Jobs you didn't really know excisted
By Torunn
@Torunn (8606)
Norway
April 26, 2010 4:28pm CST
Some years ago when I travelled around on Shetland and Orkney with three friends, one of them and I decided we wanted to spend a day on Foula. Foula is a small island on the coast of Shetland mainland, you can just see it when there's no fog. It's mainly inhabited by sheep and bonxies. Bonxies are big evil birds, they're so evil that you should carry a big stick with a hat when you walk in the mountains there because then they will hack at the stick with the hat instead of you.
To get to Foula you can take the ferry or the very small plane. We took the plane, got a great round around the island when we flew in. We spent one day climbing the mountains, getting attacked by bonxies, watching puffins and weird sheep and trying to figure out what people lived of out there. When we left we saw what the local firemen did: every day before the plane came in and before it left they drove up and down the airstrip to make sure it was no sheep, no gulls and no bonxies on it. I'm not sure if they had anything else to do as it was a very wet island, I can't imagine that it's lot of fires there. Maybe they rescue sheep from bonxie?
In Riga we took the elevator up in the spire of one of the churches. To make sure one doesn't press the wrong button there's a bloke in the elevator who's only job is to press the up button every 10. minute and the down button when those who are up want to go down. He might also have to do his best to avoid getting squeezed by tourists as it was a quite small elevator. Not a glass elevator so he couldn't enjoy the view. I think it might be some way of fighting high unemployment rates, 'cause I'm pretty sure that after a month or two he'd be bored to death and replaced by the next victim.
Any jobs you've stumbled across that you didn't think excisted? Or where mainly there to lower the unemployment rates? (and no, politician don't count)
2 people like this
4 responses
@dawnald (85137)
• Shingle Springs, California
26 Apr 10
I can't think of a single job like that right now, though I'm sure there are plenty of them. How did you like Riga?
@Torunn (8606)
• Norway
26 Apr 10
Riga was great! Some of our weird friends (both I and the travelling buddie have weird friends) claimed that it would be expensieve, no shopping and not a lot of good food. They were all wrong, the only problem we had was that it was a bit colder than we expected. And when we tried to find the big shopping centre we both thought that the other one knew where we were going so we ended up taking trip around with the bus on some Riga suburb. We found it in the end, turned out if was several block bigs so the no shopping was definitly wrong. I saw some nice museums and churches, but I'd like to go back in the summer when it's green. It's very pretty city but most cities look better with a bit of green.
1 person likes this
@dawnald (85137)
• Shingle Springs, California
26 Apr 10
One of these days....
My sister took a cruise that went to St. Petersburg, Talinn and some places in Scandinavia. She was really impressed with Talinn. Farthest north I ever got in Europe was Copenhagen and the farthest east was probably Prague.
@Torunn (8606)
• Norway
26 Apr 10
I've heard that Talinn is a beautiful city too. If I go to Finland again this summer we might catch the ferry across, depending a bit on the weather of course. I haven't been much further north in Norway than were I live, only about 400 km. It's 2000 km all the way up so 400 isn't really a lot :-) I've been nearly to the polar circle in Finland, I think that might be the farthest east too. We were just by the Russian border in the middle of nowwhere really. Reindeer, birch forrests and drunken Finns.
1 person likes this
@jb78000 (15139)
•
26 Apr 10
i can't think of any such marvellous jobs off the top of my head. oh actually i can - in glasgow in a very strange old block of random offices there was a very bad tempered man whose job apparently was standing by the entrance glaring into space and very occasionally wandering into the offices muttering about lightbulbs. perhaps he was meant to be security? he was very small though. he only spoke to you after about 6 months, and i think there were some people he never spoke to at all because he didn't like the way they looked.
@Torunn (8606)
• Norway
27 Apr 10
Maybe he was part of a light-bulb conspiracy? He secretly made sure that all the light-bulbs would go out on the same time so that when everyone was wandering around in the dark, he could pinch their bottoms. If he was very small he wouldn't dare doing that in the light.
1 person likes this
@Bellapop (1279)
•
9 Jul 10
When I went on holiday to Hong Kong the hotel I stayed in had these people, they were actually the security team, but they also had to do 'this' job where they would take in turns to do a shift each, where they would have to stand in the lift, go up the building, stopping at every floor, and then come down again, you could tell on thier faces that they felt it was degrading and very boring... I found out that they did this also as a security measure - they covered up the lift switch, so clients couldn't call the lift themselves, and it would be up to the security guard in the lift to let you go in and out, I suppose it stops some strange people who decide to wander off onto the other floors...apparently they have had problems with burglary's in the past, mainly from the high overturn of tourists coming through everyday...as with other tedious jobs like these, there are so many, probably like checking fruit to see if its 'female' or 'male' in some countires - apparently this determines the taste and helps a lot to know the difference in cooking. :)
@Torunn (8606)
• Norway
9 Jul 10
That does sound a bit like a waste of time, but a security guard is probably more frightening than a security camera.
I've never heard of female and male fruit, is it because the way they look? So you can have different genders for the same fruit? Must indeed be a quite weird job :-)
