From Yahoo News.
This fellow's job is to swim through the sewers (not storm drains, sewers) of Mexico City and remove blockages. He says that, in the darkness, they encounter dead animals and even dead bodies.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20061220/od_nm/mexico_sewers_dc
$6.50 an hour and all you can eat!
$6.50 all you can eat
Yea, I think I went there once it's called THE GARDEN BUFFET in Atlantic City on the boardwalk in front of Bally's 2nd Floor one way in with a hidden door to get out that smells like urine. Bon Apetit.............................
What about this part, it just has B-Movie written all over it:
QuoteThe divers receive air through a tube connected to the surface and are attached to a safety harness to stop them being swept away, as happened to one colleague 21 years ago who died in a torrent of filthy water while clearing a blockage.
Even though in that case the guy died, I keep getting visions of some guy swept away amongst all the poop and never seen again. Legends soon arise of the mysterious
Crap Man of the sewers who grabs the unwary and makes off with them. :teddyr:
Quote from: Shadowfyre on December 22, 2006, 11:39:45 PM
What about this part, it just has B-Movie written all over it:
QuoteThe divers receive air through a tube connected to the surface and are attached to a safety harness to stop them being swept away, as happened to one colleague 21 years ago who died in a torrent of filthy water while clearing a blockage.
Even though in that case the guy died, I keep getting visions of some guy swept away amongst all the poop and never seen again. Legends soon arise of the mysterious Crap Man of the sewers who grabs the unwary and makes off with them. :teddyr:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0364527/
And here I was 50 pages into writing my script for Curse of the Crapman, only to find out it's been done.
Phooey. :teddyr:
Charles Bukowski tried to write about the worst jobs in the world --
"What terrible jobs there are in the world!" -- after getting his . . . parts & ends of parts . . . shaved & prepped for an operation.
He also wrote about having beef carcasses dropped on him at a slaughterhouse that you had to run with --
He should have written about this . . .
peter j/peter unemployed
I do wonder what "detergent" they use to clean their wetsuits in. Talk about a cash cow for whatever company put that out. That and imagine the money in commercials, "when I want to get fecal matter stains out, I use..."
Me and my brother worked at a mink and fox "ranch" in Marcellus,MI for a total of 2 weeks.Whatta sh*tty mess!Mink stink bad! They were housed in these long ass pole barns in little wire cages,and to kill them we had to drive up and down the aisles in this little Ford tractor with a big wooden box on back,with the exhaust piped into it.You reach into the cages with real thick leather gloves(mink are real dam mean,too!) and stuff them into a trap door on top,and we gassed them.Then you skin them,de-fat the hides(adisgusting stinky ass job,grind up the carcasses(guts and all)and that was FED bacck to the poor little basterds out in the barns.They were unknowing cannibals!Some gross s**t.I quit,even before I had another job lined up.It was too nasty.You would think there would be some law against that kinda sh*t.I dunno if that place is even around anymore....Ted Nugent owned the joint before the owners that I worked for got it.There wer some beautiful Clydesdales out in the field behind the joint,though...
My uncle worked one summer stocking soft drinks in grocery stores, hated the job, but learned to appreciate what he had from it. He said he used to see the guy whose job it was to cart off the offal and other leftover bits from the meat departments of those stores. The modern day version of driving a gut wagon. One scorching August afternoon, he sees the guy standing in the parking lot on his break. Flies as thick as clouds around the truck, the stench so strong it was making my uncle sick from halfway across the parking lot. The heats just cooking the contents of the truck.
The guy is eating a Bologna sandwich, not phased by his situation in the least.
My uncle said he didn't b***h about things so much after that.
Who knows though, maybe the guy just had a defective sense of smell.
The History Channel aired a British series called History's Dirtiest Jobs, IIRC. Each episode focused on a different era of British history, fascinating and disgusting. Rat catchers, rag pickers, sewer and storm drain blockage clearers (like in Andrew's OP), saltpeter men, tannery workers, sulfur burning exterminators, child lint sweepers in cotton mills, etc. Most of us in the developed world have it ridiculously easy, clean, and safe compared those poor folks.
I once applied for a job at an ice cream warehouse.
During my interview, the manager insisted that it was a tough job, & couldn't stop noting various ex-marines who only lasted a day or so.
Thinking it would make me a shoe-in, I told him about how I ride a motorbike in the winter, & some of my adventures with freezing rain, but I never heard back from him.
I did once have a job in a dry ice factory, in which I felt that I had died & gone to hell, but that was mostly due to poor management, a lack of teamwork & unsanitary conditions.
Still, the worst part was putting on a pair of white cotten gloves, & catching blocks of dry ice as they came down a chute. The cold caused heavy moisture to condense in the gloves, which in turn froze. It made my fingers hurt bad enough, but even more painful was when I'd have my hands in these iced-up wet gloves, and would have my fingers wrapped around one block of dry ice, as another block would come down the chute & slam into the fingers of my left hand. I lasted bout a week.
