Home : Working America :Quirky Jobs
Who blows the bugle at the Kentucky Derby? Who dusts the dinosaur bones at the Smithsonian? Who sniffs dog breath for a living? Who measures the breasts of live models? There are real people who perform these and other truly peculiar jobs. These oddball professionals, have personalities and occupations that other people can't (or won't) do. In the land of the free, the brave, and the quirky, some folks will do almost anything to make an honest buck.
Betty Twarkosky worked for Carter Wallace, Inc. for over forty-six years. You may not be familiar with Carter Wallace: they manufacture Trojan condoms, among other things. Every single condom that leaves the factory gets tested, and Betty, who has since retired, was one of many testers. Working on an assembly line, testers place the condoms over steel mandrels that heat up and are then submerged in water. Any hole or puncture will immediately cause a condom to be rejected; if three condoms within a group are rejected, the entire batch. gets thrown out. More than one million condoms are produced daily at this New Jersey plant, a true boon to population control. One potato, two potatoes, three potatoes, four - what can a potato chip inspector be looking for? According to Cindy Pina at the Cape Cod Potato Chip Factory in Hyannis, Massachusetts, she looks for over-cooked chips, but more importantly, for chips that are clumped together. Such clumps will ruin the whole bag. Cindy has been inspecting potato chips for twelve years and, she admits, eats far fewer chips today than when she began the job. She also reveals an occupational hazard: when she does eat chips, she can't keep herself from inspecting them closely.
Don Allen knows a perfect 34C when he sees one. A designer of brassieres and panties, he spends his days measuring, fitting, and gossiping with real live models with perfect breasts. Having grown up with a father who worked for Playtcx, this job was a natural. Ask him about sink-in, high points, cross cups, cookies, and entry and he waxes eloquent. Those are the technical terms that fill his conversations, along with all the latest industry buzz. As a theriogenologist, Jim O'Neal is handy at his work, artificially inseminating hundreds of heifers a day. From late April through late June, Jim can be found visiting one of the many ranches he services in his custom-built trailer. He doesn't roll up his sleeves but, as you can see, he unzips his specialty designed work suit, dons a plastic glove that covers the entire length of his arm, and reaches deep inside the cow. As soon as he feels her cervix, he injects her with six to ten million live sperm contained in a vial he holds in his other hand. With a 65 to 70 percent pregnancy rate, his success is undeniable. For over thirty years, Frank Braisted has been dusting 145-million-year-old hones. Frank is the one and only dinosaur duster at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. Five days a week in the early hours of the morning, he has the dinosaurs all to himself as he grooms them with a feather duster and a vacuum cleaner. One thing he never does, however, is touch the bones. Here Frank appears with the Stegosaurus, a plant-eater known for its small head and slender jaws. He admits, though, that his favorite is the Allosaurus, a meat-eater with impressive teeth and claws. There are 700 dogs, mostly beagles, on site at Hill's Pet Nutrition in Topeka, Kansas. The odor of their breath is analyzed once a week in order to test the effect of their diet on their teeth. Hill's prides itself on making dog food that eliminates plaque build-up and fights gingivitis. Roxanne Livgren has been trained to sniff the dogs' breath to determine the state of their health and the effectiveness of the dog food. Buster here's breath is graded on a scale of zero to ten and can be categorized as sweaty, salty, musty, fungal, or decaying. Ask Lou Paulsen what business he's in, and he replies, "in the number one and number two business." He means that quite literally. His company, Can Doo, has 450 porta-potties at their disposal, you might say. Scattered all over Abilene and San Angelo, Texas, these self-contained facilities require servicing once a week to live up to Paulsen's standard of cleanliness. His company's motto: "No Gamble, the Pot's Right." Knife throwing is an odd job, but the work of the knife thrower's assistant is even odder. When Jennifer Kelley was deciding whether to take the job, she studied hours of taped performances by world-renowned knife thrower Larry Cisewski. Obviously, what she saw did not deter her. Jennifer now performs various daring acts, serving as a live target while spinning on a wheel or hiding behind a large paper screen. The only safe part of her job is inflating balloons. Larry won a Guinness world record by outlining Jennifer's slight frame with eight steel hachets thrown in a mere thirty seconds, and she is here as living testimony to his skill. At fifty-year-old Hilltop Labs in Cincinnati, odor tests are conducted daily on axillae (better known as armpits), breath, feet, cat litter, and diapers. Betty Lyons began her career thirty-five years ago when she herself was a subject. She then trained for almost a year and is still tested monthly to measure her acuity. Odors are judged on a scale of one to ten, and most odor judges are women: they are able to make finer distinctions. The Green Monster, known to most Bostonians and to every baseball fan, is located at Boston's Fenway Park. It is one of the few manually operated scoreboards remaining in the U.S. and it stands thirty-seven feet high. The work space behind the wall is a dark and dusty corridor with narrow slits for changing the numbers or