It’s seasonal. I do gardening in the summer. I definitely see myself coming back to this and the more experience you have the more “valuable” you are for returning!
Is there a license requires for driving a snowmobile in your country? Is it a government issued licence or an insurance thing? I have driven them, but I think here a normal driver’s license is enough and even that is only needed when driving on streets (which is often not permitted and even more often impractical).
I used to work as a line stander on Capitol Hill in DC. You get paid to stand in line for lobbyists for hearings and committees. Many times your there a day before and camping out overnight with all the other line standers. It’s like an old school concert ticket environment, if you ever camped out for concert tickets back in the day.
Actually the lobbyist are the ones that do most of the hiring for that position. I worked for the Dutko group at the time, before that I was a bike messenger and they get those jobs all the time.
I’m a designer, which is a well-known profession, but I design substations, which almost no one I’ve run into has heard of.
Substations are like giant jungle-gyms for electricity. They’re a grouping of electric structures that transfer high-voltage electricity to low-voltage, or low voltage to high voltage. They’re a major part of our electricity distribution system. You drive by at least one every day, most likely.
I got into it by chance. Right place, right time. I went back to school and got my AS in drafting for industrial design and manufacturing. I applied to this job on accident, thinking it was for manufacturing, then when I was offered an interview, accepted it despite the mixup. Why not? They offered about double what other jobs were for a drafter, so I took it.
8 months into the job, a designer position opened up, so I interviewed for that and got the promption!
Door is still wide open, despite the general idea that drafters are becoming less of a demand. Based on my experience, they’re sorely needed, especially for civil jobs. Also I get paid higher than a friend of mine who got her masters in interior architecture (also a drafting/design gig), with just my AS. I’d do it all over again in a heartbeat. Totally worth it.
Even with standard components, you’re still dealing with a wide variety of different sized city blocks with different types of buildings and industries, different grid layouts, etc. You also have to plan for potential future changes in load. Even if you have a large part you can copy-paste you still need to check all requirements and design the interconnections
I see. It’s just that here in the UK a lot of infrastructure like that is literally just copy paste boxes. I’m from a xUSSR country originally and there all the infrastructure is just factory built all the same stuff. Something custom is super rare. I guess everyone knows copy pasted Soviet house blocks, so yeah, infrastructure is the same.
For one glorious summer I was a small boat sailing instructor at a summer camp. My life was sitting on the beach and teaching kids to sail. I had a wonderful tan, and sun bleached hair. My life was stress free and wonderful. I got into it by learning how to sail at that very camp, and applying for the job. It paid minimum wage, but it also came with free room and board, and I was a kid, so I didn’t really need any money anyways.
Dang, I missed out. I applied for that job somewhere up in Maine, just to get away from hick-ville south USA. I think they thought I was crazy to want to drive that far.
I’m no bearings expert but my gut tells me that if I were to start making cheap toys for kids that centered around bearings that had no significant durability or precision requirements, I would probably not opt for a bearing design that was rare or expensive or unique.
In fact, I’d probably go knocking on doors of those companies that do have strict requirements and be like, gimme all the ones that failed inspection.
In fact #2, if i wanted to retire and make everyone in Lemmy threads like this one jealous, I’d start thinking about what other high precision parts probably get thrown out if they fail inspection, that I could buy for next to nothing, and how I could make that into a toy.
Parts of machines are cool. Parts of machines that are crafted to high standards of precision are cool. The toy probably invents itself. Going viral and getting as popular as fidget spinners tho… That seems harder.
I work in disaster planning - so if you want a really good disaster to happen then give me a call.
To be more serious:
I write disaster response plans mostly for the medical field, e.g. hospitals, nursing homes. That starts with ordinary fires and flooding, but also includes things like “IT outtakes”(which kill far more people than fire each year), “supply line collaps”, etc.
We also train staff, mostly management, and conduct full scale exercises. Additionally I write medical intelligence and evacuation reports. These are basically “plans” for aid workers, expats. that go to risky places: “Oh, I broke my leg in bumfuck nowhere South Sudan! What now? Is there a hospital? Which one do I go to? Which one has actual doctors? Is there a chance that a medical evacuation plane can reach me?”
Originally I am a critical care paramedic and I am currently studying towards (another) master degree in healthcare management. Before I founded my current company I worked as a consultant for various healthcare related firms, before that as an ambulance service director.
But mass casualty situations always were “my thing” and the multi-stakeholder approach I take during planning talking to basically all roles in a hospital, from the higher ups to the guy in charge of waste disposal, is something I enjoy immensely.
I bet Covid got you a lot of fun data to play with re: “supply line collapse”.
