5 Badass Versions Of Otherwise Mundane Jobs
by Lydia Bugg
Unless your last name is Warbucks, you’ve probably had a crappy job at some point in your life. Everybody has to do something to afford the food, shelter, and ninja stars we need to survive. A Modern Rogue doesn’t just accept the fate of being trapped in a humdrum job, though. They find a way to make even the most mundane, day-to-day tasks exciting.
Cutting Hair With Instruments Of Death
Russian hairstylist Daniil Istomin is a hairstylist with the aesthetic of an amateur German horror movie director. While most people enjoy a nice comfortable salon with soft lighting and even softer rock music providing a peaceful soundtrack, Istomin goes for a decidedly different vibe. His client lays her head down on a cloth-covered block of wood, and Istomin hacks away at it, frantically, with an ax.
It’s not a gentle hacking, either. It looks like this lady's hair murdered his family and he’s taking his revenge. Istomin claims his ax cutting method is much faster than cutting hair with scissors because “with one stroke you can cut as much as ten scissor strokes.” So if your hair ever suddenly becomes dangerous and you need to get rid of it as quickly as possible, call Daniil Istomin.
Istomin isn’t the only person to use extreme methods to cut hair though. In Italy and India, there are barbers who cut hair with fire. It looks just as horrifying as it sounds but if you’re one of the brave people willing to let someone casually set your head on fire for beauty, the benefit is supposedly thicker, stronger, hair.
Spanish hairstylist Alberto Olmedo also advocates the hair burning method, but since that’s a little bit risky, sometimes he just uses samurai swords. His reasoning behind the unusual cutting method is that it allows him to cut both sides of the hair at the same time, which he says is the only way to make sure it’s perfectly even.
Delivering Sandwiches By Parachute
Delivering food is one of the most dreaded jobs out there. Pay is low and the ground-level skill requirements mean you can be replaced on a dime. Plus people run out of money and have to find "some other way" to pay for their pizza way less often than you would think. Jafflechutes takes the monotony out of food delivery by floating their sandwiches to people via handmade parachutes.
The pop-up restaurant started in Melbourne and has since expanded to traveling across the globe, including a stop in New York City. Since they don’t have a fixed location, they let their customers know via social media where they will be launching sandwiches at them.
Customers order via the Jaffelchutes website, and choose what time they want to attempt to catch their sandwich. At the designated time, they stand on an X and watch as it descends majestically from the heavens. Each sandwich is wrapped in foil and delivered in a brown paper bag with the customer's name on it.
If you’re wondering what a “jaffle” is, it’s essentially the Australian version of a grilled cheese sandwich but with a tighter seal on the bread all the way around the crust. Jaffelchutes change up the ingredients a little each time they do a pop-up. They’re usually pretty simple, and they only cost around five to six dollars each. Most of the overhead cost of the sandwich is actually the hardware for the delivery system.
Designing Clothes For Dead Bodies
I assume the worst part of being a clothing designer would be trying to design for picky clients. But Australian designer Pia Interlandi’s clients aren’t picky at all, because they’re super dead.
When Interlandi’s grandfather died, she decided it was strange that there isn’t traditional funeral clothing in modern society. Many important life events, like christenings and graduations, are marked with important garments, and wedding dresses can take months of detailed design. But most people don’t even pick the outfit they’re buried in.
Does this blouse match my cold, dead eyes?
Traditionally people are buried in their nicest suit or dress, but that’s pretty silly when you think about it. Does the afterlife begin with a lengthy interview process? Or a cocktail party?
A corpse's clothing doesn’t need to be durable; it’s only going to be worn once. Dead people don’t need buttons or zippers that just make the body more difficult to dress. Interlandi’s designs are secured with loose ties so they are easy to put on, and they’re also made of natural fibers that will decompose with the body.
The clothing line in called Garments For The Grave, and it’s available by custom commissions from the designer. So, if you need a break from planning the elaborate scavenger hunt that will determine who inherits your estate, you can start planning what you’ll wear to your funeral today.
Serving Food At 180 Feet In The Air
Making money in a "server" job all lies in the location. But sometimes, those locations can be a bit much. For instance, imagine if your job was to refill Dr. Peppers while also trying not to plummet to your death. Dinner In The Sky hoists their customers 180 feet into the air to defy God by horking down steaks right in His face.
Suck it, MORTALS!
Customers are harnessed into their seats, and the entire restaurant's staff are all raised into the air for an hour-long, three course meal, plus dessert. Sometimes they even pull up a separate platform that hosts a band, because if the WWE has taught the world anything, it's that gimmicks put butts in seats.
The wait staff isn’t harnessed to a chair like the diners. Their harness is designed to allow them to move around the center of the table where the chefs cook so they can reach all of the guests. Dropping a fork here is a way bigger deal than in a regular restaurant. The restaurant is designed to be mobile and has been set up in London, France and Las Vegas, the underpants of America.
Fire Breathing Bartenders
Bartending is a noble profession, often featured on The Modern Rogue. Our respect for the profession is why we do videos that teach you how to make a Blood and Sand, or a Blazing Saddles, or The Perfect Manhattan. It was hard for us to imagine making this job any cooler ... until we saw a video of Australia’s Flair Demons:
Flair bartending has been around since before Tom Cruise made it look cool in the movie Cocktail, but no one does it quite like the Flair Demons. They’re a traveling group of flair bartenders who are also kind of performance artists. They combine flair bartending with tricks like juggling flaming bottles and breathing freakin' fire.
Leave it to Australians to take something relatively harmless and make it extremely dangerous. Injuries incurred by group members include smashing a bottle into their head and inhaling fire. We don’t know about you, but if someone tells us they inhaled fire and lived to tell the tale we’re giving them at least a 20% tip.
The Flair Demons perform at corporate events and bachelor/bachelorette parties, teach classes in flair bartending and compete in bartending shows. They’ve even been featured on Australia’s Got Talent. And judging by the amount of entries in this article that are from Australia, I’m assuming that must be a show completely comprised of people delivering the mail with a T-shirt cannon and mowing their grass with genetically modified dinosaurs.