Footage of a young cleaning woman who appears to be drinking water straight out of a toilet has sparked a heated debate on Chinese social media this week.

The caretaker of a fertilizer company located in Shandong province, China has put herself at the center of controversy after a video showing her drinking water out of a toilet she had previously cleaned went viral online. The young woman, surnamed Luo, reportedly resorted to the extreme gesture in order to impress her bosses, who can be seen applauding her as she downs a plastic cup of toilet water. Accused of encouraging the employee to humiliate herself, representatives of the company insisted that the caretaker’s gesture was voluntary, adding that she has done drunk toilet water several times over the last couple of years.

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A Chinese steel production company recently made international news headlines for offering 4,116 of its employees brand new cars as bonus for surpassing profit targets for the fifth consecutive year.

On October 1st, Jiangxi West Dajiu Iron & Steel Corporation organized an epic event to celebrate its success and reward employees for contributing to its yearly growth. It was reported that the company had reported increasing profits for the last five years, and management wanted to do something special to thank the staff, so they decided to give each one of them a car. A total of 4,116 new vehicles – 2,933 Jiangling Ford Territory and 1,183 FAW-Volkswagen Magotan – were distributed in batches in the weeks prior to the National Day holiday.

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At just 23-years-old, Dr. Veeragandham Teja had already worked in 16 private hospitals, conducted several medical camps and had volunteered with Bengaluru police and local migrant workers during the pandemic. Not a bad record for any doctor, let alone a 5th grade dropout with no medical education and little training…

Veeragandham Teja had been working as a doctor for over four years when his luck finally came to an end. It was a double whammy that got him in the end: his second wife filed mental and physical harassment against him, and he made the mistake of making a recommendation to police to cancel a person’s rowdy sheet (criminal record), only to then be spotted driving that person’s registered SUV. All it took was a bit of digging and police uncovered a web of lies going back over a decade, false degrees and certificates and several aliases. Their conclusion was that Teja’s career and pretty much all of his life, for that matter, was a fabrication…

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Businesses usually have to pay someone to keep their work spaces clean, but the shops on Sea Street, a popular jewelry hub in Sri Lanka’s capital city, actually require a fee to let people clean their premises.

Hong-Kong based media outlet South China Morning Post recently featured the sad story of a heroin addict from Colombo, in Sri Lanka in a short video documentary that also included a segment on a very peculiar job. Mavin, the 47-year-old protagonist makes a living and sustains his drug addiction by cleaning the bathrooms of jewelry shops on Sea Street, a place he refers to as “the most precious street in Sri Lanka”. The whole street is lined with gold, diamond and jewelry shops, only they don’t pay people like Mavin for cleaning, they actually demand a fee from them…

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In a country that eschews confrontation and frowns upon public display of passion, bold entrepreneurs eager to take up the burden of ending a romantic relationship on a client’s behalf can make a fortune.

The Wakaresaseya, literally “breaker-uppers”, are professional agents that specialize in destroying relationships, be they marriages or affairs, for a fee. After taking on a contract these unlicensed operatives stop at nothing to achieve their goal, which includes extreme measures like entrapment, financial burdening and lying. Wakaresaseya are viewed by some in Japanese society as immoral, but they have been around for decades and their services are more popular than ever.

Wakaresaseya services, many of which are tied to private detective agencies, are often advertised online and cater to both married people seeking a reason to leave their spouse, and married individuals who know about their partner’s infidelity and want to end it without getting involved. Prices reportedly vary from a couple of hundred dollars for simple cases, to upwards of $150,000 for high-profile cases where discretion if of the upmost importance.

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An Indian software engineer was arrested last week after reportedly hacking his former employer and deleting information in the hopes that he would be rehired.

The IT specialist, identified as one Vikesh Sharma, used to work as a senior software engineer in the company until being fired during the the lockdown due to disagreement over his salary. Only instead of moving on and looking for another job, Sharma allegedly tried to get his old job back in a very unusual way. He managed to hack his former employer’s database and delete thousands of patient details, in the hopes that his former boss would contact him to rectify the situation. That didn’t happen…

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Frederic Desnard, who worked as a manager at a Parisian perfumery until 2015, sued his former employer because his job was so boring that it made him depressed and forced him to quit. He recently won the trial and a $45,000 compensation.

We originally featured this bizarre court case back in 2016, when Frederic Desnard made international news headlines for suing French perfumery Interparfum for $400,000 for making him work a boring job that at one point made him suffer an epileptic fit and left him feeling depressed. He also claimed that the company signed him off work for several months, and later used his prolonged absence as an excuse to fire him in 2014. Last week, after four years of litigation, 48-year-old Desnard won his case, and a compensation of $45,000.

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If you’ve ever had to go to work with a splitting headache after an alcohol-fueled long night on the town, you can probably appreciate this company’s policy of giving employees “hangover days” off work to put themselves back together.

Let’s face, we all wish we could call in sick to work after having one, or five, too many drinks the night before, but for most of us that’s not an option. But the same cannot be said for the young people working at The Audit Lab, a digital marketing agency in the UK, where a specific hangover policy allows them to take time off to deal with the nausea, headache, and overall foul mood that hangovers come with. In a nutshell, this intriguing perk lets employees work from home if they are suffering from hangover, and as long as they don’t abuse the policy by taking time off to often, they can even schedule the days off in advance when they know they will end up wasted.

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We all know sitting at a desk for long periods of time has negative effects on our health, but if this life-size model of what an office worker could look like in 20 years is any indication, the future doesn’t look too bright.

Emma, as her creators have named her, doesn’t look so good. She has dry and red eyes from hours staring at a computer screen, a hunched back that makes you think she’s been ringing the bell at a recently burned down French cathedral, excess weight, swollen limbs due to poor circulation, and stress-caused eczema, among other alarming symptoms. Luckily, Emma is just a life-size doll created by a team of researchers led by behavioral futurist William Higham, but the world could be full of Emmas if we don’t do something to change the office environment and culture.

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An anonymous millionaire has expressed his desire to hire someone to try and seduce his future wife-to-be, in an effort to find out if she truly loves him.

HushHush.com, the “world’s leading luxury marketplace” recently went public with one of its regular customer’s unusual request, in an effort to help him find the right candidate. Apparently, the client, a millionaire businessman who prefers to remain anonymous, is looking to hire a “good looking” man to pose as a wealthy man and try to seduce his girlfriend. He’s willing to pay the right candidate £15,000 ($18,000) as well as supply him with the means to create the illusion of affluence – premium property, luxury cars and a big spending budget for the operation.

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A 33-year-old law-school graduate from London decided to start her own her own retail company selling vintage clothes online after struggling to find a job because of her good looks.

Russian-born Irina Kova claims that being attractive has made it harder for her to get a job in London, as women simply don’t trust her or find her intimidating, and men don’t take her seriously. Kova, who used to work in business development for important clients, believes her good looks ruined her career and made it harder to find another serious job, despite having a law-degree and an impressive CV.

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If you love eating and drinking for free and are looking to make some pocket change, there’s a job in China with your name on it. A new type of online service allows people to hire others to eat or drink their favorite treats, either to cure their boredom or satisfy their craving without the calories that usually come with it.

Chinese media recently reported on an increasingly popular service on online commercial platform Taobao that’s as mind-boggling as it is intriguing. People can now go online and hire others to consume certain foods and drinks, and ask them to provide video evidence of them eating or drinking the said treats. Fees usually range between 2 yuan ($0.30) and 9 yuan ($1.35) plus the cost of the food that the client wants consumed. It’s not exactly a get-rich quick kind of job, but there are quite a lot of people willing to do it for the free treats alone.

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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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