Original subtitles

[bright electronic music]

- Looking for that dream job?

How about getting paid big bucks

to smell armpits?

- Pick up your arms.

- The cosmetics manufacturers are testing

upwards of 10 different formulas.

- The sniffers will smell up to 60 armpits per hour.

- Or clocking in every day to eat like an animal?

- Pet food companies are doing whatever they can

to get an edge in the market,

and one of the most important tools that they use

to gain that edge are human pet food tasters.

[bright music]

- What about a gig competing for treasures

with a pack of huge killer rats?

- [Mitch] It's a very dangerous job.

Some of them just vanished

in the hundreds of miles of tunnels.

- These are the jobs so dirty and so odd,

they can only be called "Unbelievable."

[bright electronic music]

In the 19th century, Merry Olde England

is more like filthy old England,

and thanks to the practice of burning coal fires everywhere,

its capital, London, is known as the big smoke.

What odd job could combat all that grime?

One who's only prerequisite is being a small child.

[tense energetic music]

- The job of chimney sweep

has been mythologized over time.

It's not that of Mary Poppins,

of a dancing and singing middle-aged man.

- This job is anything but that.

[tense music]

- It's dangerous, it's dark, it's deadly,

and it's not a job that Dick Van Dyke's Bert

is ever going to get.

This is a job for children.

- [Dan] But how do children end up

in this perilous profession?

- It all goes back to the Great Fire

of London, England in 1666,

which totally guts the city.

Because of this, building codes are changed

and chimneys have to be built narrower than ever before.

Also, new regulations requiring them

to be free of obstruction are introduced.

- For the next 200 years,

the job of chimney sweep

is employed solely by children.

By 1841, there is nearly 5,000 of them

working in this trade.

- [Dan] Where does one find all these hardworking kids?

- The master sweeps buy young children

between the ages of three and 10 from orphanages

and give them the title Chimney Sweep Apprentice.

- The term apprentice really sounds like

it's gonna lead to something bigger.

It doesn't.

These are indentured servants essentially,

treated harshly and forced to work

every day of the year except Christmas.

The boys are shoved into the chimney from the bottom,

and then from there they're forced to clamber up inside,

using these brushing and scraping tools

to knock all the soot out

from the lining of the chimney,

and they climb back down, collect the soot pile,

and then the master sweep sells that

to farmers for fertilizer.

- [Dan] Sounds like a simple enough gig,

but a quick glance at London's skyline

in the mid-1800s reveals a daunting task.

- So some of these chimneys

are quite high, up to 60 feet.

They're not just straight,

they're built at angles,

and because the openings

are only between nine to 14 inches,

it's widely suspected that the master chimney sweeps

are malnourishing the kids

so that they can remain smaller

and fit better inside the chimneys.

- [Dan] Unfortunately, hunger

is not the worst occupational hazard.

- The chimney sweeps suffer a lot of health problems

as a result of the abnormal positions

and cramped quarters in which they're working.

These can range from deformed ankles

or deformed joints, twisted spines.

Oftentimes, they'll have pulmonary problems

because of the soot,

and they can even go on to have cancer

as a result of some of the materials

that they're breathing in.

- [Dan] Not surprisingly, these dangers

give some chimney sweeps cold feet.

- If a child is reluctant to go into a chimney,

the master sweep will hold a torch to their feet.

If you'll want to know where the phrase,

"to light a fire under someone" comes from, that's it.

- [Dan] Fortunately, towards the end of the 19th century,

the chimney sweep boy becomes a thing of the past,

but not before one particularly tragic accident.

- In 1875, a chimney sweep named George Brewster

climbs into a chimney

inside the Fulbourn Hospital in Cambridge, England.

- George is 12 years old, which as we know

is already pushing it in terms of size

compared to the other chimney boys in town.

Shortly after entering the chimney, George gets stuck.

There's a desperate rescue attempt.

The chimney is broken into,

walls are knocked down,

but unfortunately, George is not saved.

- George's tragic death

does have a silver lining, though.

It lights a fire, but this time,

under lawmakers' feet.

- In September of 1875,

a bill is pushed through Parliament,

which puts an end to the practice,

and George Brewster is the last chimney sweep

to ever die on the job.

- While spending your days

working in a soot-covered chimney isn't easy,

there are filthier ways to make coin

in Victorian London.

