Whats your strangest or most unusual job ?

Although an Architect /Surveyor by profession I've had a very strange eclectic mix of jobs in my short 50 year career from acting, film work,mixing industrial paint, accountancy , systems analyst, life guard, male model you name it I've probably tried it at some point lol

Back in 1995 I took a temporary fill-in job as Manager of a Christmas Interactive Company in Weymouth UK. The Company had in the past been very successful constructing and installing seasonal interactive shows for Shopping malls.

By 1996 the company was in sharp decline, in debt and facing financial problems I was made redundant. Traditional Christmas Grottos with loud Chrismas music and hordes of Knomes and Elves all jigging about with stiff jerky movements was old hat and Shopping Malls were now favouring innovative light shows instead.

I decided to start a Company of my own ,designing and manufacturing interactive digital sound systems and animatronic figures for Museums and Visitor Centres .

I spent a wonderful 9 months sequestered in my house every day designing and constructing prototype animatronic heads, digital sound programming and interactive playback equipment and building my business plan.

In December 1996 We secured a wonderful contract refurbishing a Cornish Theme Park and it was a mad scramble to pack and move our home and animals to Cornwall , rent a house and large warehouse. Build a workshop and offices and somehow find 30 employees from the local community at 2 weeks notice. Office staff , accountant, Specialist Engineers , GRP workers ,artists , carpenters ,electricians the list was endless.

With tight deadlines for reopening the Theme Park in March the following year ,staff were working long hours, well into the night most days. With all the overtime our weekly wages bill quickly rose to over £4000 a week which my Wife and I collected on each Friday morning from the tiny local Bank . Back in 1997 ,to me ,that was an eye watering amount of money to be spending every week and we were spending at least half as much again on materials and overheads.!

The Theme park was huge and included a walk through Dinosaur park with over 20x huge life size Dinosaurs . An animated circus, Haunted House, Model Village and numerous other attractions.

Completed in March 1997 we went on to supply many famous Companies such as Jim Hendersons creature Workshop and Aardman animations, with programmed animatronics and interactive programmed Digital sound equipment which I designed and constructed.

An exciting and wonderful part of my life and completely unexpected.



This animatronic head had vertical, horizontal and diagonal eye movements so could reproduce very realistic eye movements. The lower jaw moved in sync with a digital sound track to simulate speech . the eyelids moved independantly so you could have either eye wink or both together .
Every movement was pre programmed for speed , position and duration on a digital sequencer so that visitors could start a pre-programmed sequence of animation and sound for a talking head.

Heres one of my favourite interactives.
Its an interactive talking clock to entertain children during Bank Holiday shopping at Cardiff Shopping centre.
It consisted of a talking clock with silicon face and moving eyes and mouth. Around the clock are numerous animated mice Owls and other creatures that pop out during each show to talk to the clock and interact.In all I think there were about 8 animations.

The clock tells the kids a series of 'stories' and the owls and mice etc interact throughout.
parents could dump their kids and go off shopping !

We installed it in 2002 ...I wonder what became of it.

pending

When working as an electrical contractor one job was to repair the burner on the local crematoriums furnace.

A burner had stopped mid cremation and needed to be repaired pronto.

The place has two ovens but in this case the second oven was having the refractory rebricked and the coffins were starting to stack up in the holding area.

The repair was an easy fix and the sextant showed me around. I had a look at the partially cremated body through the watch glass and was surprised to see that only the torso remained and it was very charred and looked like a bundle of partially burned newsprint. Not gruesome at all. The sextant said it would probably take another two hours to finish the job.

What I did find a bit off putting was the hand mincing machine they passed the ashes through to grind up any residual bones before they placed the ashes in an urn. Every time I see a hand mincer I think of that day.

A crocodile Farm..........Worked on it from the beginning of construction, 2 of us putting up the fences for the croc pens, theyplanned a snake house, 2 acre Baramundi pond and at the end of the pond was to be built t a Phantoms Skull Cave that would house bats, at the back an earth ramp was to be put up the cave with a pen around it housing Dingo's......Cassowary's roaming free and 2 large bird houses connected by a walkway and they were supposed to be the largest in the southern hemisphere.....

Farrow cement Skull Cave...........30' diameter and 30' high......

Using 16mm reo bar 6meters, (19' 6"), long.......

