rats!
ooh and my animal loving flatmate was most excited to be given the job of looking after the university rats at kcl.

she came home in tears the next day.

her job was to hold them still whilst the researchers guillotined their heads off...

we spent the next 3 weeks going one, two, three, CHOP to make her cry...
( rachelswipe with a fork, Thu 30 Sep 2004, 11:24, Reply)

Hmmm,

I paid got paid to Carpet someone's Chimney before...and I'm not talking in sexual enuendo.

I used to be a carpet fitter.

This strange woman wanted us to put the carpet up her fireplace and then go as far as we could up her chimney!

We did it with the aid of industrial glue after cracking up in the van for hours before at the thought of it!

She asked me if I was 'stalking' her which I said no to, then afterwards she put salt in my tea and told me it was a 'test'...
( Donkey Gums @mattcomedy, Thu 30 Sep 2004, 11:20, Reply)

Monkey Fishing
The basement of a nameless university had several large skips full of assorted monkey body parts, scavenged from various zoos over the years, preserved lovingly in alcohol/water mix. Like olives, only more like fetid monkey soup with chunks.
Seemingly, these had been thrown in, without any thought for proper cataloguing. How careless.

Enter me, with shoulder length rubber gloves, and, a gasmask, sorry "industrial respirator". We had to go in pairs, in case someone fell in and drowned. Gave up on the respirators in the first five minutes because they were too bulky.

Fish around up to your shoulder in monkey soup, pull out a body part, and guess what it is - attach a tag with a staple gun, and stick it back in. What's this in the bucket? Oh, it's a binbag. Do you want to open the binbag, boys and girls? No? Well, I'll do it then. Oh look. It's a dismembered chimpanzee. That or we've found Jeff Dahmer's secret stash.

Best of all, after about half an hour, the alcohol fumes get you drunk as a lord. Great, until you remember you're drunk on monkey fumes.

What is that, Dr von Strome? You need me in the lab-or-a-tory? Helga will be happy to oblige.

You'll be glad to know there were no lasting after-effects.
(sags tupac-a-hats, Sun 3 Oct 2004, 23:58, Reply)

Paid to take coke
Over here in the Netherlands, I took part in a medical study in a town called Groningen. We had to stay at the clininc for 3 nights and take smallish amounts of very pure cocaine during the day. I was paid about 300 quid and my train travel for doing so. I was reluctant to leave.
(sativan, Thu 30 Sep 2004, 14:38, Reply)

Baggage handling (for £infinity p/h)
I spent three months, immediately following my graduation, being paid to *not* handle baggage at Gatwick. It was when Servisair were bidding for the Heathrow Terminal Five baggage handling contract. Somewhat speculatively, they recruited around 300 new staff to show how serious they were - this was back in the days when there was a still a suspicion that T5 might be finished before all the recruits reached retirement. They trained us (five days driving baggage trolleys in figure eights at RAF Swindon), signed three month contracts with us and told us to go home and wait to be summoned.

After a week's waiting, I got bored and got a cash-in-hand job picking apples on a local fruit farm. After a month I got really bored and moved to Cambridge where I answered the phone in a dog food factory by day and supervised second year undergraduate geology students in the evenings, all this time collecting my full wage from Servisair.

The first communication I rceived from Servisair was notification that my three month contract was up and that they were very sorry to have to let me go.

My favourite part? The effusive reference they gave me despite my never having done a single second's work for the £3,500 they paid me.
(dred, Thu 30 Sep 2004, 11:35, Reply)

Run round Soho drinking double shots of tequila!
This would be about 2001 shortly after I stoped working in IT. I was then working as a guitar technician and I had just landed a contract with a quite well know group. I got a call saying they wanted to meet me as I had been hired not by the group but by the agency. I'm guessing the wanted to see what toss pot the had been saddled with.
So, three hours later finds me in the intrepid Fox in Soho I had been chatting to the guys and gal for about an hour and was on my third bottle of Dog (Newcastle Brown Ale [I don't know - Don't ask]). This is the point where I am told that they have very little faith in the agency and would like to test me to see if I know my stuff. I'm expecting them to ask me questions, instead they give me a fifty quid note, and tell me to find a guitar shop, buy a certain set of strings and get there and back downing a double tequilla at every bar I pass on the way back. Once I get back I then have to then restring and tune the guitar(an electric in a noisy room. Almost impossible as there is no amp). On top of this I have 15 minutes to perform the whole feat!
Now I know that some of you are familiar with Soho but for those who are not soho is made up of mainly three things; strip clubs, brothels and bars. We're talking a lot of tequilla. A lot of double tequilla! Fortunately I know Soho very well (no the bars! get your mind out of the gutter. The bars and there are a lot of production compaies there [again get your mind out of the gutter. Music production!]). I make straight for the nearest shop but this still took me past a good seven or eight bars. You do the maths! I arrive back with five minutes to so and the growing desire to eat something spicy containing synthetic meat preferable with killer chilli sauce with it. I spend about the next three minutes restringing the guitar answering dubious question ranging from 'were they all doubles?' to 'I don't believe you went to all the bars!'. Being freelance and a mercenary bastard I furnished them with recepts. To be honest I would have liked to have sat down with a nice tandoori, and I did, unfortuately it was about eight hours later after a great deal more alcohol. But they were nice enough to give me some smelling salts that were quite restorative.
( riverghost servicing your mum since, Thu 30 Sep 2004, 15:50, Reply)

