Our love of cheese here at Bustle has been well-documented — but even though we’re all happily employed putting words on the Internet for a living, I think I just found the perfect backup career for all of us if we ever need it: Professional cheese babysitter. You heard me. It’s a real job that actually exists, as well as the best job title I have ever encountered (sorry, “humorous illustrator.” You’ve been ousted). Who wouldn’t want to introduce themselves to people they just met as a professional cheese babysitter?
OK, so technically that’s not the position’s actual title; it’s “cheese grader,” and it usually comes with varying levels of qualifying descriptors. Craig Gile, for instance, is a senior grader at Cabot Creamery. According to WCAX, Gile has been grading cheeses for eight years, making sure each block put out by the creamery passes muster. Gile, who has a degree in psychology (proof you don’t have to go into the field you studied in school), seems to have coined the phrase “professional cheese babysitter”; he told WCAX’s Jennifer Costa, “Sometimes you do have stubborn cheeses. I usually refer to my job as babysitting cheese. I do really think of them as having their own personalities.” I’m not sure which part of that sound byte is the most magical: That he thinks of each cheese as having its own personality, the whole babysitting thing we’ve already gone over, or the idea of a cheese being “stubborn.”
Gile then proceeded to walk Costa through the cheese-testing process; I’ll point you on over to WCAX for the finer points. But after reading the piece, I couldn’t help but think: What other “babysitting” jobs for unconventional things might exist? Here’s what I came up with — and even if none of them actually exist yet, obviously we need to start making them a reality ASAP.
1. Chocolate Babysitter
If cheese-making requires constant supervision, fine chocolate should too, right?
2. Hedgehog Babysitter
Maybe that’s just what being a hedgehog owner is. Minus the paycheck, of course.
3. Pizza Babysitter
Sometimes I wonder what the “quality check” section on the Domino’s pizza tracker actually means. What does it entail? How do you check the quality of a pizza without actually eating the thing? Who’s in charge of it? Inquiring minds want to know!
4. Cronut Babysitter
Baking these suckers is a lengthy, multi-day process, so someone’s got to keep an eye on it. Just to make sure it doesn’t get any… ideas.
5. Surge Babysitter
I like to think that Amazon had someone sitting in the warehouse, watching their limited supply of Surge when it was re-released, ensuring that none of the cases would somehow “walk off on their own.”
6. Batman Babysitter
Alfred? Definitely the Batsitter.
7. Pumpkin Spice Babysitter
Of course the world’s supply of pumpkin spice requires careful supervision.
Images: ulterior epicure/Flickr; Giphy (6); Gif Soup
