Late-Night Career Advice: 6 Awesome Jobs (including Professional Lap Dance Researcher)

Pic via Premiumkopi/flickr

Good evening, procrastinators. If you're in college, there's a pretty good chance small talk about your decided major and future career plans came up over Thanksgiving dinner. If you're out of college and still haven't landed a job or once had one and are now unemployed along with 10.2% of America, perhaps this conversation was especially grueling. If you graduated with an ambiguous degree, loathe the idea of grad school, and vehemently abhor the idea of spending the hours of 9 to 5 in a corporate cubicle, here are six creative careers and entrepreneurial undertakings worth considering.

1. Lap Dance Researcher

Last week, the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom posted this advertisement:

At a posted salary of 31,513 pounds a year, that's roughly $52,000 a year for a job that involves collecting qualitative and quantitative data by interviewing some 300 erotic dancers. Experience required. Go get 'em, boys.

2. Golf Ball Scuba Diver

If you coughed up the cash to learn how to scuba dive on a recent Spring Break in the Caribbean, put your certification to work. Entrepreneurial Scuba divers in Florida can make six figures a year by plucking an estimated 3,000 balls in a day from golf course water hazards. According to a 2004 article in Travel Golf, one to three million golf balls a year end up in golf course ponds and lakes in the United States. If you don't mind the aquatic company of alligators, poisonous snakes, and snapping turtles, the rewards may outweigh the risks. After all, one man's shank and mulligan is another man's "white gold."

3. Furniture Tester

Pic via dcvision2006/flickr

After spending $150,000 on an undergraduate education, the last thing you're folks are going to want to hear is "I want to be a couch potato"... unless you're getting paid for it. After all, someone has to rigorously test the reclining ability and ass-cheek softness of La-Z Boys before they hit the showroom. According to an Associated Content description of the job, a professional furniture tester must "sit in various sorts of rocking chairs, couches, love seats, and recliners; move them back and forth, wiggle around, rock them, lean back, lean forward, and asses your level of comfort" -- some 200 times a day.

4. Segway Guide

Segway tours are popular in pretty much every major tourist destination, thus every market needs Segway riding guides with an amicable personality, public speaking abilities, and a somewhat decent sense of balance. Maybe it's just what your hometown needs to be put on the state visitor and convention bureau map.

5. Fortune Cookie Writer

If your uncanny ability to drop cryptic one-liners while trying to pick up women at the bar never gets you laid, then you're perfect for a gig writing fortunes for fortune cookies. Back in the 1980s, Wonton Foods, a Long Island City based producer of some 4 million fortune cookies a day, hired Donald Lau -- a Columbia grad -- to update the company's dated English language database of fortunes, according to a 2005 profile in the New Yorker. He was hired because "his English was the best in the group." Perks for frustrated writers include taking comfort in knowing their miniature missives are read in some 40,000 Chinese restaurants across the country. Think it sounds fun? One of the hazards of a job that involves writing 10-word sentences, according to the New Yorker, is writer's block.

6. Ski Mountain Map Illustrator

If you've always wanted to live the dream in a ski town but refuse to wait tables and suck at teaching people to ski, use your artistic prowess to illustrate ski slopes like James Niehues, a painter/cartographer who lives in Loveland, Colorado. According to Fortune Magazine, Niehues does about 12 to 20 illustrations for ski resort maps a year, including an estimated 75% of the large resorts. He gets to fly over resorts, bases his illustrations on topographic maps, and charges a commission fee based on the size of the ski area.