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strangest occupations

Vaughn McMillan said:
Toni, you always had the look of a yo-yo pro. :p What is ban ban ball?
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I didn't know there was a special yo-yo look (spinning eyes maybe?:rofl:)

To answer your question, a Ban-Ban ball is a plastic racket of about the size of a pin-pong one with a rubber string attached to its center and a small rubber ball at the other end of the string.

I do not know if they are still sold, maybe Stu can chime in and apport some info. At that time (1979) they were used as advertising support to promote and introduce Grape Fanta in Japan. Let me find and scan some pics and we'll have some laughs at my expense.:)
 
Toni Ciuraneta said:
To answer your question, a Ban-Ban ball is a plastic racket of about the size of a pin-pong one with a rubber string attached to its center and a small rubber ball at the other end of the string.

I do not know if they are still sold, maybe Stu can chime in and apport some info. At that time (1979) they were used as advertising support to promote and introduce Grape Fanta in Japan. Let me find and scan some pics and we'll have some laughs at my expense.:)
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OH!!! Paddle Ball :thumb:
Jay
 
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got a few odd one's.

My dad spent a few years developing an artificial diet for big and little brown bats. This was to assist the government in keeping bats in captivity to study rabies. We had as many as 74 bats in the house for a while. They are actually cool pets. They can purr like a cat and can be taught to come when "called". They liked to snuggle up under your shirt collar and take a nap.

I know a guy who milks yellow jacket hornets for venom. You wonder how that looks on a resume. You also wonder what makes someone tick who likes to squeeze bugs for a living. :dunno: What's there to say to the wife when you come home from work?
 
My first job was shooting gophers in a cemetary. 50 cents per.

I went from that to 28 years of making bigger and better ways to kill people. Everything from making the guns on C130 gun ships shoot faster to launch tubes for the Trident subs. Now I build trucks to pump concrete from the mixer to the forms.
 
Dale, you just reminded me that when we were about 11 or so, my brother and I used to get $5 per 5 gallon bucket full of rats at the scallop docks. I didn't take long once we bought our pellet gun which we bought with buckets of rats!!
 
I work for Schwing building the 61 meter truck. I started out on the old style 39 meter. Been there for a little over 4 years. Little tidbit, the 61 meter truck has 600 pounds of paint on it when it is done.
 
Dale Johnson said:
I work for Schwing building the 61 meter truck. I started out on the old style 39 meter. Been there for a little over 4 years. Little tidbit, the 61 meter truck has 600 pounds of paint on it when it is done.
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That's a big boy, for sure. :thumb: I think the biggest one I ever worked around was in about the 41 meter class. Fascinating machines.
 
During the summers of 1969 and 1970 I worked as a "bugger" in the Targhee National Forest of Island Park Idaho. We sprayed lodge pole pine with a concoction of diesel fuel and a nasty chemical called ethylene dibromide (or something that sounded like that) to kill rocky Mountain Pine Bark Beetles. We lived in tents in a bug camp 30 miles from civilization up a dirt road in the Moose Creek Drainage, bathed once a week (whether we needed it or not), and had a camp cook with the cruelest sense of humor of any women that ever lived. Our boss woke us up every morning at the crack of dawn by firing a .357 revolver outside our tents. Our clothes, our hair, our skin, everything was saturated by the spray we called "goop" and we all got "goop sores" that resembled large puss filled blisters anywhere our clothing rubbed our skin. We cut our hair off with pocket knives because we were all long haired hippy types and couldn't stand the diesel soaked hair. We got paid 30 cents per tree and on a real good day you could spray 100 trees along with hiking 10-15miles through the forest. It was at least twice the money a kid could make anywhere else at the time. As bad as it sounds, it was two of the best summers of my life and I wish my own kids could have had the same experience. And I fell in love with the Island Park area and have made a trip back there at least once a year since.
 
Dale Johnson said:
I work for Schwing building the 61 meter truck. I started out on the old style 39 meter. Been there for a little over 4 years. Little tidbit, the 61 meter truck has 600 pounds of paint on it when it is done.
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There are very few days when I don't see the back end of a Schwing pump at least a few times a day! Through the windshield of an Oshkosh concrete mixer.
 
Curt Fuller said:
During the summers of 1969 and 1970 I worked as a "bugger" in the Targhee National Forest of Island Park Idaho. ... As bad as it sounds, it was two of the best summers of my life and I wish my own kids could have had the same experience. And I fell in love with the Island Park area and have made a trip back there at least once a year since.
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Carl,

Dunno about in the US, but here in Canada, college and university kids get hired by the dozen every summer to go out Tree Planting. I know it gets done in both BC and Ontario, I don't know about other parts of the country.

The experience sounds much like you describe - black flies to deal with, long days, living in a tent, getting good and sweaty and dirty. Paid by the tree. It's hard hard work, but I also hear that if you work hard at it, you can make far more money than in many other summer time McJobs that are available.

...art
 
When I was in college, I worked at the Lighthouse for the Blind in New York City. One of my jobs was teaching blind people to bowl. Great job for someone who could maybe break 100 on a good day. Another job [college work study] was training rats to press a bar to get a brain shock as a reward. Problem was the place the electrodes went weren't a pleasure center.

Ken
 
Don't know if this is considered an odd job, but the summers before my sophomore and junior years in high school I took chickens from cages and stuffed them in other cages to be transport to the slaughter house for Tyson. Odd i don't know but nasty for sure especially if you found one that had been smoosh by the others. ewwww
 
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