Bizarre Professions: 45 Unconventional Jobs That Defy the Norm

Up until 1991 there was a dedicated position in the British Armed Forces called 'The Keeper of the Apes.' Their job was solely to care for the monkeys of Gibraltar. The military even had a budget for ape-related expenses. Any sick or injured monkey was cared for in British hospitals.

27. Buckingham Palace employs someone whose sole job is to wind and maintain its 1,000 clocks. As of 2013, the pay for a Royal Clock Winder started at more than $50,000 per year.

28. New York’s Benjamin Hotel employs sleep concierge whose sole job is to make sure its guests get a perfect night of sleep.

29. A workforce of around 5,000 men in Mumbai, known just as “Dabbawalas”, deliver with the help of an efficient railway system, 200,000 tiffin boxes daily to office workers. Established in 1890, the color-coded system they use was originally designed for use by the illiterate and leads to hardly any mistakes.

30. Car makers employ sound engineers to give car doors that satisfying 'thunk' when closed.

There is an industrial freezer at England’s Sellafield nuclear power plant which is packed with an expanding mountain of radioactive seagulls that were shot by snipers employed by the plant.

32. Ice cream testers use gold spoons to be able to taste the product 100% without a slight percentage of 'after-taste' from typical spoons.

33. 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.

34. 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).

35. There are professional Dildo testers called Dildologists, who study and certify sex toys.

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.”

37. 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.

38. 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."

39. Snoop Dogg employs a full-time blunt roller and pays him $50,000 a year.

40. 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.

‘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.

42. 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.

43. 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.

44. 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.

45. Lawn gnomes used to be real people that the wealthy English families employed to live in their gardens. They were called ornamental hermits.