The engineer, overseeing the whole construction, (In all his engineering wisdom and against all the objections on how it would be to hard and unsafe),decided the construction of the Skull Cave was to be done by welding a bar end to the starter bar at ground level. Make the right length to be able to make the shape and weld together, then weld the other end to the opposite starter bar on the other side of the cave. We would then climb up the tower and drag the center of the bar up to top of the pole, (2" box steel an 1/4" thick) and loop the center over a welded bracket........We would then push out the bar with poles and make the skull cave shape.......The attempt can be seen in the first pic


After a couple of weeks of this stupidity he finally agreed that wasn't going to work so we ordered the box channel, (pics below), to make up the base frame.......

Lifting the frame into place with our crane, (cherry picker)...Note the scaffold plank


Had to make a walk way to untie the crane from the frame


2 of us, John and myself worked on this, John as the welder and i held things and we designed the cave, shaping it to resemble rock formations when it was finished

Started off by holding a 18' length of bar vertical and john would weld it to the starter bar on the base....every 4th bar.....do that to every 3 or 4 starter bars and then weld a bar horizontally around the base, then it was easier to do the verticals in between, using the ring bar to help hold the vertical.........

Snake house to the front right, looking from behind the cave


Finished the Skull Cave Frame .......Cant remember exactly how long it took but it was several weeks to a couple of months........John dropped off the job...........I stayed on it till the end.... Using the cherry picker, (come crane) i did 3 passes of chicken wire over the outside fixing the wire on each pass wherever it touched the reo bar. Once the outside was done then the inside was the same...... fixing the mesh to the bar wherever it intersected, doing 3 passes again........Man it was a pain, a roll of chicken mesh in the bucket, tying off one end, unraveling the mesh enough to get some slack so i could reach and tie it off, all the while maneuvering the cherry picker but still being able to reach.......out side was easy.....


No more pics........

After the mesh was all done the concrete was sprayed over the frame, again i operated the cherry picker, using a concrete pump, and spraying at a steep angle, moving across the cave, a quick as possible, trying to get as much concrete to stick and dry so the next pass it would hold more than would fall to the ground.......about 20 odd cubic meters of concrete was used. A big portion of that went on the floor.....

Got it built.....snake house done , bird house's were close to being finished and then 300 1 meter long crocks were released into their pens........

a few days after the crocs were released i noticed a van unloading a bunch of cardboard boxes that i recognized as containing day old chickens. (used to own a poultry farm with my brother), each box contained 100 Chickens in 4 compartments of 25 each......

Later when no one was watching i snuck into the shed where the boxes were unloaded, the boxes were there but empty......there was a large commercial cooler/freezer as part of the shed, it wasn't locked so i looked inside........Inside there were dozens of plastic bags tied off and eacjh bag had been stuffed full of live day old chickens........I was shocked to say the least.......Didn't do anything about it at the time.........

a couple of days later another van load of boxes arrived.........again later i snuck into the shed to look and the boes were gone.........strange i thought.........looked in the freezer........... the guy running the farm had got a lot smarter.........why spend all that time stuffing these poor little chicks into plastic bags when it was easier to just throw the boxes strait into the freezer......they would have taken ages to die

That was it i saw red........didn't say anything, but when i got home i rang the RSPCA and asked them about the regulations regarding croc farms and their duty of care for animals used for food............They are supposed to euthanasia them by gas......so i reported the situation.............The bosses found out it was me and i got the sack.......at least the next lot of fluffy little day old chickens didn't suffer

see skull... you have got a heart afterall fluffy chicks... I have a totally different view and respect for you now.

Great story but a nightmare for Health and Safety today.

Signal said:

What I did find a bit off putting was the hand mincing machine they passed the ashes through to grind up any residual bones before they placed the ashes in an urn. Every time I see a hand mincer I think of that day.

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sometimes I think its best not to know about some things. Once seen it stays in your mind for ever . Thanks for sharing that image with us Signal

peanut said:

sometimes I think its best not to know about some things. Once seen it stays in your mind for ever . Thanks for sharing that image with us Signal

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The old funeral home here in moab is now a fancy restaurant for tourists.

Moabite said:

The old funeral home here in moab is now a fancy restaurant for tourists.

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yummy !...

Not exactly a job...but...I was a sousaphone player in the Queen's University Band when I was a youngster.

I once rode my 1975 XS650B while wearing (at least ....partially wearing...) a kilt and I can report that it was a "refreshing" experience as all I wore under my kilt were hose, gaiters and boots (as per regulations). It worked just fine - depending on the fairing you have installed and whether or not you have a tank bag or some other accoutrement - underwhich to tuck the kilt.

.....ahhhh....but that was another time and place....