Quote from: Yaddo 42 on December 24, 2006, 07:44:21 AM
The History Channel aired a British series called History's Dirtiest Jobs, IIRC. Each episode focused on a different era of British history, fascinating and disgusting. Rat catchers, rag pickers, sewer and storm drain blockage clearers (like in Andrew's OP), saltpeter men, tannery workers, sulfur burning exterminators, child lint sweepers in cotton mills, etc. Most of us in the developed world have it ridiculously easy, clean, and safe compared those poor folks.
This series, apparently in marathon form was on today, I got about 30 seconds into the septic tank technician, the guy actually climbed down into a septic tank with a shovel, thats as far as I got.
On a similar note the History Channel series Wild West Tech had an episode on the Johnson County range war, during a gun battle 2 ranchers were chased into an outhouse by a large group of farmers and shop keepers, they went in, closed the door and the crowd proceeded to shoot the you know what out of the outhouse. When they were done and had left the 2 ranchers climbed out of the hole they had jumped into, according to the show one of them later said it was the worst thing that had ever happened to him and that if it was a choice again he'd choose to be shot.
Quote from: DENNIS on December 24, 2006, 08:17:58 PM
On a similar note the History Channel series Wild West Tech had an episode on the Johnson County range war, during a gun battle 2 ranchers were chased into an outhouse by a large group of farmers and shop keepers, they went in, closed the door and the crowd proceeded to shoot the you know what out of the outhouse. When they were done and had left the 2 ranchers climbed out of the hole they had jumped into, according to the show one of them later said it was the worst thing that had ever happened to him and that if it was a choice again he'd choose to be shot.
Considering how many people died of dysentery on the Oregon Trail, I imagine lower intestinal diseases were pretty common back then. Add to that a diet of chili and cowboy stew and you have the makings of true horror. Over the years, I have run into some pretty ugly things and can honestly say, "It all comes off with soap. Well, that and a stiff brush that will take off your top layers of skin."
When we were 17 in 1991, my friend Brian and I worked for a couple days at his uncle's turkey farm in Postville, Iowa.
Brian's uncle told us he only needed us for 2-3 days and that he'd pay us, so we did it.
Man, turkeys are some of the dumbest animals.
We had to feed them, clean up their sh*t...you name it...we did it.
The smell was bad at first but we quickly got used to it.
And we were totally unsupervised.
The thing that surprised me the most was how easy it was to accidentally kill them while working around them. You really have to be careful not to step on them as they love to swarm around your legs.
Hundreds of them will gather around you and you have to push them out of the way..
If you bump them in the head too hard...they fall over dead right then and there.
Sometimes, they just up & die for no apparent reason.
While cleaning one of the turkey barns one day, we found 3 dead ones.
The very first day, Brian & I were hauling food to them in wheelbarrows. I was pushing my wheelbarrow full of food in front of me, Brian was pulling his behind him. He was walking in front of me.
A young turkey quickly ducked underneath his wheelbarrow and the wheel ran it over...its guts shot out of its ass all over the ground.
That was one of the nastiest things I've ever seen in my life.
Even worse, I told Brian what he had just done because he hadn't seen it and he picked up most of the guts with one gloved hand, tossed them to the side and said, "I'll clean it up later."
Then he picked up the turkey's carcass and drop kicked it into one of the spinning steel ceiling fans.
Pieces of turkey and feathers went everywhere.
Guess who had to help him clean it up?
Yeah...I'm glad we only did that job for a couple of days.
I couldn't imagine raising turkeys for a living.
Actually, there is a television program that covers this. It's called "Dirty Jobs," and, I believe, it is on the Discovery Channel. It's been on since 2005, and the new season will start sometime early next year. The host of the show, Mike Rowe, finds the dirtiest job he can, and he has done almost everything, from cleaning pigeon **** off of buildings to cleaning a house, after the sewer into the house, backed up and flooded the house. They film him while he is working, then they show it on television. Never seen it, but it does sound interesting.
My sister is a big fan of "Dirty Jobs", and tells me about it quite often. I caught it a time or two when I still had cable, I wasn't quite as taken with it.
Couldn't he sue, there's bound to be health and safety problems.
I worked for two summers driving a fishing boat here in AK when I was in the Army. It was just me and the passengers on the ocean fishing for halibut, salmon, or lingcod, so I had to do the harpooning/gaffing/netting. There were no breaks so you just ate whenever you got a chance, and the only thing you had to wash your hands in was the ocean. It would sometimes be so hectic when they were catching fish and I was trying to eat that it's be take a bit of my sandwich, help someone with their catch, wash hands, take another bite. But when it got real busy, I'd sometimes forget to wash my hands, and would end up with fish slime on my food. You just kinds get used to it after a while. . .
I was a Technical asst. (telephone) for directv for like 6 mo. I hated it, because it wasnt face to face, which allows the customer to be as loud and/or as rude as they wanted. Worst job ever being on the phone all day telling people how to set up their entertainment systems.