LOOKING FOR A CAREER CHANGE? CHECK OUT THESE UNCONVENTIONAL GIGS
BY Susannah Hickling
THE WATERSLIDE TESTER
When the pool where he worked as a lifeguard in Melun, southeast of Paris, was closed during the COVID-19 pandemic, Guillaume Pop took jobs at various other pools that were virtually deserted. At one of them there was a small waterslide, which gave the 22-year-old former competitive swimmer an idea: he would make a TikTok video in which he pretended to be a “professional waterslide tester.”
Shooting down a slide in hard hat and hi-vis jacket or smiling broadly in cool shades and a tiny Speedo to a groovy soundtrack, Pop soon became a social media sensation. He was hired to “test” slides and other facilities at water parks, swimming pools and campsites all over France. Today, he has more than half a million followers on TikTok and his own real-life waterslide-testing business. No longer working as a lifeguard, he travels the country checking the condition of waterslides, trying them out to determine how fun they are and creating amusing videos to attract customers.
“First of all, I check it without water, to make sure it’s in an acceptable state,” explains Pop, who must keep up to date on water-park regulations. If he finds a waterslide needs work—for example, if there are bumpy joints, which can hurt sliders—management will bring in a specialist repairer. “After that, I test it with water,” Pop says, logically.
Then he moves on to the fun, promotional aspect. Sometimes he takes over a leisure park and invites social media influencers to enjoy it too. In 2022, he took 25 influencers to O’Gliss Park, an enormous water park in the Vendée region on the Atlantic coast.
Pop estimates he’s tested around 700 French waterslides and is now eyeing water parks abroad, in countries such as Switzerland, Portugal and Spain, where he has been testing slides during the winter. “It’s the best job in the world,” declares Pop, whose videos have received 80 million views. “I’m not behind a desk. I’m active and outside in the sun. And I have a great rapport with customers. In fact, all the children tell me they want to be a waterslide tester!”.
THE REINDEER HERDER
Finnish Lapland, in the far north of Europe, is home to some 180,000 people—and around 200,000 reindeer. The animals live wild but each one has an owner, identified by a tag on its ear. Anne Ollila, one of 4,000 such owners, works in the Finnish part of this harsh but beauti
