1. Man Who Watches Paint DryUnless 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.
2. Coconut Safety EngineerThis 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.
3. Mosquito GathererMalaria, 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.
4. Chicken SexerThis 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.
5. Egg BreakerYou 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.
6. Butt WiperLet’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.
7. Fart SmellerYes, 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.
X-ray of Marilyn Monroe's chest was taken in 1954 in Los Angeles.