the good times
i work in the film industry and i was sent to mexico while we filmed troy with brad pitt-face to agree a consumable contract (i could do this on the phone). anyway when i got there a storm had blown all the equipment and sets into the sea so i got an even better deal plus damages etc, then spent 2 months sunbathing while lying to my boss it was taking a long time :D i made around £10k personally for that trip plus the suntan, the 5* hotel, the drinks and fucking good laugh with the sparks.

i also went to ireland to work on a film and the truck was delayed for 2 weeks with the equipment so we spent our days getting hammered in dublin while getting paid and using our daily allowances to finance cock fighting!

when at school i got paid £500 to play monopoly for a week for market research. i didnt play once and gave a speech on why i liked the free parkng rule.

i have also been paid to test drive a go-kart track in spain, to blow up stuff for a dutch tv show and brush my teeth every hour for a week to see if my gums wore away quicker!

all in all i have had some pretty tasty jobs but then again i have had some bad experience but those stories are for another week...
( MagicallyInept Bored Sig., Thu 30 Sep 2004, 12:47, Reply)

I used to work as a lovely sluttly lady on a txt chat service
And I was bloody good at it too.

And yes, I am a bloke.
( Tone Depear fucking rocks, Fri 1 Oct 2004, 8:52, Reply)

I wasnt paid, but It was strange..GOING ON B3TA!
I DONT EVEN KNOW WHY I BOTHER WITH THIS SITE. NO, THATS A LIE. I GO ON THIS SITE BECAUSE THERE ARE SOME REALLY GOOD ARTISTS POSTING HERE AND ALSO SOME GENUINELY FUNNY ANIMATIONS AND PICTURES. BUT THEN YOU GET ALL THE SICKOS, JOKES ABOUT BRITISH HOSTAGES, 9/11 AND THE LIKE. AND ITS JUST NOT FUNNY. I SAY CLEAN UP B3TA - GET RID OFF THIS RUBBISH, OFF THIS PEVERTED NONSENSE. I DON'T MIND THE OCCASIONAL BADLY DRAWN COCK, DONT GET ME WRONG, JUST THE FACT THAT SICK AND WRONG DRAWINGS AND ANIMATIONS ARE OFTEN WINNING THE COMPOS AND BEING FP-ED. I FEEL SORRY FOR SINKING TO THIS LEVEL, BUT HOW ELSE CAN I GET MY MESSAGE ACROSS.

CLEAN UP B3TA
(Cheese Quiche - WARNING! This bus is 18 metres long!, Thu 30 Sep 2004, 19:58, Reply)

I was a fudge packer
Three pounds an hour, time and a half overtime. They weren't paying me to be a bummer - it was real life fudge.
(>NARF! Quality WTF chimp action, Thu 30 Sep 2004, 14:16, Reply)

I'm a nurse...
...and during my training and subsequnet employemnt I have done many odd things including -

Being regularly goosed up by old ladies.

Peeling dead skin off of burnt people.

Following a consultant round, listening to what he had to saying patients and then putting a tick on a clip board.

Advising a chav mum and her even chavvier offspring about good bowel habits.

Collecting dirty nappies in order to weigh them.

Removing and then re-applying a Ddressing to any extremly burnt knob.

Learnt Mandarin, Arabic, Lingala, Hindi, Polish and Hebrew(or at least enough to ask 'have you had a poo' to someone).

Accompanied dead bodies to the morgue.

Given antibiotics which make bodily fluids turn orange.

Spent 3 weeks in a room with a five-year old watching 'Wacky Races' on repeat.

Taken samples of every known bodily fluid.

Suctioned up all manner of multicoloured gunge from people's lungs.

Spent a night shift convincing a nutter that there was not a dragon in the air con vents.

