26Federal Tea Testers
From 1897 until 1996 the federal government had a board of tea testers whose job was to make sure that imported tea was good enough to be sold in the US.
27. There are professional "Odor Testers" working in product research, who routinely snort the emanations of scores of armpits, feet, and morning mouths, noting their reactions to what they sniffed on a scale of 1 (good) to 10 (fatal).
28. There are professional Dildo testers called Dildologists, who study and certify sex toys.
29. China employs professional panda huggers for $32,000 a year (as of 2016). Their job entails “spending 365 days with the pandas and sharing in their joys and sorrows.”
30. Advertising firms employ people called "cool hunters." These people are professionals at figuring out what people will find "cool" before those people even know that something is cool. These people are better at knowing what we like than ourselves.
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31Intimacy Coordinator
Movies can hire an “Intimacy Coordinator” for sex scenes. Their duties include scene supervision and teaching directors and actors how to run a rehearsal without emulating sexual movement, but instead "sculpting the physical actions using plain words."
32. Snoop Dogg employs a full-time blunt roller and pays him $50,000 a year.
33. The Australian suburb of ‘Surfers Paradise’ has bikinis clad "Meter Maids" who used to feed expired parking meters to promote the area and preserve goodwill. After the introduction of pay-and-display parking meters, they took on the task of explaining to motorists how the machines work.
34. ‘Breaker Boys’ were young boys aged 8-12 who were employed to work 10 hours a day, 6 days a week to separate impurities from coal. Despite public disapproval, the practice of employing children in this line of work lasted for decades, only finally ending in the US in the 1920s.
35. Women who are called 'fluffers' are employed on the set of porn scenes whose job is to keep the male porn star aroused when he is not on the camera.
36Star Wars Continuity Cop
Lucasfilm employs a guy whose job is maintaining the Star Wars canon. The position was created to avoid a repeat of incidents like a 1978 Star Wars novel that depicted Luke and Leia getting romantic.
37. In Britain, when someone wins £1,000,000 on their Premium bonds, a woman called Agent Million arrives at their door and delivers the news. Her position is completely confidential. Only her employers and her husband know her identity.
38. Lawn gnomes used to be real people that the wealthy English families employed to live in their gardens. They were called ornamental hermits.
39. For decades, tens of thousands of people in Nebraska have worked as corn detasselers in the summer. These workers remove the tassel, or the top part of the corn plant, so it cannot pollinate itself. This provides a better crop of corn.
40. The job of a flavorist is to genetically engineer the tastes in foods by choosing mouth-watering natural flavors, like that of an orange, and reproducing them in a lab, creating a "better tasting" orange with more addictive subtones.
