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Shinjuku Station in Tokyo, Japan, is the busiest train station in the world according to the
Guinness Book of Records.
It’s a confusing maze of hallways and exits leading to more lines than we could possibly
mention, and on any given day 3.5 million passengers will pass through this place.
As you can imagine, during rush hour getting onto a train might not be easy, and that’s
where the pushers come in.
These guys are called “oshiya”, and if you were at that station and it wasn’t looking
like you’d get fully into the train you might feel one of these guys on your back.
This gives a whole new meaning the expression rat race, because in some respects folks are
herded onto those trains as if they were animals.
But it’s a job that needs doing because it’s well known that many Tokyo trains run
at over capacity.
If you didn’t get pushed in, the doors wouldn’t close and the train wouldn’t move, and nobody
wants to be late for work, do they?
Japan’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport, and Tourism said in 2018 that some
of the busiest lines were well over the limit of 180 percent full.
That office said it just wouldn’t do, stating that “bodies come into contact with each
other and one feels considerable pressure.”
People don’t really want to be that close on a train, especially considering that japan
has a problem with something called “Chakan”, which means people taking advantage of their
surroundings but in this case groping on trains.
It happens quite a lot, in spite of Japan’s media criticizing these rush hour fondlers.
In fact, 50 percent of the hundreds and hundreds of cases of fondling happen on trains.
We are talking about pushers now we know, but the fondling problem is also partly down
to congestion.
They’ve been around for a long time these pushers, with the New York Times doing a piece
on them back in 1964.
Then there were 90 pushers working at Shinjuku Station, some of whom told the Times it was
a demanding job.
People so desperate to get to work often held trains up, while others were so busy trying
to get to work after they lost shoes in the melee.
It’s a crazy job if you watch the videos because that pushing is sometimes intense,
so much so it looks a bit like a game of rugby being played by men in black coats.
We should just hope that none of those guys are fondlers who’ve found a way to legally
get what they want.
He was such a good man A stranger job by a mile is what we call professional
mourners.
Sometimes this person is also called a Moirologist.
They are professional criers who know how to make the grief look real, so they have
some acting skills.
Why would anyone do this?
We mean hire someone to cry.
Well, it goes back centuries and the tradition could be found in Europe, but right now you
might find these folks in countries such as China or Thailand.
These countries are what you might call “face cultures”, meaning saving face is a big
thing.
And what if someone dies and not many people turn up to the funeral in tears, that’s
a big loss of face for the surviving family.
The thing to do is hire some folks to look like they have lost someone dear, and tell
them to really turn on the waterworks.
These people, who are paid anything from thirty to one hundred bucks, blend in.
You won’t know they are actors and you likely won’t interrupt their crying and talk to
them.
When the job is done they turn around and happily go home.
We actually found a company in the UK that rented out mourners and they said their staff
are very discreet.
For around $60 an hour they’ll turn up at the funeral and stand near the back and make
some noise.
A few friends and family will likely be saying, “You know what, I just can’t make that
face”, and then the professional will never be seen again by those people.
But at this company, called “Rent a Mourner”, the actors are more than just scenery.
They might not approach someone, but if they do they have to know what’s going on.
So, the actors will have to meet the family first and get the background on the deceased.
They will also have to create a background story for themselves that links them to the
dead.
It sounds hard and it likely is, but the good news for the actors is they usually go in
a group.
You need skills for this line of lugubrious work, and so you must be very good with your
memory and also a great improviser.
One guy in London who did this job said in an interview, “The only thing sadder than
a funeral is a funeral that nobody shows up to, so the decision is generally coming from
a good place.”
He said he actually tries to mingle as he feels it’s a big part of the job, so he
spends lots of time on his back story.
Can you imagine just making that up, saying something like, “Such a sad loss.
Me and Jack went back years.
We worked in a toy shop in Buffalo, through the winters we’d…etc, etc.”
It must be quite demanding to do such a routine in front of people who are really sad.
The guy in the interview said, “Naturally, since I don't know the deceased, it can be
hard to work up too many tears about them.
Some professional mourners I know can cry on cue like a toddler at Toys "R" Us, but
most of us keep a supply of tools to help us jerk out some tears on command.”
He added that he’d only been caught out once, but the person who caught him out just
said the deceased would have liked it.
Canine culinary The next job sounds a lot less demanding and
it just involves eating.
Who wouldn’t enjoy being paid for eating stuff?
But what if the product you were hired to test was dog food?
In this world there are people whose job it is to test dog food, and this is what they
do.
It’s actually a highly skilled occupation because the taster is the person who usually
creates the dish and makes sure it has all the right nutrients.
