Alpaca Shaver: “I met a professional alpaca shaver when I was on holiday last month. He told me he gets about $35 per shaved alpaca.”

Planetary Protection: Officer “Sounds like a kinda awesome job title, even if it’s only about making sure that we don’t contaminate other planets with Earth microbes when landing or crashing spacecraft on them.”

Facade Engineer: “I rappel/abseil down the outside of 40+ story buildings to inspect them for problems. I make sure bits don’t fall off, work out why buildings are leaking and set up schedules for repairs.”

Bottle Sniffer: “My main service contract is at a huge robotic bottling plant that washes and refills 18L office cooler water bottles. Every one gets smelled to make sure it has no ‘funky odors’ or gasoline in it. You’d he amazed how often some asshole uses one as a jerry can. If that bottle slips past the lab picks up trace amounts and you have to scrub the entire day’s production.”

Slot Composer/Sound Designer: “I compose music and design sound effects for slots. I live in Vegas, but still, few people outside of the slot industry know my job exists. Makes for a bit of interesting conversation.”

Clock Maintenance: “Clock maintainers of Big Ben and the Tower, These people make sure the tower clock faces are clean, the clock mechanism is looked after and clean big Ben itself. FYI Big Ben is the name of the bell in the tower.”

Live Telephone Call Captioning: “As far as I know there’s really only the one company in the US that does it (CapTel Inc.), and they have three centers with several hundred people working 24/7. It’s a service meant for the hard-of-hearing so that they can talk normally into the phone instead of the more traditional (but painful) method of using a TTY device to type back and forth, with a person in between reading the messages out loud to the hearing party.”

Egg Grader: Grade, sort, or classify unprocessed food and other agricultural products by size, weight, color, or condition.

Train Pushers: “There are people in Japan whose job is to stuff people into trains to make space for the doors to close during rush times.”

Hook Writer: “A Friend of a friend in Nashville just writes hooks. He gets sent partially finished songs – a beat or a verse and writes a hook to it. I think in general most everyday listeners would be surprised to know how many different hands and minds are often involved in top40 music.”

Light Bulb Replacement: “It’s not really a ‘normal’ job, but my entire job responsibility is to change light bulbs around campus. a normal shift for me involves driving out to two or three buildings and replacing all the light bulbs in the building, whether they’re burnt out or not. I do it on a rotating six-month schedule. I’m also on call if there are any lightbulbs reported as burned out. I don’t fix broken ballasts or sockets, that job belongs to someone else. I only replace bulbs”

Shipping Lawyer: “I’m a shipping lawyer, which perhaps is something people would know exists, but which nobody knows that much about! Generally, when I try to explain what I do people are either really interested, or it feels like the scene in Airplane where people would rather kill themselves than listen to me.”

Programming Director: “I’ve worked at radio stations before. We have a guy whose entire job is to decide when we play each particular song. It’s not random or the DJ deciding to play the music, rather a pretty exact science with specialized software and tones of rules to create the perfect mix.”

Weight and Measures Inspector: “A person who travels around checking that gas stations actually pump one gallon of gas when the pump shows that one gallon has been pumped.”

Crime Analyst: “My job. I work inside police departments and analyze data. I identify patterns and series and predict future events, analyze long-term trends and hot spots, and otherwise give the officers and command staff the information they need to do their jobs more effectively and more efficiently. There are thousands of us at work around the world. Almost every police agency serving a population over 30,000-40,000 has at least one crime analyst, but you hardly ever hear about us or see us depicted in films and television shows about the police. I browse /r/criminology a lot under a different ID, and both the students and professors there seem completely oblivious as to the existence of the profession.”

Underwater Lumberjacks: “Harvest old growth trees that have been covered over by diverted/dammed waterways.”

Industrial Radiography: “My dad used to X-ray pipes for airplanes for faults. Apparently, it’s quite vital. Who knew?!”

Dendrochronologist: A scientist who uses tree rings to answer questions about the natural world and the place of humans in its functioning.