Spent 4 weeks in a house occupied by 3 young chaps with learning difficulties basically being paid to eat 3 meals a day and got to Lakeside(truly a chav mecca).

Telling one of said aforementioned gentlemen to kindly please 'go and wank in your room, Alex and Phil(not their real names) are watching the football'.

Checking linen baskets on an old people's ward to make sure that one 'confused' old lady had not crapped in one of them.

I could go on..and refuse to apologise for the length.
( Amorous Badger NAKED BEA ARTHUR PHOTOS 4U, Fri 1 Oct 2004, 16:10, Reply)

Told a mate once
that his parents had been paying us to be his friends for the last two years, because they knew how social inadequate he was. We then said they hadnt payed us that day, so we were gonna show him our true feelings. Which of course meant ripping the piss outta him non-stop. For three days. Until they started paying again.
He believed it as well, and is now one of the most insecure people I know :)
(lifelikeandposeable, Thu 30 Sep 2004, 17:16, Reply)

pick dingleberries out of dogs' asses with a comb.
...never be a dog groomer, folks.
(MR KEARNS, Thu 30 Sep 2004, 16:35, Reply)

Collecting poo
Years ago, I was working for a pharmaceutical company developing anti-parasitic drugs for veterinary purposes. The drugs had to be tested on the appropriate parasites, which needed to be extracted from excrement. Most of this came from sheep - this involved coaxing them into a narrow stall and doing a nappy change on them, then dissolving the stools in warm water and sieving the parasitic worms out - not really unpleasant for me or the sheep apart from being slightly undignified.

Unfortunately, there was a requirement for another worm to be tested which could only be readily obtained from cats. You can't put a nappy on a cat (and I would love to see someone try) and the need for fresh and on demand shit meant extracting a cat from its luxurious living quarters and putting in a plastic dustbin, then turning a hose on it, to "persuade" it to dump. This is horrible for the cat, and not fun for me, as I got thoroughly scratched and bitten. But the best bit was that cat shit does not dissolve easily, so had to be blasted through a sieve with hot water to extract the worms. The resulting miasma of cat intestinal bacteria was measurable in the air several corridors away, and stank like only hot cat shit can do.

18 years on, I still cannot resolve the conflict of cruelty to a few cats to try and relieve millions of other domesticated animals from suffering, but I can still smell the air in the lab complex.
( godstar, Thu 30 Sep 2004, 16:15, Reply)

When I was in Uni (Insert long ago year here)
I participated in a paid study on the short-term effects of certain tobacco products. I was picked for the cigarettes and recieved $5,000. for the two month study. I got the cigarettes for free and smoked about a pack a day.
Pretty nice getting the money when I needed it, the only problem was I couldn't quit.
That was 15 years ago and I still smoke a pack a day.
(What made them want non-smokers for a smoking study)
Funny thing was I went back to the study director and asked for help to quit and he said,"That was what part of the 5k was for, didn't you read the contract?"
Bastards
(drunkpup, Thu 30 Sep 2004, 12:13, Reply)

Unusual jobs
As a junior doctor, I've had to do many strange things in my job.

The strangest was to remove a turnip from someone's rectum.
(Fishgoth, Fri 1 Oct 2004, 17:55, Reply)

Pig Porn
I had the uneviable task of shaving the gargantuan bollocks of a huge male pig before it fucked the arse end of some depraved old slapper.

Looks better apparently.
(Fonkadelix is fucking bored, pass the crack pipe Mavis., Fri 1 Oct 2004, 10:17, Reply)

I was paid quite a lot of money
for licking tomato puree off someone's armpit yesterday.
(The Secret 7000 ...join us. www.secret7000.co.uk, Thu 30 Sep 2004, 10:25, Reply)

I was once paid to dress up in a chicken costume
and hand out tiny fake chocolate eggs to children. It the hottest Easter I can remember, and the suit had been worn by upwards of twenty different people over the previous three weeks without being washed. It stank, and was still moist with the sweat of the previous occupant - one of the more unpleasant experiences I've had, it must be said.

After an hour or so I was choking on the fumes so badly I had to get some fresh air, so valiantly struggled to pull off the utterly steamed-up head and light up a fag.

Cue small child turning the corner to be greeted by a giant, stinking, soggy, headless chicken with smoke rising from its severed neck. The screaming didn't stop for some time.