I’ve always been interested in work like this–I took a class that covered lean manufacturing and kept thinking about how “just in time” inventory seemed like it’d be awful for a hospital, as the hospital would be MOST needed if supply lines collapsed, and JIT stuff seemed a dumb move. But I was only spitballing on the surface as an outsider.
And mass casualty events are generally centred around population centres. If a train hits that bus in bumfuck, it’s six hours before triage and transport
Yeah, thankfully in central Europe our “bumfuck nowhere” still means that some infrastructure is reachable within 120min usually - and as long as the weather permits we throw dozens of helicopters at it.
Personally I am far more afraid of other scenarios therefore.
I’m a kiln operator. I run a giant oven to dry red and white pine.
Dropped out of uni. Various retail and tech jobs for about 12 years. 4 years disability. Took an interview at a lumber mill because ‘cool tour’, took a job because ‘paycheck for a little while anyway’. Ran a planer for about 6 weeks and then offered kiln operator when their previous was poached.
On the job learning for me with the caveat that it was not a reasonable expectation to set. Typically one works under a senior operator for about two years not ‘you’re on your own but you’re good at google right?’
Certified by my work for government heat treatment programs, front loader/forklift operation and working at heights. One of those jobs where mindset is more important than education.
Would I do it again? Yes? I’d want more money for the work. There’s not a lot of people who will write an algorithm to interpret the data they gather in a 50c box. It’s a really intense combination of intellectual and manual labor and the compromise seems to be to plop the pay in the middle. Good pay for a lumber mill but shit pay for developing processes, an inventory system and an entire goddamned iOS app(that my boss didn’t even understand much less appreciate).
I wouldn’t expect the door to be open again in the future. There’s not a lot of kilns to run, they are increasingly automated and it’s a job people hold til retirement. The manager who hired me took a massive gamble on a physically disabled but intelligent person so that’s not easy to find either. Owner runs under the ‘warm body is better than no body’ premise. There’s not even any other mills close enough with kilns that I have other employment opportunities. I’ve got a very specific and reasonably lucrative skill set for a rare job.
Warp is more about the piling and stickering of the packs going into the kiln. Wet you can mitigate at home but once a warp is set you’re pretty much screwed.
The mill should have some sort of quality control in place to communicate these issues between the kilns and stacker crew. Find a different mill to buy from. Anything warped is pulled out before the planer at my mill and then sold as rough outs or goes to the chipper.
Ever seen 20 feet high of stacked lumber sway in the wind? Stickering can be a huge safety issue alongside quality.
I imagine if you took two seconds to contemplate how too many small businesses are run, you could figure out it’s shit management from your local companies and not this particular kiln operator.
I dont know if its really “Lesser Known”, but pest control is a very interesting field to work in and isnt often talked about in many circles.
Its essentially future proof, as we’re always going to have pests. Its one of those jobs where its the same enough every day that you get a little better, but different enough from call to call to keep you challenged and stay interested.
I wished that I had even considered it an open back in High School and gone to college/university to actually study pests in an academic setting, and be able to participate in some of the groundbreaking work taking place currently.
Has it ever happened that you accidentally took some pests (like bed bugs or cockroaches) home in your clothes or bag and infected your own home with it?
Nah. I mean, it can happen, and really only with bedbugs, but only if you’re not careful.
Roaches have no interest in being on your person, so.its not like they’re going to hitch a ride home with you. If I were to, say, take home a cardboard box from a heavily infested unit, then maybe (they loooove corrugated boxes), but that fall under “not careful”.
Bed bugs are pretty much the same. I mean, if you give a bear hug to a mattress that is heavily infested, then there is a chance that one could make it onto you and you bring it home, but theyre actually not that great at holding on (they are not like ticks where they latch on).
My only precaution is an ocular patdown of myself when I leave a unit, and as soon as I get home, my uniform goes into the dryer on High for 40 minutes to kill anything in the off chance I brought a bed bug or an egg home with me.
I’m a Dev(Sec)Ops Engineer, so I’m basically the guy who makes all the funky stuff in the background so developers can write their apps/websites and automatically roll them out on different environments and versions, also im more or less adding a bunch of tools for this and different platforms so the devs can do that autonomously without me being there 24/7
I work in the surgical pathology department in a hospital.
Anything you get removed from surgery comes to me to be examined. Then I describe what I have and what sort of pathology I can see with the naked eye. I select and cut out pieces of tissue that are important to the case. The tissue undergoes further processing and eventually reaches the desk of a pathologist (a type of physician) who examines the tissue microscopically, forms a diagnosis, and ultimately signs out the case.
