Ideal for: Graduate students desperate for a good idea for a thesis. Job Specifications: Why look for a cure for cancer when you can devote your research efforts to studying…flatulence? Join the team of Minneapolis gastroenterologist Michael Levitt, who is looking for assistants that will inhale the, er, “gases” emitted by subjects who [...]
Ideal for: People with an animal fetish. Job specifications: So basically, your job is to collect animal sperm. Depending on the kind of budget your boss is working on (and how much he hates you), you’ll be sent to the fields with a) an electric probe, to be pushed into the animal’s rectum, [...]
Ideal for: sadomasochists. Job Specifications: Most mosquito researchers have it easy: set the traps, go inside the tents, and have a cold bottle of beer before calling it a day. But the Brazilian mosquito, Anopheles darlingi, seems to have caught on. This little “sucker” only comes a-hovering when you set yourself up as [...]
Ideal for: Insomniacs. Job Specifications: You are locked into a small room that’s specially designed to create a completely blank and empty environment. You can’t hear anything. Feel anything. See anything. You start to lose a sense of time, and begin to hallucinate—the brain is simply not able to work in a vacuum, [...]
Ideal for: people who never outgrew their love for dinosaurs. Job specifications: Remember the first time you visited a museum, saw the stuffed animals and artfully constructed skeletons of a woolly mammoth, and swore to yourself that you’d become a natural history expert? Well there was one little detail they forgot to tell [...]
Ideal for: Pseudo Scientists (with no qualification!) Job specifications: You look at stool and urine samples for any traces of bacteria, or in some cases, worms. It gets progressively worse when you’re assigned to a third world public hospital, where dysentery and tapeworms are par for the course, and you may find yourself [...]
Ideal for: retired trapeze artists. Job specifications: You need a ladder. A very tall one. Plus insurance, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Essentially you climb to the roof and replace the missing or loose shingles. Slip, and you break your neck. Meanwhile, you’ll need a high tolerance for heat—roofs can get [...]
Ideal for: obsessive compulsive personalities who like everything in the proper place. Job specifications: What is so difficult to remember about paper-plastic-biodegradable? Despite large stickers on their garbage bins and a very expensive print and television campaign, people still dump their wastes into one big bin, instead of separating them into “recyclables” in [...]
Ideal for: hormonally charged adolescents looking for a free show. Job Specifications: After each show, you take your trusty mop and rag and wipe up after everyone. Drawbacks: Unlike traditional movie theatres, when it’s safe to assume that the sticky goop under the chair is spilled soda, you’re likely to handle far [...]
Ideal for: men of the cloth looking for something exciting to do on a Saturday night. Job Specifications: The Ghostbusters having long retired, it is your job to face the Demons, angry spirits, and numerous denizens of the Underworld and convince them that to leave the poor humans alone. Tools of the trade [...]