From deer urine collectors to professional cuddlers, we count thirteen strange and unusual jobs that pay surprisingly well!
13 – Professional Patient,
- If you think every throat tickle is tuberculosis and every scraped knee requires amputation, then maybe you should consider becoming a professional patient. Even if you aren’t a hypochondriac, this is still a noble profession that will help the next generation of doctors.
- Basically a professional patient volunteers their time and body so that med school students can hone skills as physicians and improve their bedside manner.
- In one session, you might receive seventeen physicals or, if you want to be paid more, you can volunteer for more invasive procedures, like pap smears or getting your prostate examined multiple times by teams of inexperienced doctors.
12 – Deer Urine Collector,
- Apparently, deer urine is packed with pheromones that drive bucks completely loco. This makes it the lure of choice for deer hunters and creates a weird market for animal pee.
- Deer farmers actually collect and sell the undiluted pee of their white-tailed deer. Since there are more than seventeen million deer hunters in the US, there is plenty of demand and plenty of opportunity to make serious coin.
- A single deer has between $93,000 to $303,000 worth of pee in it each year.
11 – Roadkill Collector,
- Deer farmers may weep at this, but over one and a half million deer are hit by cars each year. All that urine money down the drain. Plenty of other animals get collected by cars, too. Usually while scurrying across the road in poor weather conditions. It’s the roadkill collector’s job to pick them up.
- Collectors must scan the roads for animal carcasses, play Frogger with traffic, and dispose of what they find at landfills or compost heaps.
- If you’re game, roadkill collection can be pretty lucrative, with a minimum wage of $25,000 a year.
10 – Furniture Tester,
- If your mum keeps giving you grief about spending fourteen hours a day on the couch, tell her you’re training for a career as a furniture tester. This unusual job exists because robots haven’t yet developed the ability to give feedback about how comfortable furniture is.
- As you might have guessed, testers sit for long periods on manufacturers’ furniture to give feedback. This human touch gives furniture makers insight into what is comfortable and tells them what material they should use and how high or low to build something.
- For their efforts, furniture testers average $31,000 a year. Probably get freebies too.
9 – Ice Cream Taster,
- Ice cream tasters are employed by dairy companies to taste and assist in the creation of different flavours of ice cream.
- John Harrison is the official taste tester for a company called Dreyer’s. He goes by the alias ‘The Ice Cream Man’ and has tasted a few hundred million gallons of the stuff over the years. His taste buds are reportedly insured for a million dollars.
- Seems like a pretty cool job then. For their efforts, ice cream tasters make a whopping $56,000 a year on average. I guess they would be subjected to gross flavours like liquorice and wasabi, though. You couldn’t pay me enough to eat those.
8 – Crime Scene Cleaner,
- Although police clean the streets of crime, they don’t clean crime scenes; that would be the crime scene cleaner.
- Dismantling meth labs or cleaning up after horrific bloodbaths or anthrax spills is an unpopular and sometimes dangerous job, so it’s important that workers are well compensated. For surrounding themselves with all that gore and tragedy, crime scene cleaners bring in around $600 an hour.
- Obviously this isn’t a job for squeamish types who hate blood.