26 Unusual Occupations - mental_floss on YouTube (Ep.215)

Hey guys, I'm Elliot Morgan. You might recognize me from YouTube.com slash Elliot Morgan or YouTube.com slash Mashable

This is Mental Floss on YouTube. And did you know that you could get a job as a planetarium technician

This is the person who's in charge of the sound and projection equipment used in planetarium shows

They create special effects and select music and synchronize the recorded commentary and the visual presentation

And that is just the first of many unusual occupations that I'm going to tell you about today

Let's start with something fun, an ice cream taste tester. Professional testers sample around a pint of ice cream a day

They also brainstorm ideas for new flavors and taste combinations. But it can get tough at times

Apparently, taste testers at Haagen-Dazs spent four years looking for the perfect browning

For people who hate dairy, there is the dog food taster job. A few companies hire humans to taste test pet food for quality control

For this job, you actually need pretty nuanced senses, knowing both what animals like to taste and what owners like to smell

Final taste job, there is the poison taster, which is not as bad as it sounds

This person tastes food of elected officials for poison. So, for the sake of these workers, let's try to not elect officials who eat kale

Anyway, American tasters actually oversee all food preparation when the president goes out

And while I'm talking about food, a banana room cutter prepares shipments of bananas by cutting hands of them

That's what they call a tier of around 20 bananas from stocks. If all that food talk made you hungry, I'm gonna try to solve that problem by describing the next few jobs

Being an odor tester can earn you $39,000 a year. These are the people who smell perfume and wine and air fresheners The downside if they working for a deodorant company the job might involve smelling the occasional armpit A port cleaner puts on a nose clip and then uses a tank and vacuum wand to suck up the contents of a port They then restock it with supplies

and clean its walls. Gross. Another tough job that has to get done, hazmat diving. These divers are

called when pipes need to be repaired, objects are lost, or bodies need to be recovered. They swim in

places like sewage, contaminated ponds, vats of oil sludge, and paper pulp tanks. This is

actually giving me a lot of inspiration for some games of Would You Rather. Let's move on to something a little nicer. A professional Lego builder is an artist who uses Legos to construct

projects. On their website, Lego lists 12 certified professionals, including Sean Kenny, who was once

commissioned by a Lego store in Chicago to create three huge replicas of famous Chicago buildings

His Tribune building is four feet tall, the Water Tower place is six feet tall, and the Trump Tower

is 10 feet tall. These three contained a combined total of 126,000 Legos

That's too many Legos. I'm just kidding. You can't have too many Legos. A professional RC vehicle racer

travels the world racing customized radio-controlled vehicles on tiny tracks for prize money

Speaking of childhood dreams, an amusement park ride tester or forensic ride engineer test drives rides

They point out faults in the rides and check for any potential dangers. I will do that for you for free

If you prefer circuses to amusement parks, circus laborers are responsible for the cages

of all the big animals. They load and unload animals and equipment on and off the train

Plus, they set up and take down some pretty large tents. Speaking of animals, a deer urine farmer is someone who collects and sells undiluted white-tailed

pee. Good stuff. People buy deer urine to use as hunting lures. A typical deer farmer

makes between and off of one deer each year So if you own a deer farm with over 100 deer you doing pretty well for yourself Roadkill collectors search roads for carcasses and then plate frogger with traffic

and dispose of the bodies at landfills and compost heaps, depending on state laws

Some of them just take them home. Frog picklers work for the biological suppliers who preserve animals like frogs and cats and pigs for students

The animals need to be embalmed and then injected with colored latex. The latex helps students locate arteries and veins

unless the students are like me, in which case they're not even looking at the dead animal because they don't want to barf in its grace

Another job that's not for the easily queasy, crime scene cleaner. A few of their responsibilities involve sweeping up gore

breaking down meth labs, and cleaning anthrax scares. It's also your job if you work for Olivia Pope

or if you work for Walter White, Jesse. Today's smaller mattress companies employ people

to jump on their mattresses to compress the cotton material and make sure there are no bumps in the layers

They're called mattress jumpers. They used to hire monkeys, but they'd fall off and bump their way to hedge

A comic book inspector looks over classic comics and then inspects them for damage

Upon completion, the book is slabbed in a tamper-proof plastic case to seal the condition

Speaking of old stuff, a museum technician molds and restores skeletal parts of fossils

They also reassemble fragmented artifacts and then fabricate substitute pieces. A snowmaker makes the snow for ski resorts

This involves using very large equipment like a snow gun or snow cannon

which turns water and pressurized air into snow, like magic. Speaking of nature, a kelp cutter lowers a mower into water from a kelp harvesting boat

Then, they monitor the mower as kelp builds up in the boat. If you're looking for some acting practice, I know I am, many medical schools will hire fake

patients to help future physicians hone their bedside manner At a casino the Kino rider takes bets operates the machines and then calls the numbers They also scan winning tickets calculate the winnings and then pay the winners You know if anybody were to actually win Kino We have box buffers to thank for our perfectly

buffed shoes. They hold shoe parts to an abrasive cylinder or wire roughing wheel, which polish the

part. Other job requirements include putting a shoe sole between a rubber presser roller and an

abrasive covered roller, which gets it ready to be added to the shoe. Moving on to the banned

salvager profession, cotton bales are bound together with tie bands. The band salvager

recycles these so they can be used more than once. This involves straightening the bands with a rubber

mallet or power rollers and then cutting them to the required lengths. And finally, I returned to

the salon to tell you that in 2010, six people in Moscow locked themselves in a mock spacecraft for

490 days. They wanted to see if it was possible to travel in deep space, specifically Mars, without

outgoing insane. So they spent 250 days in the craft, 30 days exploring a model of the Martian landscape, and then

240 more days back in the spacecraft. That is a total of 520 days of solitude, and thus the fake astronaut profession was born

Before his invention people used natural rye grass straws, which were gross because they made everything taste vaguely like grass

The legend goes that Stone was tired of his mint jewelers tasting like something other than mint and bourbon

So he invented a straw made out of paper instead of grass If you have a mind-blowing question you would like answered leave it below in the comments and we'll try to answer it

Thanks again for watching and DFTBA