Dinners, sandpapered skin and big brother
A few spring to mind:

-I was a dinner lady on a territorial army camp for 3 summer holidays, serving up 3 meals a day to [mostly] horrible children. Making 500 rounds of spam sandwiches between breakfast (at 6am) and lunch is no fun for 76p per hour. We were in the middle of nowhere too - one camp was 40 miles from the nearest town somewhere in Northumbria, another was slap bang in the middle of Sherwood forest.

-I've had fellow scientists sandpaper my arm until it bled for £100, in the interests if studying the inflammatory reaction afterwards

-Focus groups - easy money, but once you've done a couple, they don't want you anymore. Campaigns that got my input (for £40 a session) included a long-defunct domain names company, Re-designing the packaging for Scan meatballs (the one of the the shelves now is the one our group designed), an internet company who wanted to get people to make bets as presents for their mates, at £10 a go [never saw them come to light], and Amazon. The Amazon one in particular was odd - they had two campaigns they were thinking of running - one centred on "the box" (i.e., the excitement of getting an Amazon box), and the other was to do with their recommendations-based-on-what-you've-bought feature, which unfortunately came across as a deeply sinister Big Brother is watching you scenario.
( KQ, Fri 1 Oct 2004, 16:32, Reply)