8 of the (Literally) Shittest Jobs on Earth
Some people have really crappy jobs – really, really shitty jobs. You might think your office job is tedious, demanding and dull, but at least you don’t spend the day knee dip in other people’s shit and come home smelling like poo. Unless you have one of the following eight jobs, your job isn’t half as shitty as you think it is.
Shitty Job No. 1: Elephant Cage Cleaner
credit You can’t just become a zoo keeper – you’ve got to work your way up from the bottom. Specifically, animals’ bottoms. Basically, you’ve got to shovel shit to get on the animal husbandry ladder. And zoo volunteers can expect to pick up a shovel or two of turds in their time, too. Each elephant can produce around 350 pounds of poo every single day, and there’s about one hundred elephants in zoos in America. Not to mention those in circuses, rescue facilities and in private facilities. That’s a shitload of poop. And that’s a lot of dung to be sitting around – especially since poo contains disease. Lucky for us, there are a few unlucky souls whose job it is to clean the poo-filled cages. And that poo becomes fertilizer. Now that’s recycling for you!
Shitty Job No. 2: Artificial Inseminator
Apparently bulls can’t get it in the right spot, because every year, thousands upon thousands of cows get someone’s hand up their bum, followed a long syringe full of semen. It’s all very romantic. In order to breed a high-quality bloodline of cattle, farmers, vets and insemination experts (oh, yes, they exist and they cost a lot of money – not to mention the thousands of dollars it costs to purchase the bull semen), then they put on a really long glove and work their hand in the back end of a rather alarmed cow. Once the hand is in, they slide their arm up (usually about as far as their elbow, depending on the length of the cow’s insides), find the opening to the uterus and create a clear channel for the syringe. The outside arm feeds the syringe in, deposits the sperm and the dirty deed is done. And when that glove comes out, that lovely lady cow normally leaves a sizable smear of shit all over it. And that’s the romantic beauty of baby-making in the bovine world:
Shitty Job No. 3: Plumber
Plumbers make pretty good money and they get to charge ridiculous fees for coming out on a weekend, holiday or any time that doesn’t really suit them. And their delightfully hairy cracks are usually out on display. But we need plumbers. If they all upped and left town, it would either be you with your hand in your toilet, unblocking clogs of shit and hair; or, your neighborhood would have a pool of stagnant poop floating around. And with the recent downturn in people taking vocational training, America is looking at a shortage of plumbers very soon.
Shitty Job No. 4: Flatulence Analyst
Believe it or not, your farts are more than just a source of hilarity and disgust – they mean something. If teams of scientist and medical experts (who apparently don’t have gag reflexes) didn’t take interest in farts, then how would we know if there’s a connection between smell and food? Or smell and cancer? It’s not a huge field of research, but it’s been done. Too many farts every day? You might be eating the wrong things and eating too quickly. Never farting? That’s not healthy either. As ever, a healthy, varied diet is best.
Shitty Job No. 5: Cow Poo Analyst
When fossilized cowpats are found, analysts dig in and get looking up close for evidence of food, bacteria and microorganisms. From looking at the crap up close in a laboratory, it allows historians to build a frame of reference about what kind of crops were around at the time, what cows were munching on and how this affected the meat that people ate. But cow poo analysis isn’t just limited to old, fossilized crap. Scientists like to get stuck into fresh, new, steaming crap, too. From studying the dung, there’s a slew of diseases and digestive issues that can be diagnosed which, otherwise, could wipe out a whole herd of cattle – or more. Don’t believe me, take a look at this:
Shitty Job No. 6: Sewer Worker
Depending on the country you live in, this job goes from kind of crappy to unbelievably shitty. Sewer worker in America? Pretty gross. Sewer worker in a Third World country? Dangerous and damn disgusting. In America, approximately 450 billion gallons of water go sloshing into the sewer systems every day. Some of it is nice clean drinking water, some of it muddy dish water, some murky bath water and about 5 billion gallons of it is pissy, shitty toilet water. So either the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had no sense of smell, or Splinter and April cleaned that place day and night. Sewer workers are in charge of fixing bad blockages, investigating city drainage issues and – bizarrely – for cleaning the underground draining systems. Why do sewer systems need to be cleaned? Who knows. But they do. And according to a Cincinnati sewer system worker who spoke to National Public Radio about his job, he finds tires, bicycles and – once in a while – doors floating around down there.
Shitty Job No. 7: Porta Potty Cleaners
These lucky fellows get to drive a big old tank up to shit-filled portable toilets, stick a vacuum hose in there and suck it all out. Delightful! Or, on fancier models, there’s a big plastic “holding tank” underneath that holds all the turds, toilet paper, tampons, cigarette butts, beer cans and piles of vomit it could ever want. Big tanks can hold up to 100 uses of the porta potty. And some blessed soul gets to cart this to some water treatment facility, flush it all away, check it’s all out and clean it all up. Again, delightful! Not to mention, someone has to get in that porta potty cubicle with a bunch of cleaning supplies and wipe down every surface (every pube, chunk of vomit and smear of shite), replace the toilet paper (if there is any to begin with) and make it nice and shiny for the next outdoor event full of people comfortable enough to take a shit between four thin, plastic walls. Many porta potty cleaners take pride in their work:
Shitty Job No. 8: Septic Tank Cleaner
The average septic tank holds about 1,000 gallons of waste matter – that’s an enormous volume of poop (especially considering hundreds of thousands of homes across the United States use septic tanks as their primary waste disposal units). If you have ever been unlucky enough to be around a tank that has flooded or overflowed, and you’ve smelled the fresh aroma of feces all over the lawn (or worse, in the house) then you know how important having someone come and empty the tank is. The bacteria in our poo breaks down the waste in the tank, but the toilet paper, soaps and detergents mean a manual approach must be taken to cleaning the tank. In this case, a cleaner comes by with a huge portable tank and a big hose and sucks it all up. Delicious! So, next time you’re sitting behind your desk thinking about how dreadful your job is, thank your lucky stars that you aren’t covered in shit.
