones

Professional bungee jumper. No, really.

And you worked in a prison, to boot.

What was the bungee jumping job?

I hope Chris Range chimes in, too. He used to work for a hot-air balloon company, and his dad was a stunt parachutist.

I worked at one of those bungee towers in pigeon forge for a summer in college. Oh, and a prison too.

I once had a contract at a project that required that I be onsite at exactly 8:00 each day, and must leave no later than 5:00. I was not allowed to take any materials inside or leave with anything either. thats not the wierd part. the wierd part is that they didnt care what we did for the 8 hours or that we delivered anything. It was 18 months of sitting in a cubicle.

We tried to leave, they insisted that we stay. We told them our status, they said 'sit tight'.

Thats odd.

I drove an ice cream truck once. Instead of the ice cream truck jingle, I played Creedence Clearwater "Suzie Q" on the 8-track. The kids in West Knox thought I was weird.

The low-income housing projects in Vestal were on my route (when I wasn't sneaking over to West Knox to poach in some other guy's territory). The food stamps were one thing (at least I could spend them), but I almost went broke taking buttons and pennies for ice cream bars.

Other jobs weren't as much fun, but we had a lot of them. Mrs. Bubba and I counted over 20 W-2s between us one year.

Paying jobs: Sales secretary, youth counselor, paralegal, web developer, system administrator. Nothing noteworthy there. Firefighter/EMT as a volunteer = much more fun.

Volunteer Ambulance Attendant, Barrista (during college), Battalion level commo officer, Air Battle Manager... mostly just professional stuff... haven't had many small jobs...

Also, while in public accounting, i used to inventory nukes.

Man, I've had lots of weird jobs.

I was a stripper.

Technically a four color offset stripper in a pre-press department for a web press.

Hey, gunner, I worked with a lot of hookers.

That was back when I was producing industrial lifting equipment.

I got paid to look at p0rn. Seriously. It was a requirement mentioned in the job interview.

I processed mink pelts. This involved using a machine to strip and vacuum the fat off the back side of the pelt. Mink fat flew everywhere. You couldn't wear goggles or a face mask because they would get thoroughly covered too quickly and become useless, so you ended up with the stuff all over your face. FWIW, it does NOT taste good.
I did acquire seriously smooth skin and perfectly waterproof shoes, and they didn't even charge me for that!

Yep - here I am chiming in.

From 1986 to 1990 I worked seasonally as a crewman for Windworks Hot Air Balloon Company. I drove the trucks, fueled the balloons etc. They had 7 hot-air balloons total. The ones that would be familiar to Tennessee residents were the WQUT balloon for Tri-Cities, and for Knoxville the UT balloon, Pepsi balloon, WIVK and 7-Up ballons which have all flown over ball games at some point in the past. I don't think they are in business anymore though since the owner was hurt in an accident some years back.

My dad was a stunt sky-diver in the Army and for 2 theme parks. In the Army he moved from being a regular trooper in the 101st Airborne to being a member of the Stuttgart-American competition team. They predated the Golden Knights (this was the late 1950s) but they had the familiar gold and black suits and chutes. In the mid-1960s he did stunt jumping for a water circus and for a theme park called Hillbilly World. His brother (my uncle) also did trick waterskiing.

I lack the nerve, athletic skill and thick skull required for such things.

Well the nerve and skill at the very least.

Back in the late Seventies I had a summer job, part of a team of college students, of inventorying a military base. We would be taken to a warehouse (construction, automobile, clothing, electronics, etc.), then given a huge stack of computer punch cards. Each card detailed a "location" (bin on a shelf, painted square on a warehouse floor, a pallet) where we had to count whatever was there. Then someone else had to recount it. If our counts didn't match, a third count was done. This included enormous stacks of uniforms, bins full of screws, nuts and bolts, piles of lumber, etc.

The real fun was counting bunkers! We had a Major accompany us. He would check the number on the bunker, verify it on his worksheet. If it was marked "Secret," we all left. If not, then two burly guys with sticks would open the bunker and chase out the snakes first. Then we'd go in and count whatever was there -- grenades, rocket launchers, etc. Rumor was that nuke material and missiles were in the "Secret" bunkers.

Our team documented a couple of million in "inventory loss" at that base. We were commended for our job, then told we had "done it so well" that no inventory would be done the following year. Har har har.

This is good stuff.

Marty: your story reminded me of a couple of people I knew who had unusual jobs.

One was one of the biology professors I worked for in New Mexico. One of his first jobs was at a fish hatchery. He would collect sperm from trout by masturbating them with forceps. That's one for the resume.

When I worked for the park service in the Smokies I met a guy who was a boar hunter. He'd spend the night in a treestand with a shotgun equipped with a nightscope to shoot wild boar that had been accidentally introduced into the park from a North Carolina game preserve earlier in the century.

I worked for one night as the poor unfortuante bastard who had to drive a stripper around to all her gigs that night and had to watch a real hot chick named "Angel" take her clothes off over and over again. Oh, the horror.

When I was 11 I used my grandpa's printing press (a letter press, with real honest-to-god type) to print custom lunch bags ("Susie's Lunch" or "SayUncle" or whatever) and took orders at the town's Christmas crafts fare -- I made $110 for two days of work -- a fortune in 1981 for an 11 year old.

We still have the printing press and a room full of type -- I'm trying to convince Mrs. Earthling that it's a good idea to move it into our garage.

One time, I was basically a guy who supervised temp workers filing out their W-2s and other administrative forms. I told this one gal to "Put her John Hancock right there." And she wrote out -- I swear to God -- John Hancock on her W-2.

Good topic. I didn't do anything too odd, but I was a janitor for an industrial fabricating plant, a certified compressor repair guy at age 16. The worst was barnacle scraper. When these huge steel ships were docked, keels a couple of feet off the hard sand bottom, and moved up and down with the wind, they expected me to go under there with a scraper and hammer and scrape, while sucking air from a sputtering hookah rig. No way man, that didn't last long.

First job: correspondent for national teen magazine.

Second job: sports writer for Asheville Citizen.

Third job: Gas station attendant, Bob's Airport Exxon, Arden, NC.

hmmm. All by the time I was 17. Is that "downwardly mobile?"

Oh I forgot! I was the Easter Bunny in Gatlinburg two years later. I recall it was 97 degrees. that's up!