nlerner

That's #28!

bark_eater 

1) Shipwright, Oysterman, arc-lamp projectionist. (2nd and third, I will claim no mastery of)
2) Caulked between tides. Same boat I went over the side with a couple of shingles and a gun of 5200, looking for the light shining out.....The crew asked if they were good to go.. I advised two trash pumps as the captain was headed 12 miles out...
3) Falcons

seedsbelize2

1) Logging with a team of Percherons, and sawing them up on a portable bandsaw mill.
2) Spent 6 years in the rainforest of southern Belize, getting in and out in a pole powered dugout.
3) Smithies(blacksmith)
Addendum: I was dorm ping pong champion my freshman year in college.---staying on topic.

Mad Honk 

Trying a second time to follow directions a bit better.
I was a railroad "Gandy Dancer" , and Steel Mill crane operator
Bike shop Manager for repairs, Got to ride my bike off the roof of Castleton Square Mall while doing that job
High school mascot "Red Devils"

philbob57

1) name a couple of unusual jobs: drove a Good Humor truck (average $125/week in 1965, which was 2 times minimum wage, so it was a great summer job); did (non-bike) business on Taiwan when Giant really did use gas pipe on their bicycles

2) some thing else you have done that not a lot of people have: in college, I was treasurer of group that was named (by a frightened idiot) as a Communist front group in US Senate hearings; I was part of group that got Taiwan's government to free a political prisoner long, long before they wanted to.

3) high school mascot - don't remember; I do remember that our colors were purple and white, which are Northwestern U's colors, so when I see NU student, I think high-schooler (I live a couple of miles from NU); also, we cheered our teams in Latin from time to time

bulgie 

(1) Not me but a housemate of mine back when I lived in a hippy house: Ship scaler, nasty enough job on a normal enough day, but their shipyard got a contract that kept him busy for a couple weeks. Some town on Puget Sound didn't have a sewage treatment plant, or their plant was down for maintenance or something, so they shipped their sewage to Seattle for treatment, by barge. When the barges were pumped out, some stubborn sludge remained and eventually the capacity of the barges was reduced enough they came in to the shipyard for cleaning. He had to climb down a ladder into the belly of this beast, lugging a stiff heavy hose that shot hot high-pressure water. Working knee-deep in sewage, in an enclosed space not tall enough to stand up, bent over at the waist. Double shifts because they were behind schedule on the contract, so 16 hours a day bent over like that, in a room that was almost unbearably hot from the steam-cleaning. "If there's a hell, you might want to go there for a little R&R after this". Needless to say the pay was excellent. He was a graduate of a prestigious college, but no white-collar work he could find paid anywhere near as well.

(2) Boulder-trundling. We got the name from a '70s British rock-climbing magazine article titled "The Gentlemanly Art of Boulder Trundling". Me and a couple friends would go to a local cliff, which had been a quarry in the 1700s. The rock there has a semi-cuboidal fracture that made the rocks sort of appliance-shaped. With big steel bars, we pried out boulders the size of anything from microwave oven sized, through laundry washers/dryers, up to roughly refrigerator-sized. Just to see them plummet down the cliff. They'd send big sprays of rock everywhere when they hit the talus slope below, then roll down the slope along with lots of smaller rocks they'd knocked loose. Very satisfying to a teenaged boy, at that age where you want to make a mark on the world but don't know how yet. Juvenile and destructive, not "gentlemanly" in my opinion (now).

That all stopped after I dislocated my hip. I saw this giant rock, proportioned like a fridge but twice as big, and it looked like it could maybe be induced to fall if I pried out this one smaller rock under it that seemed to be holding it up. But I never thought I had any chance of moving that smaller rock. Guess what? I did. And I was in the path of the big rock when it did, in fact, fall. I would be just a stain on the rock except there was another pinnacle behind me, so the giant rock fell toward me, then hit the rock behind me and bounced, went off at a 90° angle to its original trajectory. My boot was caught in a crevice and I was pushed back so hard my hip was dislocated, which hurt a lot, but less than being completely crushed, I assume! Being rescued off the cliff was no picnic either. I spent my 16th birthday in traction. None the worse for it now though; I can't even remember which hip it was.

My friend, who was off working another boulder on a different part of the cliff, got to see this all happen. The giant boulder hit another pinnacle that was partway down the talus slope, and knocked it down too, so now there were two giant boulders coming down, the biggest we ever moved. My Nemesis-boulder made it almost to the road after knocking down some trees.

Hopefully the statute of limitations has expired by now for whatever crimes we committed with our "gentlemany art", 50 years ago

(3) Sage Hens. Pomona College had a long history of indifference, bordering on outright hostility, to college sports. I think they named their teams the Sage Hens on purpose to dissuade any jocks with delusions of making it in the pros from matriculating there. So sports there were stictly something you DID, not something you sat and watched other people do — as it should be. One of the charming things about Pomona.

