People Are Sharing The Wildest Stories From Working For The Rich And Famous

I’ve had quite a few different jobs over the years, but one thing I’ve never done is work for someone super rich and/or famous.

I’m curious about what it’s like though, so I asked the BuzzFeed Community for their wildest working-for-the-rich-and-famous stories.

It became clear pretty quickly that while money and fame don’t necessarily make people act irrationally, it certainly didn’t help in the case of these 15 people:

1. “I worked taking care of an 18-year-old cat of a deceased wealthy actress. The cat had a trust fund, a lawyer, and paid the rent.”

“A vet would come to the house each week to give her treatments including neuromuscular lasers, herbal massage, and something I called ‘the shock box’ for her hips. During shock box ‘treatment,’ the vet would run an electrical current from the box, through the cat, and then through me (I would have to act at the grounding point for the current). This means I had to hold the front of the cat (with the teeth and claws), but if anyone moved we all got a painful SHOCK, which also meant I got super bit and scratched. It was so bizarre and traumatizing that I set up a hidden camera whenever the vet came over to show this crazy treatment to my friends, but the vet never did it again. The things I’ll do for free rent apparently include being electrocuted through an old cat.” —-tessaoiihouse

2. “I worked in the accounting department for a well-known alcohol company owned by a celebrity. When processing expenses for sales staff, we had a special account code to use just for strippers and lap dances.”

“There was a lot.” —karlie99

3. “My mom worked as a house cleaner for this really rich family back in 2007. The mother was a TV and movie producer for a couple of well-known shows/movies around that time. On my mom’s first day working for them, the mother was showing her how she liked her laundry done and insisted all of her dirty underwear be thrown away instead of washed.”

“My mom reconfirmed with her a few times to make sure that she understood her correctly. She only wore a pair of underwear once before tossing them.” —raquelf4851008ac

4. “My mom was a nanny for a rich couple. She had previously cleaned their house but only certain areas. When she became the nanny, she went to do some laundry, which was in the basement. It was a large basement. You literally couldn’t see the floor because it was all covered in dirty clothes.”

“They just never did the laundry, would take off the dirty clothes, and when the wardrobe became sparse, they would go out and buy new clothes. It took her a few months to get through all the laundry. I saw it with my own eyes too, so I know just how bad it was.” —Anonymous

5. “I worked for a wealthy family that didn’t believe in using taxis or Ubers so they would drive to the airport and later have me Uber there to pick up their vehicle, and then the night before or day of return from a trip, they would have me drop their vehicle off in the parking garage and have me Uber back.”

“The Uber driver would ask me what destination or gate I was going to for my vacation, and I would have to awkwardly tell them that I was visiting the parking garage. : )” —cheryl79

6. “When I was first starting out in the entertainment industry as an adult, I worked on a film called US Marshals. One of the male actors would CONSTANTLY arrive late.”

“On the day we crashed the plane on the swamp, there were fuel lines everywhere, and he was late. It was very dangerous to drive through them, so we had to stop this actor’s car when he arrived. Well, he apparently needed to go to the bathroom and couldn’t wait. He hopped out of the car, whipped it out, and peed on the side of the road. He shook it off and got back into the car, as though it was perfectly normal to pee on the side of the road in full view of EVERYONE — men and women. (And, no, it wasn’t RDJ.)” —Anonymous

7. “I had to buy a $300 shoehorn that was made from an endangered animal’s horn.”

—Kay Mur

8. “I worked as a nanny for a family with one baby girl. They had two houses within a three-hour drive that I had to split my time between during the week. They had four nannies and a babysitter because they never wanted to be alone with their child.”

“I went on cruises/holiday trips/other vacations and events with them and took care of the baby 24/7 so they could go out and party and also have crazy parties at their house on the shifts I worked until 3 a.m. And I once had to spend an entire 10 days out of state with the mom so she could do a workout boot camp at a high-end facility where they worked out for nine hours a day. Needless to say, the poor baby had such bad separation anxiety because she never knew who was coming and going. That was the only job I ever quit because I couldn’t bear to watch it anymore.”

9. “My mother owns a property management business in Scottsdale, Arizona, where she takes care of wealthy people’s second (or third or fourth) homes. A few years ago when one of the Dan Brown DaVinci Code books was popular, one of her clients left the book at their house after they departed. They called my mother at some ungodly hour and begged her to overnight it.”

“When I asked why the client couldn’t have just gone to like every book store (or even Target or Walmart) to pick up a new book, she said the client didn’t want to have to ‘guess’ what page she left off on.” —pmusumeci85

10. “When I worked in LA, my agency had one client who was a pretty big deal in the ’80s but has since lost some star power. My boss didn’t like dealing with him, so when this guy would come in, I was basically instructed to distract him at all costs and read with him/psych him up for his auditions or whatever.”

“One of the days, I’m reading with him, and he bursts into tears. He really needed a shoulder to cry on, so I just sat with him in our conference room and sort of hugged him while he wept about fading stardom. Poor dude. He finally left after about an hour, and my boss poked his head into the room and was like, ‘He’s your problem now!’ 

Sure enough, I was always the one to deal with him. I see him on TV stints now and always think about how sad he was that day. But he’s doing OK now, professionally speaking.”

11. “I was living in Costa Rica and got a nanny job for this very, very rich Canadian couple. They had one daughter who was 7. My ‘job’ was to take the 7-year-old to the beach every day. That’s it.”

“Pick her up after lunch, go to the beach, bring her home for dinner. They bought me a golf cart specifically for the job, and I made full-time income doing this. It was the best but was only during the summer vacation.”

12. “One of the C-level executives in my office walked past three other men working in their cubicles to ask me to pick up his lunch. I am not a secretary, but I am a woman, so I guess that made me qualified to run his errands when the three other people would’ve been just as qualified.”

13. “I worked for a high-end wedding coordinator in the early 2000s. We were doing a pretty famous rock star’s wedding at a very prominent hotel.”

“Two days before the wedding, the bride started yelling about how the ceremony wouldn’t have enough light. It’s common to make multiple changes in every category before a large wedding, so this was nothing new. 

She then demanded that people from the staff go through the whole wedding procession (act as groomsmen, bridesmaids, minister, etc.) while she watched to make sure the light caught. She requested I WEAR A WHITE DRESS and my male coworker get put on a tux so she could ‘envision the moment.’ WE DID THIS FOR THREE HOURS. 

She hated everything and called her groom crying saying we were messing everything up. He came down, and you could tell he was utterly embarrassed at how she was acting and got her to calm down. We ended up changing nothing, he apologized to my director, and they got married.”

14. “I worked for a very wealthy woman who was some kind of property manager. She had this giant house, a small child, and a husband who also had some kind of high-power job. I, along with at least five other young women (this was when I was about 22), worked out of an office in their home, and it was absolutely wild.”

“We went through no less than five interviews, two of which were in person at a local Dunkin’ Donuts, with other young women working there, and then find that the job only pays $7 an hour in 2012, and we only get paid once a month. If this wasn’t enough of a red flag, I asked about tax paperwork, and my new boss said that we didn’t make enough to need to fill out tax forms. I was supposed to be doing office and clerical type work, but we ended up running all kinds of errands, grocery shopping, cleaning, and a million other things as ‘assistants.’ I recall once I had to empty her fridge because everything in it was spoiled or rotten.”

15. “My CEO was late to Steve Jobs’ funeral and asked if we could call ahead and ask them to delay it until he/she arrived.”

—pamplemousse14