If the idea of getting paid a decent monthly wage to do nothing, or whatever you want, for the rest of your life sounds appealing, you may be interested in this Swedish experimental art project that plans to hire a very lucky person for a responsibility-free job with just one very simple requirement.

This government-funded conceptual art project/ideal employment opportunity in Gothenburg, Sweden will select one very lucky applicant to show up at a train station currently under construction in the city every day and punch a time clock. This will turn on a set of fluorescent lights over the boarding platform to let everyone know that the useless employee showed up at work that day. After that, the person is free to do anything they want, or nothing at all, just as long as they return to the station to clock out and turn off the lights when their shift is over. They don’t have to hang around the train station during working hours, and they can quit or be replaced by someone else anytime they want. As long as they don’t get another job, the position is guaranteed for the rest of their lives.

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We all make wrong decisions from time to time, but one woman in the UK feels like she’s made so many of them over the last year that she now wants to pay an “enlightened individual” $2,600 to make decisions on her behalf for a month.

After reportedly losing money by trusting a friend, becoming stranded and penniless in a foreign country, getting mugged and being in a toxic romantic relationship, all in the last twelve months, an anonymous woman from Bristol, in the UK, wants to hire a spiritual guide or clairvoyant to help her make decisions for a month and get her life back on track. She’s willing to pay the successful candidate a fee of £2,000 ($2,600).

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Long haul truck driving is generally seen as a man’s job, but Rino Sasaki, a young female truck driver from Japan, is challenging this stereotype and conquering social media in the process.

Rino Sasaki grew up in Kochi Prefecture as the daughter of a long haul truck driver, but never really considered the idea of becoming one herself until seven years ago, when her father became sick. He continued working, but she couldn’t stand the thought of her father all alone on the road, thousands of miles away from home, with no one to care for him. So 21-year-old Rino, who worked as a traditional dance teacher at the time, got a truck driving license and decided to join her father on his long haul trips. She tried teaching her dance classes as well, but soon learned that driving thousands of miles around the country meant that she might not always be back home on schedule, so she eventually abandoned her old career and became a full-time truck driver.

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The owner of a clothing store in the UK is taking an unconventional approach to preventing theft. The woman, who preferred to remain anonymous, wants to hire skilled thieves to come in and steal from her store and then tell her how they did it, so she can prevent it from happening again.

The witty entrepreneur posted a job offer on Bark.com, which quickly went viral, offering thieves £50 ($64) an hour to come in and try to steal from her store, plus the chance to keep three of the things they manage to steal. Candidates would need to visit her store on a number of occasions over several weeks and then produce a report of all the things they stole and how they did it. Realizing that her job may come off as strange, the woman explained that she is simply taking a different approach to theft prevention after years of suffering significant loses during the holiday season.

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Japan has a culture of long working hours, but even in this generally tough and stressful working environment some companies stand out because of the complete disregard for their employees’ well-being. They are known as “black companies” and anyone who has ever wanted to experience what working for such organizations is like, without actually getting a job at one, can find out by applying for a special event called “The Black Holiday”.

It’s hard to imagine anyone ever wanting to experience what it’s like for a ‘black company’ is like, but especially so on Friday, November 23, when Japan celebrates Labor Thanksgiving Day. It’s a national holiday and a rare opportunity to enjoy a long weekend free of work-related stress. But I guess that’s exactly why the organizers of The Black Holiday chose this date for their special event. What better way to emphasize just how bad working for a black company can be then having you do it on your day off, right?

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Japan has some of the world’s longest working hours, but some companies are starting to realize that their workers also need to sleep in order to be productive. One such company is actually encouraging employees to sleep more by rewarding them with points that can be spent at cafes and cafeterias.

CRAZY, a Tokyo-based wedding planning company, recently announced the implementation of a “sleep remuneration system” to encourage its workforce to get more sleep. It has teamed up with Airweave, a startup specializing in sleep analysis technology and will be monitoring its employees sleep patterns. Workers who install the Sleep Analysis app on their smartphones and share their data with the company are eligible to receive points according to how many hours of sleep they get ever night. CRAZY hopes that the new reward system will improve the lifestyle habits and overall health of its employees, as well as boost their productivity.

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For some reason, many Japanese people find it incredibly difficult to quit their job and prefer paying a third party hundreds of dollars to quit on their behalf rather than have to face their boss and co-workers and handing in their resignation personally.

Senshi S LLC is a Tokyo-based startup founded by childhood friends Toshiyuki Niino and Yuichiro Okazaki last year. It operates ‘Exit’ a unique service that basically handles job resignations on behalf od clients, for a fee. Rather, than having to tell their bosses that they can’t or don’t want to work for them anymore, Exit clients prefer to pay between 40,000 yen ($350) and 50,000 yen ($450) to have someone else do it for them. Exit’s founders declared themselves surprised that so many people find quitting their jobs so stressful, but they have been more than happy to help hundreds of them get through this process.

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As human beings, one of the things we often overlook in our daily lives is physical touch; without it, we can fall into depression and a number of other mental health problems. To fulfill this need, a mother of 3 from Australia’s Gold Coast has become a “cuddle therapist”, and currently makes around $58,000 a year hugging people.

