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Mystery Shopper

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You've likely gotten about a million spam messages in your lifetime about becoming a mystery shopper, the most glamorous job this side of an erotic cake baker. You can go shopping and get paid? That's amazing! My boner just broke the sound barrier, and I'm a lady!

The reality of mystery shopping is that it's about as glamorous as a fart in a glass elevator. Generally speaking, most companies will want you to pay some kind of administrative fee to get started, because "administrative fee" is actually a lesser known synonym for "I'm ripping you off, ass face." You will never make this money back, unless you're a crazy person or some kind of churlish robber baron. I don't even know if that's a thing.

Your job as a mystery shopper is to go deep undercover in a Target and let your employer know if the cashier called you cock breath and refused to give you change. You have to go to a specific store, maybe buy a specific item, and pay attention to what happens. Were you greeted promptly? Were the walls bleeding? Is there still vomit in Aisle 6? You don't give opinions, you just tell them how your experience went. It's part of a store's internal evaluation process. It's that boring.

Now it's not a scam per se, but it's also not a job for a real person. Odds are someone out there right now makes a killing at mystery shopping, but someone out there is also making a killing at selling golden shower videos, so let's not split hairs. For the most part, what's going to happen is you'll get an offer to drive across town and buy a pack of gum and see if the clerk has pants on today. You'll get paid $5 for your effort. Maybe tomorrow you can go to the other side of town and see if the Walmart greeter really has been spin-kicking elderly patrons in their decrepit old nuts for a cool $10.

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Dishwasher

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Dish washing is the great employment equalizer. I've washed dishes in at least three different restaurants, and each one helped enrich my hatred of the job a little bit more. Why is washing dishes so terrible? Well, there's a number of reasons. To start, it's a job you do at home. Any job you also do at home is going to breed a tiny bit of resentment. It's like you can't get away from it. You wash dishes for eight hours, then come home, make a corn dog, and wash the corn dog plate. God damn it.

The big deal with washing dishes is that, on the employment totem pole, it's as respected as janitor, Northern Canadian porn star and garbage man. No one cares about a dishwasher. It's a job your employer expects even an ape could do if you Tazed it enough times. This is actually partially the fault of dishwashers themselves, and if you've ever worked in a kitchen, you'll know why -- because any idiot can become a dishwasher, often any idiot will. This means that if you happen to not be an idiot who really just needs a job and sees the value in an honest day's work no matter what it is, the rest of the staff is just assuming you're an idiot and waiting for the moment when you think it's OK to try to shine the silverware on your sack or lick the stovetop to see just how hot that burner is.

And really, it's one of the most humiliating tasks we have for a person. Look at what you're really doing when you wash someone's dirty plate: It's all the bits of food and sauce and sludge this person wasted -- it's mirror-universe feces. The stuff you're washing off the plate and a deuce later in the day bookend the only decent part of the meal. You're cleaning preshit. Or unshit. Whatever.

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Tech Support

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Night Stock Clerk

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If you ever get the chance, wake up before noon someday and go to a grocery store. You may even have to do this around 8 a.m. It's asking a lot, but you should never turn down a chance to experience something new and relatively painless. When you go into the store after it's just opened, you'll be amazed to discover how pretty everything is. Unless you live in a shitty neighborhood where no one does this stuff. But most places have stock clerks working all night in that store to make it look like it's a brand new store every goddamn day.

For a solid eight hours at night, a team of hapless boobs are in that store putting new stock on shelves and turning all the old stock around and lining it up so all the shelves are fully stocked and looking brand new and untouched. Every day.

It's worth noting right now that people believe that babies are so fascinated by peek-a-boo because they don't understand that when they can no longer see you, you still exist. So a game of peek-a-boo is like a transdimensional thrill ride of a mindfuck for a baby. You exist, you don't exist, you're like Portal or something.

This thrill of discovery should not hold true for adults and canned beans. You do not need to see new, pristinely arranged canned beans every morning to still need canned beans. And why is this only done for those four lonely, elderly nutjobs who actually go to the store at 8 a.m.? By the time normal people get around to shopping, the store looks like shit again anyway, and it's totally irrelevant that someone spent all night arranging the shelves to look like they'd never been touched.

For more from Ian, check out The 5 Most Overrated Jobs Of All-Time and 8 Geek Conventions God Never Intended.