[mellow soothing music]

- In this period, the River Thames

is so polluted and so nasty that Parliament

has to hang sheets soaked in chlorine over their windows

so that they can conduct business without the stench.

That same summer, ground is broken

on an 1,100-mile sewer system in the city.

- With progress comes new problems.

People discover that they are dropping valuables

down the drain from time to time.

- Copper, silver, gold coins,

jewelry, other valuables.

- [Dan] This opens a whole new job opportunity

for anyone willing to take on the task,

they become known as Toshers.

- A tosher, or sewer hunter, makes a living

trawling through Victoria-era sewers.

They literally dig around in the wastewater

searching for anything valuable that might have been lost.

- Men will go down with a lantern and a pan,

much like you would pan for gold.

- London is a thousand-year-old city,

and so sometimes they even find medieval

and even Roman coins in the sewers.

[intriguing music]

- Being a tosher is not the most upstanding job

because it's illegal for people

to go down into these sewers.

Because of this,

they don't wanna be identified by their real names,

and so they take on unusual monikers,

often based on something about their appearance.

Long Tom, Lanky Bill, One-Eyed George, Short-Arm Jack.

[tense music]

- [Dan] These aliases may protect them from the law,

but not from other perils.

- Toshers go out in groups

because it's a very dangerous job.

[suspenseful music]

Some of them are overcome by noxious fumes.

Some of them collapse and drown.

Some of them step into sludge holes,

and some of them just vanish, getting lost somewhere

in the hundreds of miles of tunnels.

- But that's not the worst part.

The worst thing that they face

are the giant sewer rats

- Toshers can actually get overtaken

by swarms of man-eating sewer rats.

[ominous music] [rats squeaking]

Now, experts today tell us

that rats very rarely attack humans,

but we have records from toshers themselves

who speak very vividly of rats attacking men.

- [Dan] With downsides like these,

why take on the gig?

- Toshers could make up to six shillings a day.

That's about $200 today,

making them some of the top earners

among Victorian working-class people.

It's a surprisingly egalitarian work.

At the end of each shift, toshers will gather

everything that they've collected

and divide the spoils equally.

[tense music]

- But if you're looking for a more noble way

to earn a living, here's one job

that is considered very respectable.

[light dramatic music]

- In the history of jobs

that revolve around scatological employment,

the Groom of the Stool is an elevated position.

- Why?

Because the Groom of the Stool

accompanies the monarch to their privy chamber

and monitors their fecal output.

[light dramatic music]

Back in the Elizabethan and Tudor eras,

the analysis of the colors of stool

is critical into diagnosing the health

of both the king, and therefore, the state.

- Among other duties of the Groom of the Stool

is to wipe the royal bottom

and supply whatever his majesty needs

whilst using the chamber pot.

- Despite the apparent unpleasantness

of a job like this, this is actually

one of the most prestigious positions

a young man in the court could have.

- This job is very sought after

because it's a lot of one-on-one time

with the most powerful person in the nation.

- These people filled their entire lives

with ceremony, with pomp and circumstance,

all of which has dozens, if not hundreds,

of courtiers with them for all of those moments.

So if you want to bend the ear of the monarch,

you have picked the right job.

- [Dan] During the Tudor Dynasty,

the position is so coveted,

it's literally to die for.

- [Larissa] Henry VIII has a very trusted bottom-tender,

Sir Henry Norris, who is his Groom of the Stool.

- The king shares all of his secrets with Norris,

but Norris does not share his secrets with the king.

- It's alleged Henry Norris has a romantic affair

with Queen Anne Boleyn.

- Henry Norris is put on trial for adultery,

which is treason, and ultimately in 1536,

he's executed, just as the queen.

- [Dan] This act of betrayal

doesn't soil the career for everyone.

A century later in the 1640s,

the king still relies on his right hand man

to perform his duties.

- King Charles I becomes extremely close

with his Groom of the Stool,

William Seymour, 2nd Duke of Somerset.

King Charles trusts Seymour so much

that he makes him royal commander

during the First Civil War.

- During that time, parliamentarians,

led by Oliver Cromwell, deemed the king a tyrant.

And in the course of this war,

Charles is actually tried for treason.

- William Seymour is so loyal

that he remains alongside King Charles

following his captivity

and right up until the king's execution.

