Weird jobs: professional sex toy tester earns £15k

Cara Houiellebecq has one of the oddest jobs in the UK. As an erotic blogger she is sent sex toys to be tested and reviewed on her blog. She's paid for every review, and says she earns £15,000 a year - working seven hours a week as a sex toy tester.

Houiellebecq, a 33-year-old mother of two from Lincoln, had previously worked for a sex toy company. She told the Daily Mirror she started the blog for fun, and gradually built a large audience. She was approached by one manufacturer to work on a commercial basis, and other deals followed suit. According to the Daily Mail, she added that she preferred it to her old job working in a bank - cue jokes about job satisfaction.

Weird jobs
Testing sex toys may strike some people as an interesting job, but there are all sorts of things that require testing, and although it's a tough job, someone somewhere has to taste crisps hot off the production line, sample ice cream to check the flavours in each shift, and taste chocolates (Godiva has a number of people in this role and even sends them to 'chocolate school' in order to qualify).

Tragically one chocolate taster had to give up his job in 2012 - two years after getting the gig writing chocolate reviews in an industry journal. He was forced to quit after gaining two stone and raising his cholesterol level dangerously high.

And beyond the world of testing, there are yet more unusual roles. In June our trawl of unusual jobs revealed there were people working as zombies, fake bank robbers and worm farmers - among our list of the ten most unusual occupations.

There are also the job titles which sound a great deal more fun than they actually are - like a cheese sprayer (who sprays cheese flavouring onto snacks) and a banana gasser (who gasses bananas after shipping in order to encourage them to ripen). There's even one company who has a Director of First Impressions - which it turns out is just a receptionist.

And in May we reported that a company was advertising for a Fort Ruler - to run No Man's Land Fort in the Solent. Unfortunately this doesn't come with ultimate power and endless rewards. It's essentially a luxury hotel manager... which sounds a great deal less fun.%VIRTUAL-SkimlinksPromo%