High School was Wildcats (boring!) One charming thing about my high school was No Football. Well, we played touch or flag football in PE, but there was no team, no games with other schools, no Homecoming Dance! My cousins in Texas (cheerleadsers all) assumed I was kidding, and were aghast to learn I was not. They wondered "what's the point of high school, without football?" To paraphrase Dani Rojas, "Football is Life!" Again, 50 years ago, so this may have changed, dunno. Town of Suffield CT.

Mark B

rhm

1. Jobs include being a temporary secretary through Kelly Temps, technical drawing of archaeological samples (ceramics).

2. Picture a small church in a small clearing in the woods at the top of a little hill on an island on a lake somewhere in Bavaria. It is April. Wet snow is falling. Next to the church an area about the size of a two car garage has been excavated to a depth of about 50 cm, exposing a jumbled layer of human bones, all well preserved but not articulated.
Standing among the bones is me, with a sheet of graph paper on a very large clipboard that I'm trying to keep dry while drawing the bones with fingers too cold to hold a pencil. Do not, under any circumstances, try to erase anything on the wet spots. Within ten minutes it's all wet spots. Miserable, but it's not all bad: an attractive young woman is helping me by measuring the bones so i can draw them at the correct scale. At the bottom of the hill is a warm vacation villa where the rest of the team is drinking cocoa and waiting for us to finish.

3. Eagles, then tigers. I transferred.

Dylansbob 

1. Fixed computers for Uncle Eli (Lilly) and Cumins. Ran thrift shops. Built Haulmark trailers (1 day, bagboy at the grocery paid more and wasn't 3rd shift)

2. Lost racquetball tournaments against half a dozen top10 pros.

3. redbirds

cheffyjay

1. Oyster shucker. Became a competitive oyster shucker and did pretty well. We had the Oyster Olympics around here and I did that too--oyster identification: market name, latin name, growing method. Never really cared for oysters though.
2. I had the joy of making hundreds of pounds of fake feces for toilet testing over a very long weekend. I've cooked for a loooong list of 1990s era celebrities, that was more fun.
3. is this whole thing a trick to have us give out personal information / guess answers to password reset questions?

Wildwood

1. Final 'career' was in Assisted Living - Administrator and corporate marketing. All the clients were vintage, most classic to boot.

2. Traveled to the beach at Palaiokastritsa, Corfu, Greece. Hooked up a 'touring' Euro/Aussie bunch of hippies. Ate fresh octopus, drank abundant wine, learned the goat dance, and some Danish words late at night ..... the rest is kinda fuzzy ....

3. Graduated H.S. ....the rest is kinda fuzzy.
3a. Here is my mascot when I Certificated from UC - Santa Cruz, Wide Area network management (early Internet vintage)

UCSC Banana Slug. - I got the t-shirt, too. I think the above mascot was the MBA program's version.

gaucho777 

1a. As a teenager, I would sometimes sneak onto golf courses at night and wade into the ponds with bare feet to fish out the golf balls. Then my friends and I would clean up and sell the golf balls on the weekend outside the entrance to the golf course. 1b. My first job out of college, I worked with a company that did advising for Native American tribes.

2. I survived an attempted murder (two guys got locked up for it).

3. High School: Warriors; College: Gauchos! (hence, the username)

squirtdad

no but I realized after the fact it could be determined

squirtdad

hopefully sawing the logs not the Pecherons

martl

This is an actual profession i learned - golf ball diver
translated: Salary: How much does a golf ball diver make? - Job - now.de (www-jetzt-de.translate.goog)

1 i was an on-call interviewee for a market research company. As such, i posed as an abitioned hobby photographer and a whisky drinker, among other things. It paid 20€ a session plus free sandwiches. Whole scheme got busted when it became obvious that at a group interview where "regular reader of a very stupid lifestyle magazine" was the requirement, no one in the room had ever read a single issue, or cared.
2 i hiked the Bhutan Snowman Trek, the Great Zanskar Trek, and the Singalila- Kanchenchunga trek
3 our schools don't usually have mascots, but we had a stone lion at the front gate.

seypat

I did lots of golf ball diving back in the day also. As to the person upthread that was getting busy on a water tower, a golf green is a nice place to knock boots as well. Hay hauling. I hauled a lot of hay BITD.

