re: Name the craziest job you've ever had......

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I sold knives. Cutco knives. Complete crap and I knew it, but hey it paid rent.

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Vector Marketing

Worked in a steel factory in Bham summer before freshman year at AU.

Holy hell it sucked. Long pants, steel toe boots, long sleeves, arm guards, thick gloves, hard hat and goggles. All day every day. You walk outside in the middle of July into 95 degree heat and it feels great. Like you can breathe. Temp indoor was 115-120 in most work areas.

I respected the guys there a lot. Sorta a brotherhood of tough men doing extreme work in hell. All for 7 bucks an hour

Worked at an Adolescent Treatment Center for my first 2 years of School.

It was a lot of fun.

I worked my first three years of college at Lowe's 40 to 50 hrs per week. God I despised that job, then worked at a marina my last year of school. Now that job had a lot of perks and a lot of nice women to look at. First job out of college was a training coordinator for a plasma donation place. I have many stories about the crackheads that frequented that place.

I was a piano player at a whore house....

One semester I took 6 courses, ran 3.1-5 miles a day and worked a 7/12 job. This was in Wyoming and I was keeping busy to pass time.

Built above ground pools in the Ozarks of Arkansas for a summer. Problem with above ground pools is that you still have to level a spot and dig down, but you're not digging far enough down to make use of a back hoe always. If you know anything about the soil/rocks in the Ozarks, you can probably see the problem with this scenario. They paid really well, and lots of the jobs were rural, and we got paid for drivetime as well.

My "craziest" was probably detassling corn in Iowa. It was piece meal work over about a 3 week span, and you got paid per "panel" of corn that you detassled. The way to make the most money was to work a longer day than anyone else, and we were all pretty competitive. We worked on average of 10-14 hour days in the Iowa summertime. I would have loved to have had a pedometer to track my mileage each day. Brutal. Plus, our whole crew was camping out at a State Park, so we'd get done working and return to sleep in a tent at night. Made about 3 grand in 3 weeks, though, which was insane money for me at the time. Then we went and traveled around the Pacific Northwest and up into British Columbia with our spoils.

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Does being a hobo count?

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Corn detasslers are pretty much hobos. In all seriousness, it's a pretty interesting group of people. There was a whole migrant worker scene/tour back then. Apples in the upper midwest, plant trees in Texas, blueberries in the northeast, detassling in Iowa, and some of them would do firefighting our West.

Lots of characters in that circuit.

Worked in a movie theater for a bit. The night janitor after hours was a straight-up boozehound, and would leave bottles of Captain Morgan and Aftershock in the janitors closet. Of course we helped ourselves when they were unopened, but he never complained and never stopped bringing that shite.

Worked in a country western steakhouse too....stationed as kitchen prep/dishwasher. The owner liked this redhead serving tables and would constantly hit on her which she hated. She felt like she needed the job and just tolerated it instead of opening a can of worms with a sexual harassment claim. But me and her hit it off and went out a couple times. He found out and found a convenient way to fire me. Total dickbag. But when he did, she quit too but the relationship fell apart after that anyway.

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Corn detasslers are pretty much hobos.

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No lie, the town in Iowa my grandad farmed in and my uncle's still do is home to the National Hobo Convention, where they hold a Hobo Parade every year on National Hobo Day. They also have the National Hobo Museum and a Hobo Graveyard where any hobo can be buried for free. I have a Hobo Convention t-shirt somewhere and still have to eat at the Hobo cafe everytime I visit.