Does traumatising small children count as strange?
( TV's Nosemonkey, Fri 1 Oct 2004, 16:36, Reply)

I spent a week at Erotica...
working as a bondage model. I was dressed in gimp mask and wore one of those leather harness things, I was kept in a cage and once every half hour my "misstress" would take me out and parade me around on lead. The money was good and you see some weird shit behind the scenes at an erotic show.
(Brother_Will, Thu 30 Sep 2004, 22:18, Reply)

Morrisons supermarket in Falkirk, Scotland:
"Come on in on Thursday and Sunday nights for a spot of shopping and allow yourself to be aurally presented with DJ NeillyB, playing the finest tracks at the audio bar."

You see, after a certain amount of time all of the managers go home, leaving me and the rest of my colleagues to do whatever the fuck we want. It's these times when I browse the in-store CD charts, pick the most obscure CD's and play them at unacceptably high volumes right in the middle of the store through the seperate stereo system.

Favourite so far has to be "The Best Classical Album...Ever". The look on peoples' faces as the stirring tones of Orff strikes up suddenly, or indeed the Hallelujah Choir spreading its classical joy from Fresh Food to Frozen Food. I love it.
(neillyb, Thu 30 Sep 2004, 13:53, Reply)

I see dumb people
I was once employed by British Gas to open up two different databases on the same pc and to manually type the records from one into the other. When I mentioned that they could do this automatically I was slapped down and told that "if it was possible they would have done it already". Well maybe it would have been done already if they weren't total fucking retards.

I excused myself to go for a cigarette and never returned.
(ShadowTail, Thu 30 Sep 2004, 11:38, Reply)

Prostitution
I have been paid to have sex with a lonely friend of a friend. She wasn't exactly pretty so I declined. 2 months later I had unpaid sex with her.
(Musk ox hygene inspector, Thu 30 Sep 2004, 11:13, Reply)

My current job.
I make pornsites. Everyday I get paid to look at porn, and b3ta.
(Spastic Bambi, Thu 30 Sep 2004, 10:32, Reply)

You ain't seen me, right
When I was a nipper, I was on me skateboard flinging recklessly around my estate when my mate's neighbour's car sort of got in the way. I was flung up. over the bonnet and onto the road on the other side. He was so guilty, and worried that we'd shop him that he gave us £20 to keep us quiet. Bearing in mind I was 7 and this is in 1981, this was a splendid amount of cash.

I spent it in caps for my toy gun. About 5000 of them. In one go. Best week ever. Fact
(aneraseroflove excuse me...i have to go to space now, Fri 1 Oct 2004, 15:41, Reply)

Solvent Abuse
As a 17 yearold...
Summer job, Small unventilated room, cleaning 1metre diameter Aluminuim disks (freshly machined) that were to be used for giant cotton-reels for the weaving industry...

Can't remeber the pay, but basically I got these disk on a table, sloshed a can of Celulose Thinners onto it and wiped and wiped and wiped. More thinners... more wiping. Eventually the cloth would remain uncoloured.... Change Disk... More thinners. etc.

It was summer... and warm, and there were no windows. I got through 15 liters of Celly a day, and it all evaporated into the air that I was breathing.

The guys laughed thier asses off at me when i came out for lunch breaks... Apparently I was completely off my tits and would talk total and utter bollox. I can hardly remeber it. I rekon it f*cked my memory.
( Humpty Dumpty was Pushed Is unaware of having any limits., Fri 1 Oct 2004, 15:28, Reply)

Safety Deposit Boxes
A few years back, I was paid to act as an independent witness for a bank, opening thousands of long-unchecked safety deposit boxes. Lots of old banknotes, gaudy jewellry, and mad handwritten rantings about how to save the world. The odd rusty gun. Quite sad in parts. Oh yeah, and there were two or three very suspicious fungus-covered objects, which led the bank to call the police. They turned out to be "organic matter". Not sure what that's supposed to mean...
(ptet is happy, Fri 1 Oct 2004, 14:35, Reply)

I've had 2 weird jobs
I was paid to screen calls and take appointements for a call girl.

I did voice over work for porn movies in France.
(albator, Fri 1 Oct 2004, 12:48, Reply)

one for the (whelk) ladies....
I crushed whelks and measured their penises as a holiday job one summer at university. Sounds good, huh? The anti-fouling paint on boats interferes with their "schlong-growth", and makes the lady whelks grow them as well. Somebody should tell the Daily Mail our beaches are being overrun by weird transexual shellfish!!!
We had to use the "whelk penis index" to describe the size. Once you've consigned a thousand little snails to their doom, just for a glimpse of flesh, it ceases to be funny...
(invisible, Fri 1 Oct 2004, 9:33, Reply)

For Mister Caps Lock
I think I speak for all of us when I say:

B3ta has always been about bad taste. Don't try and remove the fundemental part of the site. Cunt.
(ProudClod, Thu 30 Sep 2004, 20:06, Reply)