One summer, my father had leased a lot of extra land for cattle. My older brother was gone on the wheat harvest that year. I was 12 and my younger brother was 10. All we did most of the days was build, string and maintain barb wire fences that summer. Had a pickup and we drove from place to place getting er done. Nothing like digging post holes in 100+ heat with the sun beating down on you. We did have stock tanks/ponds on some of the places to cool off in.

rustystrings61 

1. Kept guitars tuned and polished in a music store, as a student worker shifted an entire college library's holdings to facilitate carpet replacement, sold batteries to retired Gen. Robert L. Scott of the Flying Tigers and "God Is My Co-Pilot" fame, covered city cops and government for a now-defunct newspaper, wrote and edited "advertorial" copy and special advertising sections for another newspaper, fronted a roots music trio, about to retire after nearly 32 years working in a college library.

2. Played a jam session one night 1986 in a 20's roadhouse/former speakeasy in Macon, Georgia with Allman Brothers drummer Jaimoe Johnson, blues and soul bass legend Calvin Arline and fomer Percy Sledge and James Brown guitarist Robert Lee Coleman. I did NOT cover myself in glory, but from then on I was treated like family when I encountered any of those gentlemen around town.

3. Started off as an Eagle, finished as a Charger, I don't recall going to a single high school football game ever - my father conducted the marching band for the college where he taught, and I had enough of football games by the time I was 10.

Spaghetti Legs 

I congratulate you on your perseverance!

OK you win the thread.

clubman 

Roving cameraman at '88 Winter Olympics for TSN, covering 'Special Events'. Saw KD Lang perform twice, flew in Hot Air Balloon, saw Eddie the Eagle, Opening and Closing ceremonies, the Jamaican Bobsleigh team, Katarina Witt, Boitano/Orser etc. Best job ever, for 3 weeks.
Babysat Jim Carrey in a locked office for 45 minutes as he warmed up for College performance. Just the two of us. I can't describe what I witnessed, it was jaw-dropping, as you can imagine. Two weeks later he made his Carson debut.
Wildcats.

Sitting in the 90-metre chair before games.

curbtender

1) Went in people's backyard early in the morning and made a bunch of racket. I had a kid tell me he thought I was a boogeyman, lol. I see Brent was an elevator operator also.

2) Free climbed a Redwood tree to about 150'.

3) Mustangs

cyccommute 

So many.

1: Delivered plumbing supplies, installed fireplace screens, chemical analysis, chemical researcher doing alternative energy research including inventing a phenol/formaldehyde resin from wood pyrolysis oil; inventing a wood pulping method; developing a ground breaking analysis method/ASTM standard;
2: Operating experimental alternative fuel/electric trucks on a double wheel 17,000 lb dynamometer because the building shook too much for me to do the filter weighing that I was assigned to do. I had to do the weighing from (roughly) 1200 to 0200 when the building quit vibrating.
3: Demons.

squirtdad

barb wire fencing is a pain, no pun intended.... and never is grazing land easy post hole digging

steelbikeguy

hmmm... unusual jobs?...
Not really unusual... fixed electronics on jet aircraft in the Marines.
... helped design a box that gives audio warnings in the C-17 cargo plane.
... helped design a laser communications system for one of the Star Wars satellites
... helped produce and design electrical power systems for satellites
... various electronics designs for Big Yellow Machines

Some of these jobs did provide opportunities for doing novel stuff.
As an avionics tech in a Marine training squadron, I did get to spend a little time in the backseat of the two-seat jets inflight. Other than filling up my "relief container" a few times, it was a lot of fun.
btw, fellow BF member @bianchigirl was also a member of this squadron at approximately the same time. Small world!

A pic from the first flight:




Being an engineer for Big Yellow Machines did provide opportunities to operate them. In this shot, I'm trying out the D11 Carrydozer. I had developed a sensor that allowed the "carrydozer" feature to work.





For non-work stuff... I did do a little skydiving with friends. After 5 static-line jumps, I did a freefall jump. Unfortunately... the parachute didn't come out! I had to use the emergency chute. It was a round chute, so I landed wherever the wind took me. It worked out and I was fine, but it did freak out my friend who jumped right after me.
Hopefully no one else here has experienced this.

edit: high school mascot: saber, which I think meant saber-tooth tiger... although it looked more like a panther, if memory serves?? Not important.

Steve in Peoria

jdawginsc 

1. Delivered phone books, worked on an ice cream truck, sold Cutco cutlery.

2. Was the 1 millionth visitor to City Hall in Columbus Ohio in 1971 (age 5); stepped on rusty nails through the foot three times in one year in different places. Nail holes were 1/2 inch away from each other on the same foot.

3. Wildcats, but my teaching alma mater were Cougars.

Andy_K 

1. As a software engineer, I wrote a piece of custom software for the SETI project to look for irregularities during a meteor shower. As a sportswriter, I covered the world whitewater canoe/kayak championships.

2. I was once mistaken for Glenn Danzig during a concert at Hammerjacks.

3. Sentinels

seypat

Were you taking someone's daughter out to the concert that night by chance?