22 Strange but True Full-Time Jobs (Some Are Really Bizarre)
A while ago a simple question went round the web: what are the most unusual ways people make money? The answers proved that human beings will turn almost anything into a job. Here are 22 of the strangest that are real.
1Ambulance taxi
News reports from Moscow described private vehicles kitted out to look like ambulances that would rush paying passengers through traffic jams for a hefty fee. Russian authorities treated it as a scam, but it says a lot about Moscow traffic.
2Pixel salesman
In 2005 a British student named Alex Tew, about to start university and worried about the cost, set up The Million Dollar Homepage: a grid of one million pixels sold at a dollar each to advertisers. It became an internet sensation. The last 1,000 pixels were auctioned on eBay in January 2006, bringing the total to just over $1 million.
3Rent-a-boyfriend
In China, single women can face heavy family pressure to marry, especially at Lunar New Year. Some hire a man to play the boyfriend at family dinners, paying for his time plus his travel, meals and gifts.
4Gold sweeper
In the jewellery districts of Indian cities, tiny flecks of gold and silver end up in dust and drains. Sweepers collect the sludge, wash and pan it like old-time prospectors, and recover a living from metal nobody else can see.
5Professional mourner
In parts of Rajasthan, women known as rudaali were traditionally hired to weep at funerals for families whose own members were expected to hide their grief. Paid mourning has a long history in many cultures, from ancient Egypt and Greece to modern services that hire extra mourners for small funerals.
6Street weigher
In many countries, from Nigeria to India, you can meet a person with a bathroom scale on the pavement who will weigh you for a coin. It is one of the smallest businesses in the world, and one of the most honest.
7Rage room operator
Customers pay to smash old printers, plates, bottles and washing machines with a baseball bat, wearing a helmet and overalls. Rage rooms spread from Japan to cities across North America and Europe in the 2010s.
8Kidnapper for hire
In the early 2000s, a New York artist named Brock Enright made headlines by running "reality adventures" in which clients paid to be snatched, bound and held according to a script they had agreed in advance. Everything was consensual, but it was still very strange.
9Cat café owner
Many city apartments in Japan forbid pets, so cat lovers pay by the hour to relax with resident cats. The idea started in Taipei in the late 1990s, and Osaka's first cat café opened in 2004. Today they exist worldwide.
10Sock subscription
In 1999 a Swiss entrepreneur, Samuel Liechti, founded a company that mails subscribers fresh black socks several times a year, so they never have to shop for them again. It sounded absurd and became a lasting business.
11Star seller
Companies will "name a star" after you and send a certificate and a sky chart. The International Star Registry has done this since 1979. Astronomers do not recognise the names, but customers do not seem to mind.
12Irish dirt exporter
A Belfast entrepreneur noticed that Irish Americans longed for a piece of the old country, and started selling bags of genuine Irish soil, so that emigrants could, for example, have it scattered at a funeral. Sales reportedly ran into the millions of dollars.
13Street ear cleaner
In India, traditional ear cleaners walk the streets with a red turban and a kit of picks and cotton. Doctors would rather you saw them instead, but the trade has survived for generations.
14Human billboard
People have rented out their foreheads, arms and bellies for advertising. In 2005 an American woman auctioned a permanent forehead tattoo on eBay, and an online casino paid $10,000 for the space, a story we tell in our list of bizarre eBay sales.
15App that does nothing
In 2008 a developer released "I Am Rich", an iPhone app costing $999.99 that displayed a glowing red gem and nothing else. Apple pulled it within a day, but a handful of people had already bought it.
16Publicly traded person
Mike Merrill, from Portland, Oregon, split himself into 100,000 shares and sold them at a dollar each. Shareholders voted on his decisions, from what he ate to whom he dated.
17Professional queuer
People are paid to stand in line for others: for new phones, Broadway tickets, popular bakeries and even seats at public hearings in Washington.
18Golf ball diver
Every golf course pond hides thousands of lost balls. Divers recover them by the sackful, clean them and sell them back to golfers. The water is murky, cold and sometimes shared with alligators.
19Odour judge
Companies that make deodorant, mouthwash and cat litter employ trained sniffers to rate how well their products work. Yes, that means smelling armpits for a living.
20Street View driver
Someone has to drive, walk, cycle and even boat the cameras that photograph the world for online maps. Some carry backpack cameras up mountains and through deserts.
21Professional eater
In South Korea, "mukbang" broadcasters film themselves eating enormous meals while chatting to viewers, earning from donations and advertising. The trend went global.
22Casino proposition player
In Nevada card rooms, a "prop" player is paid an hourly wage by the casino to sit in poker games and keep tables running, then gambles with their own money. They win and lose like anyone else; their job is simply to make sure a game never dies for lack of players.
Strange jobs on the casino floor
Number 22 is not the only odd job a casino creates. Up in the ceiling, surveillance officers spend whole shifts watching camera feeds, trained to spot a dealer's sloppy shuffle or a player's suspiciously well-timed bet. Their work has a long history, and some of the stories they learned from are told in the craziest casino heists and cheating stories.
Other jobs are just as specialised. Precision dice for craps are made to extremely tight tolerances and usually retired after a short time in play, so somebody inspects and replaces them. Slot technicians maintain machines whose real brain is a random number generator, a story we explain in the technology behind modern slots. And croupiers train for weeks to learn chip handling, payouts and the mental arithmetic that lets them pay a roulette bet in seconds.
