5 Jobs You Think Are For Losers (That Pay Six Figures)

To Earn $80,000 A Year, You Can:

Spend four years earning a bachelor's degree to become a mechanical engineer. Sure, it sounds like a cool job, but keep in mind that it's only train engineers who get to wear that awesome little hat. You? You're designing elevators and stuff. No hat issued whatsoever.

Or You Can:

Screw designing elevators; grab a wrench and start spinning it about until people stop plummeting. Forbes once ranked "elevator mechanic" as the best-paying blue-collar job. The average pay is slightly less than that of mechanical engineers, but the top 10 percent of elevator mechanics nearly break $100,000 a year.

And you don't even need any schooling to land the job. What you do need, however, is an inside contact -- the industry is heavily dependent on apprenticeships with people who already know their shit. Guidelines vary by state, but as a general rule, elevator mechanics have a high school diploma and maybe an optional certification -- not a bad level of effort for a group of workers that averages in the mid-$70,000 salary range. We're happy for them. Still, don't take our happiness to indicate that the whole "guidelines vary" thing isn't absolutely going to cause us to take the stairs when we leave the office this evening.

Or You Can:

Load and unload cargo ships. It requires no academies, and you'll make an average of $70,000 to $120,000 a year. And if you stick with it long enough to bump your way up to foreman? Well, then you can take home a yearly salary of a smooth quarter mill.

To give you an idea of how much of the world's economy depends on the oceanic equivalent of truckers, in early 2015, a labor dispute with West Coast port workers was estimated to cost the U.S. economy $2 billion a day. Two billion dollars. A day. And that's just one coast -- if memory serves, we have two.

If you want to get started, our best advice is to start hanging around the union hall looking for casual labor until you can bumble your way into a union membership. In practice, it helps to have an "in," such as a relative who's already in the union. Oh, and the mob still has a significant presence in the industry, so be prepared to pick up the slack for some no-show co-workers ... and don't ask any stupid questions. Caprese?

Or You Can:

Be a skycap! It's a decidedly less lubricating title than "pilot," sure, but those guys who check in your luggage curbside at the airport make a good living. They also assist with navigating the labyrinthine terminals, distributing boarding passes, helping people figure out where in the ever-loving hell their shuttle and/or rental car is, fetching wheelchairs ... they'll even help you wrangle your pets, if you're the kind of weirdo who brings a pet to the airport.

On average, skycaps are paid similarly to restaurant servers -- two to three dollars hourly. But unlike the waitresses at that crappy airport Applebee's, a skycap can rake in $75,000 to $100,000 a year in tips. It's so lucrative that the CEO of one company that provides skycaps to airlines said, "I know several who don't even bother cashing their salary checks because the tips are so good."

We don't know what they do with them instead. Flick football?

To Earn $100,000 A Year, You Can:

Spend a good third of your life getting your PhD (the average person earning the diploma is 33 years old), followed by a few more years slogging through lowly postdoctoral research jobs, to become a physicist. Impressive mustache and unquenchable sexual thirst are optional, but highly encouraged.

Or You Can:

Dive for golf balls. That's not a gross euphemism for going down on a senior citizen; it's a real career.

That man is a golf ball diver, and he clears $100,000 a year diving into water hazards, rescuing scads of lost golf balls from the muck, and reselling them. Golf is a nearly $70 billion dollar industry in the U.S., and balls make up no small part of that. A box of a dozen new ones can easily cost more than 50 bucks, but the more budget-conscious can instead visit a golf ball diver and pick up a dozen gently drowned ones for less than $20.

With an estimated hundreds of millions of balls lost in the U.S. every single year, business is damn good. Business is not, however, easy. Golf ball divers must deal with hazards such as gators, venomous snakes, pesticides, fisherman, fertilizers, and, perhaps worst of all, a bunch of jackasses making endless shaft and ball jokes.

Hee hee. Shaft. Classic.

For more jokes and musings on daily life, follow Vicki Veritas on Twitter. And be sure to check out her website for more stories, and maybe even a puppy video.

There are a few more ways to make money without a degree. Like becoming a regular sperm donor or anything else in 5 Ways To Get Rich (Without A Single Discernible Skill). Or, if you insist on going, get some sage advice on what to REALLY expect from college in 5 Things Nobody Says About College (Until It's Too Late).

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