[ominous music]

- The Groom of the Stool

remains a coveted position in court until 1901,

just a few years longer than I would've anticipated.

- There are some jobs out there

that call for the keenest of senses,

but only one that requires knowing

the taste preferences of man's best friend.

[intriguing music]

- During the Industrial Revolution

and with the rise of the middle class in the 19th century,

families start to keep animals as pets.

- Initially, these pets are fed

with table scraps and leftover food,

but as we humans want better, more consistent diets,

we want the same thing for our pets.

[light dramatic music]

In 1860, an English businessman named James Spratt

comes up with the idea to industrialize

the feeding of pets.

He creates the first dog food.

- [Dan] From there, dog food companies begin popping up

around the country and the world,

now fetching around $58 billion in sales a year.

- Today, pet food companies are doing

whatever they can to get an edge in the market,

and one of the most important tools that they use

to gain that edge are human pet food tasters.

- [Lab Tech] Help yourself to some product.

- Humans have around 9,000 taste buds,

but dogs only have one sixth of that,

but their sense of smell

is a million times stronger than ours.

So to make something appealing to a dog,

you have to make sure it smells

really, really great to them.

- [Dan] Contrary to popular belief,

dogs won't eat almost anything,

something some pet food tasters must keep in mind.

- These pet food tasters have to strike

a very, very delicate balance

because on one hand, they need to make the food

as appealing as possible to the pet,

but they can't make the food too repulsive

to humans that are buying the food.

[percussive music]

- This experience is really high end.

These tasters are in labs.

There's proper silverware.

They're doing tasting notes,

they're doing smelling notes.

It's not unlike a sommelier tasting wine.

- You're evaluating the initial smell,

the different notes and flavors.

What is the chew?

What is the mouth feel?

What is the viscosity?

What's the aftertaste after you swallow it?

Whatever goes into it,

to make it as perfect as possible,

and nutritionally complete.

- [Dan] So how much does a human earn eating dog food?

- These jobs are highly sought after,

and at one of the big pet food companies like Purina,

you might have a starting salary in the 30,000s range,

but if you prove yourself and move into management,

you're looking at more like six figures.

- If you think taste testing pet food is odd,

try sticking your nose in another strange business,

one dominated by a man named Barrie Drewitt.

- Raise your right arm, please.

Left arm.

- Barrie is in a very specific line of work.

Companies all over the world

hire him and people like him

to test out the latest products

that combat sweat and body odor.

- Lift up your arms.

- And see if they're doing enough

to tamp down those nasty smells that are created

when the sweat mixes with the armpit bacteria.

- The cosmetics manufacturers are testing

upwards of 10 different formulas

with slight variations,

applying it to a paid subject.

That's when Barrie comes in.

Barrie is there, nose deep,

armpit after armpit after armpit,

to test each variation of the deodorant.

- The sniffers will smell up to 60 armpits per hour,

to determine which version is the most effective,

and that's the version of that particular product

that the company will actually sell to consumers.

- You might be asking, how much

are we gonna make a year on this?

Well, if you are the ace, the top,

the ne plus ultra of armpit sniffing like Barrie Drewitt,

you could be making $15 million a year.

[energetic music]

- If getting paid to sniff armpits

isn't weird enough for you,

there's an even stranger job opportunity

in farming.

[taut energetic music]

- The United States generates

over 100 billion eggs a year

from 370 million chickens.

These highly efficient chicken farms

house over a million birds each,

and they use technology for everything

where it comes to the eggs,

collecting, cleaning, sorting, grading,

but the most essential element in this well-oiled machine

cannot be done by technology.

[taut percussive music]

- For most of human history, farmers must wait weeks

to differentiate male chicks from female chicks.

This is truly important

because only the females will go on to lay eggs,

and laying eggs is big business.

- [Dan] This crucial position in the poultry industry

has a job title you don't see every day,

Chicken Sexer.

- Sexing a chicken is exactly what it sounds like.

It's determining whether it's a male or a female chicken,

and it takes human eyes to determine that.

It's a very, very important job to have on a farm.

- [Dan] One very significant biological fact

makes this job much more difficult

than you might imagine.

- Male chickens don't have penises,

so even if you turn one over and look,

there's not much to see.

