Labors of Love: 5 Odd Jobs That Beat the Grind
By Carl Kozlowski

Think your job is boring? It probably is. After all, you likely don't have to save the planet from incoming asteroids every day, or deal with requests to pierce people in dozens of imaginative and highly disturbing places. And you probably aren't shaking your thing as a belly dancer in the middle of lunch-hour restaurant crowds.

But if you log a typical workweek in America, you probably spend more time at the salt mine than with the people you love; so you'd better cultivate some affection for the daily grind. Here are five jobs that maybe even you could learn to love:

Hard-rock Reporter: NASA style

Don Yeomans has spent the past six years as a desk jockey, staring at a computer screen and monitoring complex data for his employer. The difference from most of us is that his employer is NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Yeomans is the manager of the space agency's Near Earth Object program.

That means he's in charge of the Solar System Dynamics Group, a staff whose duty is to make predictions about future near-earth approaches by 300,000 space-based objects -- including asteroids, comets, satellites and even other planets. Earlier crashes of this magnitude were believed to have led to the extinction of the dinosaurs, so one can only imagine what an intergalactic mishap would do to the human race.

"On a daily basis, we have a short list of objects for which we cannot rule out a near-earth impact. These are newly discovered objects, so their orbits are not well-known," explains Yeomans.

Working from "high-end desktop computers," Yeomans and his staff use a JPL-designed program called Sentry to do most of their tracking. Among the fun facts he shares are that 100 tons of little meteors hit the earth every day, basketball-size objects hit the planet twice a day, and six "Volkswagen-size objects" enter the earth's atmosphere every few weeks.

"They enter earth's atmosphere but don't make it through, because they're broken up and disintegrate much like smaller meteors. It's only when objects get to 30-meters-or-greater in size that they start to cause trouble, and they become a global rather than regional problem when they're at 1 kilometer or greater," says Yeomans. "We had an object, 400-meters in size, that we were a little worried about over the Christmas holidays, but even then it wouldn't hit us until 2029, so we do have time to prepare."

But prepare to do what? Ship Bruce Willis or Robert Duvall into space to save everyone, God bless us all?!

"You could send Robert Duvall into space," he chuckles, referring to the plot of Deep Impact, in which a Duvall-led team of astronauts had to save the world from a giant incoming asteroid. "You can use the team to slow the incoming object down or push it into traveling the [sun's orbit] for 20 years so that the change will be enough to save us later.

"You can also use a giant focusing mirror to reflect sunlight on the surface of the asteroid."

About his job, he says, "Overall, my family and friends think it's cool that I do this, and I look forward to it everyday."

Belly Dancing for Burgers

When Harry Hindoyan took over Pasadena, CA's Burger Continental restaurant in 1971, he knew he "had to do something revolutionary and different." Part of that meant expanding the menu to include his much-loved Mediterranean cuisine.

But he brought in another part of his Lebanese culture: belly dancing. His goal was to hire a team of beautiful women to practice the ancient dance form for customers as they noshed on his flavorful food. The combination of tasty and visual delights paid off almost immediately.

"The minute that people hear or see Burger Continental, they go, 'Oh, belly dancing!'" says Hindoyan.

Kim Mischook is one of Hindoyan's dancers, having shimmied and shaken herself for diners' enjoyment throughout the past 15 years. The Pasadena native had been dancing ballet with the Pasadena Dance Theater and going out for auditions as a jazz dancer, but she had always been intrigued by the exotic music and costumes that went with belly dancing and found that it was the best field in which to earn a living as a dancer.

"People don't realize how hard it is. I teach classes and women are surprised it's really hard to learn, takes years," says Mischook. "Most people take the class thinking it's to be sexy, but it's really an art form and the serious dancers think about it that way rather than as a means of being sexy."

Despite her protests that the dance is more arty than sensual, Mischook met her husband of 28 years while strutting her stuff.

"He was in the audience and we made eye contact, and the rest is history," she recalls. "That was unusual. I don't usually go out with customers. Well, definitely not now! But not that often in the past."

Among her most unusual memories are the occasions when a group dance have led to Janet Jackson-style "wardrobe malfunctions" and the night she wound up invited to dance at a Hollywood party -- only to learn that the notorious R&B singer Rick James was the host.

"It was a wild party for Rick James. I danced into the room and found people without their clothes on, so I decided to dance right back out," she assures. "People don't get fresh with us, they're actually afraid of us. They act big when they're far away from you, but up close they get a little intimidated."

Now that she's mastered the art of the dance, Mischook teaches it to others in six class sessions a week, built around her Burger Continental schedule.

"I think that women really enjoy doing something so feminine and they say it's something they fall in love with. And it's interesting that such a sensuous dance comes from a region [the Middle East] that doesn't approve of anything," she says. "It's an ancient dance form, but because it recently came under fire from fundamentalist movements there, dancers are more afraid to perform and people aren't hiring as much there. In U.S. and Europe, the dancers are really keeping it alive."