Jessica O’Neill claims that her hugs can help those who are suffering from loneliness, depression, or low self confidence. She didn’t get into this strange career overnight. Originally, Jessica was a massage therapist and counselor, quite ordinary professions. She noticed that when she hugged her clients during sessions, they dropped their guards and opened up to her more.

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Some people find it hard to cry when their loved-ones’ die, but wailing and mourning are a big part of funerals in the African country of Ghana, as it is indicative of the deceased’ social standing or how beloved they were by their family and community. So it’s no wonder that some Ghanaians are willing to pay professional mourners to cry on their behalf.

Ami Dokli is the leader of one of the several groups of professional mourners in Ghana. In a recent interview with BBC Africa, she said that some people cannot cry at their relatives’ funerals, so they rely on her and her team to do the wailing. Dokli and the other women in her team are all widows who, after their husbands died, decided to come together to help others give their loved-ones a proper send-off to the afterlife. But crying for strangers is not the easiest thing in the world, so professional mourners charge a fee for their services, the size of which is in direct relation to the size of the funeral. If it’s a big funeral, their tears cost more.

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A restaurant in Shanghai, China, recently made headlines for employing two young crayfish peelers who do the dirty work right at the customers’ tables, while they check social media or play mobile video games.

Wouldn’t it be nice if someone could handle those nasty crayfish shells and then just hand you the succulent flesh?Well, at one particular restaurant in Shanghai’s Huangpu district, you can actually request a crayfish peeler that will be glad to take care of the dirty work while you watch or chat with your friends or play on your smartphone. Crayfish are really popular in China these days, so the two young peelers usually handle around 100 crustaceans every day, which earns them a nice monthly salary of over 10,000 yuan ($1,500).

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A 64-year-old employee of the waterworks bureau in the Japanese city of Kobe was recently fined and reprimanded by his superiors for going on his lunch break three minutes early, on more than one occasion.

The lunch break at the Kobe waterworks bureau starts at 12 pm sharp and lasts until 1 pm. However, an employee looking for “a change of pace” decided to leave his desk a few minutes early to go get himself a bento box from a nearby restaurant. Unfortunately for him, a senior colleague looking out the window from his office, saw the unnamed offender heading to the restaurant on one of his unsanctioned escapades, and reported him to management. An investigation revealed that the man had started his lunch break three minutes early a total of 26 times in the last 7 months, which they apparently decided was a huge deal.

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After being served an official notice asking why he had only been present at work 16 times in the last 8 months, an engineer from the Indian state of Gujarat replied that he was the 10th incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu, and had been too busy with divine work to focus on his job.

Rameshchandra Fefar, an engineer at Gujarat government’s Sardar Sarovar Punarvasvat Agency (SSPA), claims he first got an indication of his “divine greatness” in August of 1999, from the newspaper horoscope. He felt his body being detached from his being and getting filled with ‘divya anand’ (divine happiness), but didn’t know exactly what had happened until his wife read the daily horoscope. It mentioned that he would become a leader of men and be supremely intelligent.

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A Malaysian man is protesting what he claims was an unjust termination from oil giant Chevron Malaysia Limited (Caltex) by supergluing his hand to their headquarters floor.

Fadzilah Abdul Hamid worked as a Caltex petrol station operator for the past 17 years at two sites in Kelana Jaya and Kampung Subang, Selangor, until being served an unexpected notice in May ordering him to vacate both locations within 30 days. The letter claimed that his termination was due to unpaid charges outlined on a circular regarding the Implementation of Self-Service at Petrol Stations.

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Some people can barely make a living working 9-to-5 jobs, but that’s definitely not the case of Jessica Gould, a 32-year-old woman from a small town in Ontario, Canada, who makes upwards of $70,000 by taking photos of her feet in various positions and posting them on Instagram.

Gould discovered the lucrative albeit unusual source of income completely by accident. While casually searching for a hobby to fill her free time, the young Canadian came across a local job ad for female foot fetish models. She scoffed at the idea that anyone would be interested in her feet, but some part of her was curious and intrigued by the idea. So she had some professional photos of her feet taken and started posting them under the name that became her alter ego, Scarlet Vixxen. It didn’t take long for her to realize that she had accidentally discovered a virtual gold mine.

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Aílton Manuel da Silva is not your usual waiter. He dresses as one, carries himself as one and even sports a tray full of cold drinks and snacks, but instead of a restaurant or a cafe, he works in the streets, braving the hot sun and incoming traffic to provide for his family. He is the “traffic waiter” of Recife, and probably the world’s most elegant street vendor.

Every morning at 5 a.m., 43-year-old Aílton Manuel da Silva wakes up, puts on his creased pants, white shirt, bow tie and lacquered shoes and leaves for work. He arrives at the busy intersection of Avenida Almirante Dias Fernandes and Rua Emiliano Ribeiro at around 5:30 and gets ready for a long day of waiting through traffic. He prepares his bottles of cold water, cans of soda and snacks like popcorn and chips, sets them neatly on his metal tray, and at 7 in the morning he steps into traffic to offer motorists his assortment of refreshments.

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