Most unexpected thing about working in a linguistics department: the number of calls I get from people who spoke in tongues/had a vision involving some word or phrase and now want someone to translate it.

It is not super common (a few calls a year) but happens regularly enough that I can now usually spot those calls in the first few sentences.

There's also the people who have "Indian artifacts" that they want translated, but I usually try to at least check into those a bit, because hey, you never know.