for watching the game. Chris Elias has held the position of scoreboard operator for twelve years and counting. Every day is filled with excitement at ABS Global, Inc. in DeForest, Wisconsin. More than 150 ejaculating bulls provide semen three to four times a day. Eliza Roberts, manager of semen collection, has worked at ABS for twenty years. She jokingly claims to have "shoveled her way up through the ranks and up through the bullshit." In a typical day, she and her colleagues collect some 30,000 units of semen. In a year, that mounts up to over six million acceptable units. Tim Stone created his job of professional pooper scooper because he wanted free time to spend with his son. He sells his services with shovel and pail to dozens of dog owners in Los Angeles's San Fernando Valley. His company is called Scoop Masters, and he performs his duty once or twice a week with an open mind and lots of humor. His motto is "Your dog's poop is my soup." Though Steve Buttleman is a modest man, he toots his own horn, a 3 1/4-foot B-flat Blackburn bugle, before thousands of people on a daily basis. As punctual as a cuckoo clock, he makes his appearance ten minutes before each race at famed Churchill Downs, home of the Kentucky Derby. Standing on a deck in the center of the racetrack, he performs two rounds of "Call to the Post," a thirty-four-note cavalry tune, as the horses make their grand entrance onto the racetrack. Come rain or come shine, Steve plays nine to twelve times a day to mark the beginning of each new race to glory. Las Vegas may soon rival Paris as the "city of lights," thanks in part to the Mikohn Lighting and Sign Company, an up-and-coming, award-winning manufacturer of electric signs based in Las Vegas. Though Mikohn makes and ships electric signs all over the world, employee Evan Bigelow services all their local installations. He checks for burnt-out bulbs and replaces them. Bigelow's beat includes some twenty to twenty-five signs in this mecca of lighting, where to keep up with the ever-expanding growth of Las Vegas, new signs are being added every day. Seven days a week at precisely eleven in the morning, people from near and far gather at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee. The red carpet is rolled out, and five ducks accompanied by their duckmaster march from the elevator to the lobby to the tune of King Cotton's March. The webfooted five while away the day at the fountain in the center of the lobby. In the afternoon at the stroke of four, the fanfared-procession begins anew when the ducks ascend to their rooftop home. James Means is the duckmaster, a drill sergeant who's upstaged every step of the way by his finefeathered friends. Bill Robb is one of thirty-seven state-appointed alligator trappers in Florida, his territory being Brevard County. Whether he's called upon to capture a nine-foot alligator under a trailer at the Kennedy Space Center or a twelvefooter in someone's backyard, one thing's for sure: the alligator in question has outlived his welcome. On duty twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, Robb sometimes must lie in wait for his prey for hours on end. But once he's snared the enemy, he can usually subdue it merely by covering the eyes and taping the mouth shut. Daniel Raudabaugh doesn't mind telling women what he does for a living; in fact, he finds that it makes for interesting conversation. Working the second shift at First Quality, he spends from 3 to 11 P.M. testing tampons - regular, super, and plus sizes - for such traits as absorbency, head projection, and cord strength - the industry-wide standards set by the FDA. First Quality turns out tampons twenty-four hours a day, five days a week, producing some one to two million a day. Raudabaugh himself is likely to spot test some 125 pieces out of 500,000 or more. Few men can relate to women as intimately as he does. Hidden away in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City is a unique and exclusive little school. Veronica Vera is the creator, founder, and dean of Miss Vera's Finishing School for Boys Who Want to Be Girls, the world's first cross-dressing academy. According to Miss Vera, 60 percent of her student body is married. The curriculum includes such courses as high heel walking, body sculpting with corsets, makeup, voice, and flirting fundamentals. The term culminates with a final exam: dressing up and appearing in public-as a woman, naturally. The most revered cup in the world, the Stanley Cup, may also be the best traveled. And wherever it goes, along goes keeper of the cup, Phil Pritchard, as chaperone. Though Toronto, home to the Hockey Hall of Fame, is the cup's home base, this trophy sees its share of the world. Every year it plays a part in hometown celebrations with every member of the team that won the cup that year. Weighing 34 1/2 pounds, at 35 1/4 inches tall and 17 1/4 inches across, it's also the Big Bertha of cups, and when it flies, it sometimes gets a seat of its own on the airplane. Needless to say, Phil Pritchard is always in the adjacent seat. We can wash our outer selves by ourselves, but to clean our insides takes someone with the special skills of colonics therapist Brigit Krome. Her job: to administer colon irrigations - think of them as glorified enemas - that control the inward flow and outward expulsion of water. A colon irrigation generally takes between a half hour and an hour. During this time, as many as thirty gallons of water are propelled into, and then expelled from, the colon through the rectum, several ounces at a time. Some consider the colon the body's own sewage system, in which case Krome could be viewed as its consummate plumber.
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