My answer to the Askville question "What is the most bizarre job you have ever had?". Long-time readers here have read all or most of this before, of course.
Given the subject matter, I'm not sure this answer will be allowed to stay up!
Working for a porn company I was quite the prude when I was growing up. I liked girls - very much indeed - but any public display of romance or sexuality embarrassed me terribly (although I must admit that there was also a terrible fascination in it, too). I’d close or cover my eyes when people kissed on TV or in the movies, for example.
Blame it on natural shyness and an upbringing that could be considered abusive, in some ways. In any case, I even managed to get through college without really dating.
Right after college, I planned to live with my parents in Connecticut for six months. I’d do temp work and save up my money so that I could move to the city of Boston, which I’ve always loved. The economy wasn’t too bad at the time, so I signed up with a temp agency and was given my first assignment right away: a publishing company in a small city nearby. I’d been interested in literature and publishing from a very young age, so I was quite excited.
I was also nervous; I’d worked through much of high school, but a new job is always a frightening experience. Since I wasn’t exactly sure where the job was, my whole family drove over to find the building on the day before I was to start work.
It was in a recently-gentrified district of an old seaport city. Lots of brick and new old-fashioned-looking iron lampposts. Really quite a pretty area, and only about a twenty-minute drive from my home.
We found the building rather easily. The odd thing was that there wasn’t any sign on the building, apart from the street number. And there weren’t any windows on the ground floor or second floor. But there were some large windows on the third, top floor.
We were all wondering why there were no windows or signs. "It’s a porn company!" I said, joking.
But it was no joke when I arrived for work the next day. Yes, it was a porn and adult-products company. My job was data entry; I took letters and orders from customers, and entered their names and addresses into the company mailing list. My co-workers were almost all middle-aged black women, who were quite hilarious. The bosses (who occasionally came down from the third floor to amuse us) were all bright, funny young Brits. I remember one of them had a huge penis-shaped water pistol which he sometimes loaded with the company’s "spurious" Spanish Fly juice. Everyone would duck when he waved that thing around. But I never got sprayed.
Another one once used one of the inflatable dolls - a "Heavenly Angel with optional heat, vibration, and tape-cassette speaking module" (this counted as high tech at the time, in the late 80s) - as a puppet, and cracked everybody up. The thing looked like a pink Barbie-doll princess Halloween mask glued to a roughly girl-shaped pink vinyl lifeboat. My understanding is that the technology has improved a lot since then.
It was all quite a shock, of course, but I soon found that I was enjoying myself. The work itself was mindless, but went quickly enough; the pay was good; my co-workers and bosses were all funny, genial people; and it certainly was an interesting experience.
It helped that there was a great little lunch counter on the same block, and an absolutely wonderful Victorian-style used book shop across the street. And the shop had a friendly cat, too! That was my idea of heaven. 
There were quite a few odd and amusing events on the job. The police came in for inspections, a few times; they were quite professional about it, just looked around for a while and then left. I’ve never worked anywhere else where regular police inspections were a part of the job, though.
Employees who had to deal with the public in any way (on the phone, for example) all had made-up porn names. They used to laugh themselves silly over it. "John Steele". "Candi Boxxx". I was always a little disappointed that I never got to make up a name for myself, but I never dealt with the public.
The letters themselves were a revelation to my prudish young mind. Yes, of course I read them; I’m a very fast reader, and who could resist reading mail sent to a porn company? Some letters were addressed to the company’s spokesmodel at the time, Seka. One farm boy from Dakota asked about a contest the company was running at the time; if he won it, would part of his prize be to take Miss Seka out on a date? He ventured to guess that she looked like a "real good milker". Apparently he worked with Holsteins a lot.
One woman wrote and asked to have a custom-made vibrator built for her. She gave her specifications; I did a quick calculation and realized that she was asking for something built to the dimensions of a three-liter soda bottle! She also expressed an interest in acting.
An angry customer wrote asking for a refund. He’d bought "spurious Spanish Fly sugar" and was angry that it hadn’t worked. You’d have thought that the word "spurious" (which was included in the name of all products of that type that the company sold) would have been a giveaway to him that it wasn’t supposed to work. But I guess he thought that "spurious" was a Spanish word that meant "extra powerful", or something. 
One customer sent a rather sad note along with a product return. He was returning an Arab Strap (if you don’t know what it is, don’t ask); in his letter, he said "please do not sell this to anyone else, as I have used it and I have AIDS." One of the area managers used a pair of tongs to take the whole thing (including the envelope) off to be destroyed. This was the late 80s, after all, and AIDS was still new and mysterious. Apparently those tongs weren’t there by coincidence; some angry customers mailed in all sorts of bizarre stuff, including plastic bags full of feces. Fortunately I never ran into anything like that.
Another angry person sent a piece of paper covered in cut-out pictures of penises, with the crudely scrawled demand that the reader should "stick this in you @ss!!!" (sic). Oddly enough they also scrawled a bunch of crosses at the bottom of the letter.
Of course we received a few angry letters from fundamentalist Christians. I must admit that I wondered how they’d gotten the address. 
But you know, most of the letters were actually...well, "nice" doesn’t seem like the right word for it. But I’d started the job thinking that anyone who bought porn or adult products must be a disgusting pig, morally repulsive. Reading their letters, though, I saw that they were just people - some of them not too bright, admittedly, but for the most part they seemed rather friendly and well-intentioned. They had needs, but that didn’t make them bad.
Once I’d seen inside their lives a bit by reading their letters, I found I couldn’t despise them. I even felt a sort of amused affection for them. And to be honest, I had to admit that I shared many of the same needs that they wrote about. Who isn’t interested in sex, after all?
After about six months I’d saved up a good chunk of money, so I gave notice and took off for Boston. I had more weird jobs there; I temped for a union that went on strike against itself, for example. I spent quite a while doing temp work in DSS departments in the region, and saw some strange and tragic stories of families and lives gone terribly wrong. And I spent eight horrible years working for a venture-capital law firm - I have plenty of stories about that hellish place.
I seem to be a magnet for strangeness. Even before college, I’d had some strange jobs; for example, I spent one day doing a delivery job, and quit when I discovered that I’d been going through an area where people like me were sometimes stopped, pulled out of their cars, and discovered in chunks throughout the area for months afterwards. I worked in a Burger King (and I’ll never eat there again), where the manager rewarded his workers by pulling up a van with a hooker in it at lunchtime; boy, did I have to talk fast to get out of that one!
But for the past ten years I’ve worked at a large non-profit company with a wonderfully calm and sane corporate culture (well, compared to the other places I’ve worked, anyway). I overcame my shyness, got married, and we have a wonderful little red-headed boy.
With any luck, my bizarre-job days are over forever. 
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