Odd job spoken here

With the exception of having worked as a finisher in a combat boot factory - where I applied shoe polish (sloppily) to raw edges, and cleaned glue off the finished product - most of my jobs have been fairly commonplace. But I'm always on the lookout for odd-jobs, and my sister Trish found a treasure trove in an article by Rachel Zupek over on CareerBuilder.

Using photographer Nancy Rica Schiff's books Odd Jobs, and Odd Jobs as her source material - which I must somehow get a hold of - Zupek has come up with some doozies.

Who knew there was such a thing called a "gum buster" - a person who steams gum off from under theater seats. (Given how often I've had the Eeee-ewww experience of finding gum under chairs and tables, I'd guess that professional gum busters aren't called on all that often.)

Not surprisingly - given the eeee-ewww factor - several of the jobs have to do with odor evaluation of both human and canine breath to check whether mouthwash and Milk Bones do the trick. I don't know which would be worse - smelling human bad breath all week or smelling dog bad breath. I guess that would depend on what the doggies had been into. Overwhelming as a human's bad breath can be at times, at least I've never seen a human eat excrement or lick water out of a toilet bowl.

There were a number of tester/inspector positions listed - beer, ball, video game, potato chip, and tampon, of which tampon would have to be the worst if it actually required insertion to fill your quota of 125 objects tested per day.

Ocularists paint artificial eyes which, unlike doll's eyes, have to look human and replicate the real eye in the other socket. So this is a fairly high skill position.

Dieners - a word I'd never heard before - "prepare cadavers for the pathologist before autopsies are performed in hospitals." A companion position of sorts - the gold reclaimer - "scours old teeth for fillings" which are melted down and sold to jewelers. Talk about macabre. I keep looking at my ring finger and wondering where that gold has been...

Ever wonder how ribbon candy gets made? If you thought it was by machine, you guessed wrong. Apparently, the stuff has to be pulled by hand to that nice level of thinness so that it can harden and turn glasslike so you can cut your lip on it if you're nuts enough while at your grandmother's on Christmas to actually bite into a piece. Now this has to be a job that is both seasonal and on the decline, as I cannot help but believe that ribbon candy production will cease to exist some day soon. (Although now that I think about it, the Vermont Country Store will no doubt keep it alive.)

On the fun side of the house, Mattel employs dress designers to create new fashions for Barbie and friends. How odd, though, to be designing for a body that in real life would be about seven feet tall, with five feet worth of legs, way 120 pounds, and wear a size 44DDD bra? And you thought super-models had unnatural figures?

The job on Zupek's list that struck both me and Trish as the oddest is that of paper towel sniffer, who "ensure that once a paper towel is used, there is no noticeable scent." But isn't that, ummm, contingent on what the paper towel is used for. Maybe if you're mopping up after a gold reclamation project, there's not much of an odor. And ribbon candy clean up probably smells cloying but okay. But think about where that dog's mouth might have been...