Crazy Jobs
J. Money over at Budgets Are Sexy has put together a great list of crazy jobs that we frugal folk have held over the years. My days as a dishroom girl in a dorm cafeteria are chronicled, along with plenty of other good jobs that will either make you grateful for your 9 – 5 or make you want to think outside the box and find creative employment. One of my friends had a job a few years ago that involved finding dead sheep for the Division of Wildlife. She lives in a rural mountain area, and when bears kill sheep, the ranchers are entitled to a payment from the DOW. But they were having problems with excessive claims, so they hired my friend to verify that bears had killed the sheep in question. Ranchers would find the dead sheep, report them to the DOW with GPS coordinates. Then my friend would head out with her GPS, trekking over the mountains to find the dead sheep and verify that they had been killed by bears (yes, she had to go through a class to learn how to determine if a sheep had been killed by a bear). I think she got $150 per sheep, and basically got paid to go hiking, although there was quite a bit of bushwacking involved. Apparently bears don’t stick to the hiking trails.
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Wow! The sheep-finding job is crazy cool in that you could get really fit, but I feel badly for those poor little sheep!
Wow! The sheep-finding job is crazy cool in that you could get really fit, but I feel badly for those poor little sheep!
I used to pipette blood for a living (at a clinical research lab).
Jules – I agree! I went with her on one of her sheep-finding hikes, and the dead sheep were a huge bummer in the middle of a beautiful hike. Especially when they were lambs
Thx so much for participating – i’m glad you enjoyed it
(and really glad i don’t have to do some of that stuff! haha..)
I ran a hot dog cart, and i sold weinies several summers in a row. Am glad my weinie-days are behind me!
I sent you an email today using the addy I found here on your site. Hope it arrived!
Why did she stop looking for sheep? Once you got over the upsetting part, it doesn’t sound like a bad job. How many sheep did she look for at a time? Crazy questions but I’ve never heard of this before, ever. I learn something new every day. The most exciting job I had as a teenager was to babysit for 5 kids and they were all under the age of eight. I might of been better off looking for dead sheep. It got crazy. Great post!
SonyaAnn,
It was a great job, but she only planned on doing it for a summer. It’s very seasonal work – she lives high in the Rocky mtns, in an area that gets nearly 500 inches of snow each winter. Bears and sheep are both pretty scarce from October until about May. The summer that she did that job, she took nearly every assignment the DOW offered her, and earned about $5000. So it probably wouldn’t work out long term for most people. She’s also a trained PA, and was actively looking for work with a doctor in her small town. She got a job as a PA shortly after her sheep-finding stint, so it all worked out well