Occupations

Just after 9 a.m. Wednesday, the glass doors on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange burst open, and the symphony begins. "How's Cisco?" a trader shouts. "What are you saying on Goldman?" yells another. "Let's go! Let's go!" Feet shuffle, fans whoosh, televisions blare, cameras click, electronic devices chime like slot machines. No one knows what today will bring.

JEREMY White was holding a sign advertising $5 pizza deals at Little Caesars in North Hollywood when two young men stopped their white pickup truck. After noticing his strong arms and athletic frame, they made him an instant offer. "We can pay you $10 an hour. Give us a call," White recalled the men saying.

Most people think of PGA professionals as the golfers with enviable swings, ready smiles and the good fortune to get paid for spending their day on a golf course. But a growing number of pros are leaving the green grass behind and pursuing nontraditional careers with equipment manufacturers, retail chains, finance companies, real estate developers and city governments. Many pros who leave the golf course are seeking higher pay, shorter hours or a better crack at advancement.

Despite his 10-hour workdays, the piles of housing maps, now 2 feet high, inside John Trichak's cubicle continue to grow. Trichak's job is seemingly simple: approve names for new streets in unincorporated Riverside County. But in the fastest-growing county in the United States, it can be a Sisyphean task. Each week Trichak receives up to 50 maps of new housing tracts. Using a red pen, he eliminates street names he can't pronounce or spell easily, and ones that are too common or too long.

Barbara Brown Taylor worked long hours ministering to a large congregation in Atlanta, then took the helm of a small rural parish nearby, even as her role and her soul were, as she puts it, "eating each other alive." After 15 years at the pulpit, the job, which once fulfilled her spiritually and emotionally, had come to leave her feeling frustrated, discouraged and fatigued.

There are plenty of odd jobs in Hollywood, but Rob Richards concedes he has one of the weirdest. As pipe organist at Disney's El Capitan Theatre, the restored 1926 movie palace on Hollywood Boulevard, Richards is an anachronism. "Obviously, this is the most bizarre career choice -- to choose to play an instrument that hit its heyday in the 1920s," Richards says. "Who would have ever thought that in the year 2006 someone could make their living playing a theater organ?"

A Top 10 list of workers by occupation who can't afford California homes was compiled recently by the Rural Community Assistance Corp. Based on income figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and California Assn. of Realtors home prices, the nonprofit ranked occupations that have incomes that make it tough to qualify for the mortgage needed for a median-priced home.

Martina Metzler peers at the piles of paper strips spread across four desks in her office. Seeing two jagged edges that match, her eyes light up and she tapes them together. "Another join, another small success," she says with a wry smile -- even though at least two-thirds of the sheet is still missing. Metzler, 45, is a "puzzler," one of a team of eight government workers that has attempted for the last 14 years to manually restore documents hurriedly shredded by East Germany's secret police, or Stasi, in the dying days of one of the Soviet bloc's most repressive regimes.

Even from across the crowded courtyard at Spago in Beverly Hills, all it takes is the lift of an eyebrow and Oscar Rios is at your side. Orchestrating a team of servers -- back waiter, captain and sommelier -- Rios waits for the right moment to have each course cleared, to have wine glasses refilled and tepid water replaced with cool, fresh glasses. Fish knives are delivered one beat ahead of the line-caught striped sea bass with black truffles.

Even though he's a loving husband, Kendall Gammon occasionally has told his wife to take a hike. But only the length of the hallway. When Gammon was beginning his career as an NFL long snapper, he used to take his work home with him. That required his 5-foot-7, 125-pound wife, Leslie, to stand 15 yards down the corridor of their Pittsburgh apartment building and field footballs rocketing her way. "It was catch it or perish," recalled her husband, who now plays for Kansas City.