- [Dan] What baby boy chickens have

is a very small bump

on a vent called the cloaca.

That is, if you can find it.

- To sex a chick, you must flip it over,

squeeze it gently to invert the vent,

and then look really hard

to find the bump

because it's tiny.

[taut music]

- [Dan] Chicken sexing is so hard

that there's even a Japanese school

devoted to teaching it.

- The Zen-Nippon Chicken Sexing School.

It's in Nagoya in central Japan.

This place is the Harvard of chicken sexing.

It offers an intensive two-year course.

Experienced professionals can sex

up to 1,000 chickens an hour.

That's one every three seconds

and they get it correct 98% of the time.

[taut music] [chick chirps]

- With so much at stake,

it's no surprise that chicken sexers

often earn the highest salaries on poultry farms.

- Some farms raise chickens, others raise cows.

But working on one farm in Tennessee means

tending to something a little more unusual.

[suspenseful music]

- Just a few miles from downtown Knoxville, Tennessee,

there's a densely wooded plot of land

surrounded by razor wire,

and inside the gates

sits a very, very strange facility.

This is the University of Tennessee's

anthropological research facility,

better known as the Body Farm.

[suspenseful music]

- [Dan] The facility is started in 1981

by a forensic anthropologist named Bill Bass.

- He realizes that the rate

at which human bodies decompose

can be a revealing clue at crime scenes.

So he somehow convinces the dean of the university

that he must have a place

where he can lay out human bodies and watch them rot.

- [Dan] This macabre process actually helps investigators

determine vital information about decomposition.

- What happens to the body if we have it outside?

What happens if we have it inside?

Is it different if they're clothed, if they're naked,

if we submerge them in water,

if we bury them in concrete?

How do these factors affect decomposition?

- As I can attest to as an expert witness myself,

you're always getting asked questions

in trials in courts by police officers.

We found this body.

We don't know how long they've been there.

It can make a lot of changes from a criminal standpoint

who might be the real perpetrator.

- We're finding that bodies

lose about five pounds a day

in the rapid decay stage.

- As a crime scene investigator of 25 years,

there are things that I know

because of the work that they do.

[suspenseful music]

- Death ultimately comes to us all,

but if you're lucky enough to plan for it,

consider hiring someone with this very odd job.

[tense music]

- There's a funeral home in Dallas

called the Golden Gate Funeral Home

where they actually offer a bootcamp-style training

for you to learn how to be a professional mourner.

- Don't give up, don't give up.

Keep going. [mourner wailing]

- And basically stand in as friends or family

in the crowd and weep during a funeral.

[mysterious music]

- A professional mourner's job

is not just show up and cry.

There is research done.

You have to get into the books of someone's life,

learn who their loved ones are, what their hobbies were,

so when you're confronted by someone

who may be a closer acquaintance or family member,

you can at least be conversational with them

per the deceased's life.

[mysterious music]

- You have to be able to really show

that you are so horrified by the loss of this person

that you make everyone else in the room feel the same way.

- [Dan] With such complex prerequisites

for professional mourning,

one can now understand the necessity

for bootcamp-style training

that the Golden Gate Funeral Home offers.

- Now you have to be able to really sell it.

When the day comes, only the best

gets the gig of being a rented mourner.

- [Dan] Surprisingly, this odd job has been around

a lot longer than you might think.

[tense music]

- In ancient Egypt, for example,

funerals are frequently public affairs

and mourners who don't even know the deceased,

they're crying, they're gesticulating,

they're expressing grief, they're beating their breasts,

they're smearing themselves with dirt.

They are enacting a whole drama

to herald the holy passage

from one life into another.

[ominous music]

- This job does have a title.

It's called Moirologist,

and only women are allowed

to be professional mourners.

- Men are deemed unfit for the job

because they're supposed to be strong

and leaders of the family,

and are not supposed to show any kind of raw emotion,

but it's socially acceptable for women to express grief.

- [Dan] And these paid mourners are doing more

than simply showing deep grief.

They are actually playing a very important role.

- They're portraying the goddesses

and sisters, Isis and Nephthys.

Nephthys is the goddess of the death experience,

and Isis is the goddess of the birth experience,

thus symbolizing the totality of life.

- For a mourner to impersonate one of these two goddesses,

they have to wear a plain tunic with a short wig,

and on their arm, the name of Isis and Nephthys tattooed.

