What's the most interesting job you have had?

L

Loosey

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Location
Coastal New England
If anyone feels like discussing it, I'm eager to know what interesting jobs others have done.

I've had plenty in my life if I include volunteer jobs, work study and part time jobs, "real" jobs... but only one stands out as absolutely edge-of-my seat fascinating. I expect folks will be surprised what that was, as I was.

Without going into a long and boring narrative here are some of the jobs I have had:

Child care worker in day care, both in infant (2 weeks to 2 years) and toddlers on up

Advocate in shelter for victims of domestic violence

Education advocate in a family foster care program

911 dispatcher (many years)

Middle school English teacher

Bookkeeper for college and high school food services, and residential construction (also many years)

Lifeguard and swimming instructor

Registrar of voters and ballot clerk

Manager of a small grocery store

City bus driver

Librarian in a university curriculum library

Course developer in a community education center

I could go on... But far and away the most interesting job I ever had was as a taxi driver. I drove night shift for 4 years when I was in school and on and off afterward, and I loved it! The hours are long and the pay is terrible, but every minute of every shift is unpredictable. People like to talk to cab drivers, often, and I like to listen. Truthfully, though, probably the most interesting people I met were other cab drivers. What a spectrum of personalities, experience, and education they represented. Stories, stories, and more stories!

I was in my early 20s, female, and not armed - although many of my co-workers were armed. I never got robbed, raped, or murdered, although surely it did and does happen. Maybe I was born under a lucky star.

Would I recommend my child do it? No. It's a hard life, and a potentially dangerous job. Would I do it again if I were 20, healthy, and didn't care about $ or benefits? In a heartbeat!

What about you? How have you spent your earning years? What was fun?

Ps: I've never been fired.
 

This has already come up quite recently, and my answer is the same.

I was Hall Porter (janitor) in an all female university Hall of Residence, with a master key to the bedrooms of 600+ nubile (mostly!) young ladies!
 
I was a licensed Embalmer/Funeral Director for over ten years & involved in well over a thousand funerals. and because of the very nature of the business it was the most interesting. My later career in Finance was good but no where near as interesting.
 
Lon, my granddaughter is currently taking an embalming/funeral services course at a community college. She thoroughly enjoys it.

My most interesting job was Behavioral Specialist at a state facility for developmentally delayed residential patients. Interesting but also heartbreaking, as over 50% of my clients were developmentally delayed as a result of child abuse and/or environmental isolation. It was my job to develop creative and effective methods of teaching the clients to be as independent as possible. In my four years there, 47% of my clients were able to move out of the huge state home and into group homes or supported living apartments, which is a pretty decent statistic.
 
FazeFour said:
Lon, my granddaughter is currently taking an embalming/funeral services course at a community college. She thoroughly enjoys it.

My most interesting job was Behavioral Specialist at a state facility for developmentally delayed residential patients. Interesting but also heartbreaking, as over 50% of my clients were developmentally delayed as a result of child abuse and/or environmental isolation. It was my job to develop creative and effective methods of teaching the clients to be as independent as possible. In my four years there, 47% of my clients were able to move out of the huge state home and into group homes or supported living apartments, which is a pretty decent statistic.
Click to expand...

Oh, GOOD job! What a challenge every day. You really made a difference to improve people's lives! As I hope there is a special room in hell for people who so damage other people, I know there is a special place in heaven for those who work to mitigate the damage.
 
My most interesting job was as a bartender right after I got out of High School. I certainly learned alot about the many different reasons people drink and was surprised to find out that bartending is many times like being a Counselor.
 
For 26 years I worked as a building maintenance mechanic in a county's jail facilities. Now, I supervise state prison inmates in a welding/fabrication shop.
 
My most interesting job was as a Notetaker / Support Officer for students with a disability. I worked mainly at a University but also helped out at local Technical Colleges and a High School. Most of the classes were interesting with the odd boring one thrown in.
 
I worked for 22 years at Russell Stovers Candy Company. Think the candy scene with Lucy and you pretty much have an idea of my first day there. I once had to help clean up a three thousand pound chocolate spill, think chocolate lave for this scene. The last five years of my employment there, before the local factory closed, I was the only female member in the maintenance dept. Before that I was once the only female on third shift at a powder metal place where small metal parts were formed. I work best with males I guess is what I'm trying to say.
 
On one job, I was the advertising department of a small grocery-supply firm, that supplied about a hundred small IGA-type grocery stores. My job was creating ads for the small stores to turn into their local newspapers. This was cut-and-paste when it was really cut-and-paste. I had several large "clip books" with pictures in it and two typewriter-like machines that printed out different sizes of copy. I'd cut out pictures, print out the copy and paste them on copyboards. Then I would use a machine that would transfer all that onto thin metal sheets that I printed from on a big-ol-ass printing machine onto glossy paper.

It was hard work and it wasn't exactly Pulitzer-prize winning prose, but dammit! I was producing SOMETHING. I had something in my hands at the end of the day that I.had.made.myself. That's a feeling that I've lacked in a lot of other jobs.

But my FAVORITE job, so far, has been "retirement". I'm really good at it, too.
 
Probably the years I worked for the Sheriff's Office..in the command center and records office. This was the 70's and the Deputies on patrol called for computer checks for warrants and this and that. It was fast paced and interesting.
 
When I was a student, I has summer jobs lifting bins (collecting garbage ?), looking after municipal parks, rural graveyards etc..
and over Christmas, as a postman. Not great jobs, not great pay, but a priceless education in human behaviour and society.

I spent the most of my working life in I.T. (hardware & software), but my best career move was to take early retirement.
 
I know this will sound boring to some but it was interesting and challenging to me. When I worked for the county, sometimes I had to take a state or federal form of some kind or another that Social Services decided they wanted to use and I had to get on the computer and copy it exactly and that's hard to do because all the lines and marks and spaces everywhere had to be an exact copy. At first I thought I could just make a copy and then put the little thing at the bottom that it was a country form copied from a Federal form but they wouldn't let me. It had to be made as a new document right on the computer. I was very good at doing that so when it came up, that was my job. When I was all finished and got to put my little notation on the bottom about it now being a country form, I felt I had accomplished something. I guess it doesn't take much to make me happy. :)
 
My most interesting job - my career, in fact - was as a martial arts instructor. I covered everything from Oriental philosophies to meditation to Chinese medicine to, yes, fighting. Did it for over 35 years.

Some of my more interesting "support" jobs included being an escort in NYC and a bouncer in several ... "establishments" ... in NY, PA, CA and FL.
 

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