My job can assist with several things depending on the case…
To help the clinician confirm or determine what type of lesion or disease process the patient has
To document and confirm that a surgery was necessary
To stage cancer cases
To determine whether or not a cancer or lesion has been completely removed from the patient and there is none left inside their body
To make sure the patient does not have an unsuspected cancer
I see everything from tiny boring specks of tissue they biopsy during a colonoscopy to large cancer resection cases.
The other day, I got an almost entirely necrotic above the knee amputation with maggots. A few days before that I got a 9 lb spleen. It’s fun in the lab.
In the US, my job generally requires a very specialized 2 year master’s degree (on top of a bachelor’s degree in any subject). In other countries, the role of my job can be fulfilled by different types of people depending on the country and education will be different.
I found out about the job on Google lol. I was looking for something hands on in healthcare or anatomy related, but I didn’t like patient contact. I would probably select this career again if I had a second go around. It pays pretty well and is interesting. But grad school in the US is very expensive.
Antenna engineer. It’s a subset of electrical engineering. It’s often referred to as black magic by other electrical engineers but I don’t agree with that. That would be an engineer specializing in PIM testing. Anyway, it was a great career and I was able to command a higher salary at first, because if you need an antenna engineer, you need an antenna engineer. Unfortunately very few companies need an antenna engineer so, no, I wouldn’t choose it again. Changing companies is too limited. Plus, due to lack of antenna engineers and the high cost of the resources needed to do the job, more companies are moving away from it, preferring to buy off-the-shelf antennas. This means there are fewer and fewer companies doing the real design work.
I got into it, because it was the first professional job I got. Sticking with it was easier than starting over.
I promise this isn’t a “OMG, AI!” question. But it involves kinda that thing.
A long time ago–probably over 15 years–I once read an article about some sort of…“evolved”?..method of generating novel antenna designs. Basically, the article said that the researchers said they had an algorithm or computer “evolve” some potential designs, and it spat out this really weird unintuitive design that was nothing like the human made designs. But it ended up working fantastically well or something when they actually prototyped it and tried it?
Not the person you were responding to, but I’m knowledgeable on the topic. What you’re describing is simulated evolution, and it can (and has!) been used to make anything from antennas to spray nozzles to mixer blades. Basically, you start with one or multiple base designs, then slowly alter parameters about the design (for antennas, this could be length, number of loops, loop direction, etc., or it could be more granular, like starting from a stump and extending or branching in random directions).
You generally have a group of candidate designs, called a “generation”, then randomly select from these designs, weighted towards the ones which perform better, and “kill” the underperforming ones. Then you make random mutations on the remaining members of the old generation to create a new generation. Continue until you have generations that are performing better than your current manual designs, if the evolution manages to reach that point.
There are additional things you can do to solve certain issues the evolutionary process might run into, like taking the parameters for your new generation from two parents instead of one (essentially, this goes from single-celled mitosis to sexual reproduction, and can allow two different evolutionary lines to share their progress).
This is an absolutely boring one, but did you know part of your seatbelt, right now, could just be colored in?
How about your seat cover? Your steering wheel? Some poor bastard had to go get that out of stock, bring it into repair, go over the entire lot, and take a special pencil to color in those little scratches, or mark it as unrepairable.
I was that bastard for awhile. It sucked. 10 hours going over whatever needed checking that day. An “exciting” day meant a defect hit the line and we needed to hunt it down, hopefully without stopping production.
“Repair” can cover a lot of things, and that was the worst repair work I’ve ever done.
Some poor bastard had to go get that out of stock, bring it into repair, go over the entire lot, and take a special pencil to color in those little scratches, or mark it as unrepairable.
…This is so simple it’s making me ask to be sure…This specific repair gig was…Coloring in scratches?
It’s becoming more common, but I work in the cannabis industry. People don’t tend to know much about exactly what I do and how weed sales works. The education and certification side of this is actually super unique. You do have to get a basic agent ID, but it’s really more of a background check than anything. But, because the rec market is so very new here, you are basically required to have broken the law extensively to have the knowledge and experience needed to sell weed. Everyone I work with has a criminal past, even if they never got busted. I talked about buying psychedelics on the darkweb in my interview, and my HR person knew exactly what the fuck I was talking about. It’s just one of the many wonderful things about working in cannabis <3
I’m a geologist, but not the fun kind that gets to look at actual rocks.
I do environmental and some geotechnical work, which pretty much boils down to “Is the dirt poisoned?” and “How hard do I have to squish the dirt to make the future building not fall down?” There’s few things to get excited about, but it’s steady work and pays the bills.
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