- And they carry with them bread,

libations, jars of water,

to accompany the deceased to the other world.

We know this is true because it's written

on sarcophagi in funerary scrolls and made reference to

in texts like the Book of the Dead.

- At the end of the mourning ritual,

the women portraying the goddesses recite a poem

that symbolizes the loss and grieving of the goddesses,

and safely ushers the dead

into their transition to the afterlife.

[somber music]

- If this job sounds attractive,

funeral homes are always on the lookout

for new mourners to fill their pews.

Be sure to mention wailing in agony

under special skills on your resume.

- Raising livestock is a difficult, dirty job,

but not all herds are the same.

One man in Iowa is harvesting something purely unusual.

[man calling deer]

[taut music]

- There are millions of deer hunters

across the United States,

and it is a ritual to use the urine

of whitetail does in heat

to attract bucks into their sights.

[taut music] [gun fires]

- This is big business.

The whitetail deer lure industry

is raking in over $100 million a year.

- [Dan] But high-quality doe urine does not grow on trees,

and one man has made a career out of collecting it.

- Sam Collora is from Mount Pleasant, Iowa

and an avid deer hunter.

In the late 1980s, he's working at a factory

as a day job, but he has a little side gig

as a taxidermist.

- [Dan] How does one go from factory worker

and part-time taxidermist

to deer urine collector?

Completely by accident.

- Most of Sam's clients are deer hunters.

They bring in their kill

and Sam wants to create

a very lifelike taxidermy model,

but he has problems getting the positioning just right.

He finds it's not enough to look at photographs.

He needs the real thing.

- His wife gets him three live deer

that he can observe and use as life models

for his taxidermy business.

- But the deer models begin to mate

and pretty soon, the family

has a growing herd of deer on its hands.

- [Dan] One day, Sam takes off

from his taxidermy business

to go hunting himself.

Instead of buying pre-packaged deer urine as bait,

he sees he has a free and endless supply

right outside his door.

- Sam takes the homemade urine with him

and it works like gangbusters, [gun firing]

and he realizes he may be onto something.

[suspenseful music]

In 1991, Sam quits his day job

and opens up his own business,

selling this magical deer urine, full time.

- Sam sets up his own shop,

he brands it as Mrs. Doe Pee's Buck Lure,

and people come from miles around

because it is the best lure they could find.

- Sam spends hours tracking doe on his farm,

determining which are in heat,

and then corralling them to an enormous barn

with a grated floor,

gathering their urine for eager customers.

- Sam isn't the only player in the deer urine market.

There are giant operators

with 5,000-square- foot collecting areas

that pump out gallons of deer urine

and they can sell to wholesalers

for over 100 dollars a gallon.

But Sam insists that his product

is the best because it's 100% pure,

no modifications, no preservatives,

no chemical additives.

Sam has the Lamborghini of deer urine.

It's the best you can get.

[taut music]

- There's no doubt that Sam's hands

get dirty earning his paycheck,

but there are probably no hands dirtier

than those of New York City's night soil men.

[intriguing music]

- By the middle 1840s,

New York City has a population

of around a half million people.

- The concentration of people in here is just maddening.

It is the most populous city in the United States

and far and away the dirtiest.

- They don't have modern sewer systems,

and so there are these cesspools of human waste,

10 feet wide, 20 feet deep.

It's estimated that in 1844 alone,

Manhattanites will produce

800,000 cubic feet of excrement.

[taut music] [urine spritzing]

- [Dan] To avoid sewage overflow

and the endless disease that comes with it,

the cesspools must be emptied often.

- So, New York creates a brand new job.

Teams of very strong men are dispatched

to eliminate and mitigate and move around

this human waste and cart it to the outskirts of the city.

It's hard work, but it's honest work.

- [Dan] Even so, no one wants to see it.

As a result, these four-man crews work

between the hours of midnight and 4:30 a.m.

- Because human excrement is collected

under the cover of night, it is dubbed night soil.

Therefore, they give the men

who collect it and dispose of it

the illustrious title of Night Soil Men.

A night soil team is made up of a hole man,

a rope man and two tub men.

- The hole man goes down into the cesspool,

scrapes the excrement into a tub.

The rope man lifts it up

and the two tub men dump it into the cart.

