A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 14
Here is a list of weird jobs that pay really well:
Shot girl
For a woman in her 20s, taking home between $300 and $600 a night is excellent pay, which is about how much shot girls make, The Wall Street Journal reports. They’re paid 25 cents for every shot they sell at the bar, with the rest coming from tips, which vary between $1 and $20 per round. The watered-down tequila in a plastic test tube and Jell-O shots cost 15 cents to make and sell for $3 or $4. After the young woman gets her cut, the cash is evenly split between the bar and the company managers. The shot girls wear revealing tops and short shorts, which may not make it an appealing job for all women.
Submarine cook
In Australia, a senior submarine cook with more than six years of experience earns $200,000 (about $187,000 U.S.) per year, the same as a junior admiral.
The base pay is $58,806 per year, but the key is in the bonuses, which include a capability bonus of $40,000, seagoing allowance of $22,254, submarine service allowance of $26,703, and a bonus of $50,000 a year just for showing up for work, because the job is listed as “critical to the navy.”
Pearl diver
It’s a dangerous occupation, but diving for pearls in Australia pays well. Offshore rates are $1,300 Australian dollars ($1,216 American) per day, and overseas daily rates start at $500 American.
Oil and gas diver
This may not be the most glamorous job since the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, but oil and gas divers can earn up to $80,000 a year. Tasks required in this demanding underwater job include inspecting and installing rigs, welding or laying pipe. The best news: It’s a growing field.
Airplane repo man
If you like adventure and high-stress work, this is the high-paying job for you. Aircraft repossessors can get a 6 to10% commission of the resale price of a plane they get back for a bank. For planes costing millions of dollars, that can add up to $10,000 to $900,000 per plane. Be prepared for tough work, though. Some repo men get shot at or tossed in a foreign prison.
White hat hacker
Instead of trying to steal information from computers and use it to make money, these ethical hackers help companies find security holes in their computer systems. The top certified ethical hackers earn up to $123,900 per year, and need a bachelor’s degree in computer science or information technology.
Sometimes an unusual job is enough of a spark for a story. Or you can take a job and put them into an unusual location.
True story. The very first screenwriting class I taught was at UCLA. One night, I brought in two hats and a bunch of index cards. I had the students write down a series of jobs on one set of cards, then locations on another set of cards. Put them into two hats, one for jobs, one for locations. Then had students pull out one each to see what matches came up. Most were worthless, but this is one of the pairs:
“Cop”.
“Kindergarten.”
Kindergarten Cop. Purely by chance. Unfortunately a decade after the movie. But still, you never know.
What would you do with any of those gigs noted above?