They work in a lab, but at some point when the concocting has taken place they will have
to have a nibble.
Those animals can’t tell you how the stuff tastes, so a human has to do it.
The good news is that they might be paid from $40,000 to $100,000, and it’s not just dog
food either, other pet food is tested by humans.
We found a guy in the UK who is famous for pet food tasting.
He works for the company Marks and Spencer, and his job is making sure the dog food is
up to scratch.
In an interview he said, “I have trained my palate to look for materials that we will
not allow in the recipe, such as tripe - pet owners react badly to the smell of tripe.
I’m looking for a pate texture, almost to the point where you could spread it on crusty
bread.”
If you don’t know what tripe is, it’s the stomach of a cow.
It looks like it sounds.
The guy added that he thinks his job is very important and he’s doing it for the pets
well-being and the owners sense of trust in the product.
He said, “The more we can make the pet food like the owner’s food, the more comfortable
we think customers will be serving it.”
A surgeon of toys We’ll keep this one short.
The job is a person who fixes Teddy Bears surgically, and the title is Teddy Bear Technician.
In Florida they even have a bear hospital where the surgeons work.
Why?
We guess some people really love their teddy bears.
Professional Sleeper This is the best job in the world if you are
seriously lazy.
One case we found of this job was when a hotel in Finland wanted people to test their beds,
so they put an ad out asking for professional sleepers.
But the U.S. space agency NASA went a lot further than that because Forbes reported
that in 2013 NASA was hiring regular folks, but they had to do something pretty hard.
That was to lie on a bed and move very little for a total of 70 days.
Why you might ask?
Well, if people are going up in rockets and spending a lot of time in a closed space then
NASA wants to know what effects this will have on the human body.
Except they didn’t want to use their astronauts for this experiment, and so they said they
paid $18,000 for volunteers.
The deal was you had to stay on that bed, but you were allowed to use a phone, look
at a TV, even work on a laptop.
You couldn’t get off that bed, and so we assume the people were hooked up to a valve
they could urinate through.
“Subjects in the study look at it as a way to help,” said a senior scientist on the
bed rest study.
“In that what we eventually do will help astronauts maintain their health while in
space.”
She also said, “by putting someone in bed for a long time, there is also atrophy of
the muscle and atrophy of bone density.”
It’s now starting to sound pretty horrible.
We wonder how many people dropped out of the study, but 18,000 bucks for 70 days work doing
nothing but sitting and lying down isn’t that bad.
Professional zombie From hired sleeper to the living dead.
According to the British media something called the London Bridge Experience hired two people
in 2009 to do the job of being a zombie.
They got almost $40,000 a year to scare tourists, no doubt many of them American tourists.
One of the guys who was hired said he gone for a similar role at the London Dungeon but
he didn’t get the job.
He told the press this is why: “The Dungeon said I was too intimidating and scary and
they told me to tone down my act.”
The cuddlers We started with Japan and we’ll finish with
Japan.
It seems there are a lot of strange occupations in this country and many of them involve touching
people.
While there is a line of work in Japan that means some folks are a hired boyfriend or
girlfriend, and we mean really pretending to be a lover and not about bedroom stuff,
you can also hire someone to cuddle you.
For about 30 bucks you can lie in a bed for 20 minutes and be cuddled.
That’s it, nothing else, just cuddling.
The longest course we found was a 10-hour cuddle, which must be really hard for the
cuddler.
That will set you back about $460.
You can fall asleep of course, and we expect that happens over 10 hours.
Some cuddle cafes in Japan advertise themselves as “co-sleeping specialty shops.”
Apparently this is a booming industry in Japan, a country where some people work really long
hours and according to reports more and more people are deciding to stay single.
Some reports state that since the cost of living is so high many men don’t want the
stress of bringing up a family and many women don’t want to be broke housewives, so more
people are just staying single.
This in part has led to what some media say is a booming industry of cuddle cafes.
It’s not just Japan, though, we found cuddle cafes in New York City and also Toronto.
New York’s “Snuggery” café says it’s all about cuddling and absolutely nothing
else.
It seems in this busy world there are a lot of people that just need a hug.
It’s said more people don’t get enough human interaction, working so hard, looking
at dating sites but not meeting, and staying alone.
Word on the street is expect more cuddle café to pop up.
It’s kind of nice but also kind of sad.
We thought a lot of these strange jobs actually sounded pretty fun and we think the people
doing them are probably lovely, well adjusted people.
But one strange job we hate and think that the people who do it are subhuman monsters?
Hacking.
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Have you ever had a weird job?
Or maybe just a really strange thing happen at your normal job?
Tell us all about it in the comments.
Now go watch the “11 Highest Paying Teen Jobs.”
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