- [Dan] For such an important job,

at times it can be pretty crappy.

- There is not only the danger

of succumbing to the fumes, disease,

and perils of being in these cesspools.

- Their late night work leaves them vulnerable to hoodlums

who occasionally stone the men or shoot their horses.

[gun firing]

- [Dan] Sometimes, dodging gunshots

is the least of their worries.

[taut music]

- Night soil men often catch burglars in the act

or are burgled themselves,

and dead bodies are regularly found in the cesspools

and are often victims of murder.

[tense music]

- Where else am I going to dump a body

if I were committing a crime in 1840s New York?

I'm dumping it straight in there

for the night soil men to find it eventually.

[tense music]

- Fortunately, by the 1890s,

after years of construction,

New York and Brooklyn have 844 miles of sewers,

and so the demand for night soil men has become obsolete.

[tense music]

- Haven't had a vacation in a while?

How about going somewhere warm with sandy beaches?

No problem.

Just book it on your phone.

Online booking

has revolutionized the travel industry,

but as new forms of transportation emerge,

so do new and strange jobs.

[intriguing music] [plane engine whirring]

- There was a time when arranging and booking travel

looked far different than it does today.

You had to use a travel agent.

[phone ringing]

You had to visit their office

where they gave you brochures and printouts

describing these exotic destinations,

and this agent would call up the airline,

the hotel, the rental car company.

They would hold your hand through the whole process.

- Now, being a travel agent is completely obsolete,

like say, wagon wheel repair person.

They just don't exist.

- But there is one destination

where the only way to do it is through an agent.

[suspenseful music]

[rocket roaring]

- [Dan] That destination,

the vast expanse of deep space.

- When I was a kid, the only way

to get to space was with NASA.

You had to be an astronaut.

But today,

who knew all it takes is a whole lot of money.

[crowd cheering]

- Four, three, two, one.

[bottle thuds] Whoa!

- Today there's lots of options for space travel.

You have Virgin Galactic's suborbital thrill ride.

There's the World View Explorer capsule,

which takes you a 100,000 feet above Earth's surface.

- Companies are planning even more adventures,

like orbiting hotels where you can spend

a month or more floating serenely above the Earth.

- [Dan] Thinking of switching careers?

There are certainly a lot of responsibilities

involved in being a space travel agent.

- One of the first jobs of a space travel agent

is to warn you there is an FAA,

federally mandated warning,

that space travel is kind of dangerous,

and you need to know this and acknowledge it

before you even start your journey.

- In particular, travelers have to be

made aware of the risk of death.

- Here's the thing,

going to space is far more rigorous

than just going on a normal vacation.

You need to be between the height

of five feet to six feet, four inches tall.

You need to weigh between 110 and 220 pounds,

plus, you have to have so much testing done

to make sure, you know, your cardiovascular health

is where it needs to be.

Your stamina work with G-forces and zero gravity.

All of those things have to be done,

and it takes a space agent to make sure of it.

[tense music]

- One would imagine traveling to space is demanding,

but sometimes, even a simple commute

requires a little extra effort.

[tense music]

- The Japanese rail network is known around the world

for its superiority and its punctuality.

[tense music]

Shinjuku Station sees 3.6 million people

every single day from that one station.

- That is more in one station

than the entire New York City subway system per day.

This is a very busy place.

[train roaring past]

Shinjuku Station is so busy

that to fill these trains to capacity,

they employ Oshiya, train pushers,

specialized staff there to, not usher,

but physically push people

into overcrowded train cars

to ensure the doors can close

and the train can move on

and another one can come

and the process can repeat every two minutes.

- [Dan] To ensure maximum efficiency,

the oshiya's job is to fill the train to 180% capacity.

That's like putting nine people in a four-door sedan.

- This job is really essential.

If they don't get the people onto the trains in time

and the trains are delayed,

the whole system kind of breaks down

and it's total chaos.

[tense music]

- Unbelievably, the art of train pushing,

it actually has its roots in New York City

when the subway opens in 1904.

[taut energetic music]

- Before automated doors,

there were the equivalent of train pushers.

- Because at the time, the subways are privatized,

there's a financial incentive

to get as many people onto the trains as possible.

So by 1918, you start to see subway pushers

shoving people onto the train

along the very popular new line on 42nd Street.

- [Dan] Due to the forceful nature of the work,

subway attendants earn an unofficial job title.

- The New York Times names

these subway pushers, sardine packers.

By the 1920s, the advent of automatic doors

and automatic turnstiles start to

kind of phase out the need for subway pushers.

But subway pushers still exist today

in countries like Germany and China,

but nobody is as pushy as subway pushers

in Shinjuku Station in Tokyo.

- The job of subway pusher remains highly coveted,

and as long as there are train cars

that need over-stuffing, there's work to be done.

- Ah, the side hustle, a relatively new term,

which basically means picking up

an extra gig or two to supplement income.

There are a multitude of options.

Drive for a ride-share company, deliver food,

or do the one thing most people hate.

[suspenseful music]

- It's 2012 and Robert Samuels is down on his luck.

He has just been let go from his job

at the At&T store on the Upper East Side.

Calculating the thing that we New Yorkers always do

is how much longer can I survive in this city,

he sort of wanders aimlessly

until he comes across the Apple store,

and he sees person after person after person waiting online.

- He notices that the iPhone 5

is about to come out, and something clicks.

- He starts to wonder,

would people be willing to pay someone else

to wait in line for them?

Could he be that person?

- [Dan] With his rent due and expenses mounting,

Robert realizes he just can't stand around

doing nothing, unless he's paid for it.

- Robert posts an ad on Craigslist

offering to wait in line for the new iPhone 5,

and someone takes him up on his offer.

- He ends up waiting 14 hours in line overnight,

and at the last minute, someone comes in

and they trade spots, they get their iPhone, he gets paid.

Robert gets $325 for his efforts

and he creates a company,

the Same Ole Line Dudes.

- We've waited in line for Cronuts, for sample sales,

Saturday Night Live standby lines, concerts,

popular bars, brunches, passports.

I've been in line now 47 hours, 42 minutes.

- It's not just Robert.

He's got a whole cadre of dudes and dudettes

from the Same Ole Line Dudes to wait online for you

for whatever it may be, concert tickets,

technology, brunch appointments,

the best seats on Broadway.

- For 25 bucks an hour,

they will wait through heat waves,

sleet, rain, and even snow.

[tense music]

And Robert is so dedicated to his job

that he even waited in line for Hamilton tickets

for two weeks.

He was paid $8,400.

That's $600 a day, times 14, just to wait in line

for someone else to see Hamilton.

- If I were gonna wait in line for days,

I'd make sure I have the pizza guy on speed dial.

They'll deliver just about anywhere,

including some place completely unexpected.

[taut music]

- In Key Largo, Florida,

there's an amazing little place

called Jules' Undersea Lodge,

and it is, in fact, a hotel room

30 feet down in the water.

[taut music]

It is the world's only underwater hotel

and the only way to reach it is to throw on scuba gear,

swim down the 30 feet

and pop in to this sort of open space

where you'd climb out, take off all your scuba gear,

and then there you are in your lovely hotel room

under the water.

- Your room at Jules' Undersea Lodge

has everything you could want.

It has a great view, books to read,

television with hotel cable, stocked fridge.

- [Dan] You might ask yourself,

does an underwater hotel have room service?

Well, the answer's yes,

but only one man can deliver.

- Rob Doyle is Key Largo's

resident underwater pizza delivery guy.

- The strange job of delivering pizza

to an undersea hotel has some interesting challenges.

- You know, moisture is the enemy of pizza,

so cardboard pizza boxes

just can't be the delivery mechanism.

You've gotta come up with some kind

of waterproof pizza delivery box.

- He places the pizza

into this airtight waterproof case

to keep it warm and dry.

Then he seals it up and dives into the water.

But of course, the case is buoyant

so it wants to float, so he ties on

this 40-pound weight so that it will sink

and he can bring it to the hotel.

- Luckily, no pizzas have been lost at sea,

and there've been no soggy pies that have been delivered.

But sometimes, the toppings can shift a bit on the top.

- Due to how long it takes to put on scuba gear,

there's no 30-minutes- or-less guarantee.

Even still, I think he deserves that 20% tip.

There are many ways to bring home the bacon,

whether it's dining on dog chow, crying on cue,

or staring at the backsides of chickens all day.

Fascinating and amazingly odd,

these jobs are truly "Unbelievable."