Working in the wide open spaces has some definite advantages over the traditional lines of work located in an office. The outdoor worker enjoys a sense of freedom and connectivity with the world that would be otherwise sealed off from the office worker. The outdoor worker can break up his or her day with walking, labour or driving a company vehicle, making the day zip by at breakneck speed.
And if you can incorporate your passion into an outdoor job, you can bring meaning and purpose into your daily grind. Some people have a natural affinity for animals and nature and would be well-suited for conservation, animal care positions or working in the agricultural field.
However, capturing your dream may require some academic posturing to make your job candidacy the best it can be, so be sure to evaluate your skills and professional goals when enrolling in higher education.
In addition to the outdoor jobs in the countryside, the inner city has its own options for working under the sun. Fields such as law enforcement, construction work, gardening, tree trimming, truck driver and commercial maintenance are some of the top desired outdoor jobs to keep you in touch with society while performing meaningful duties.
Although working outdoors can make going to work a pleasure, there are some pitfalls to being exposed to the elements. Persons with sensitive skin will need to use a strong sun block to avoid a build-up of overexposed skin. Once a sunburn takes hold, the remedy is to refrain from anymore sun, which is near impossible when working outdoors full-time. Also, if you don’t like getting dirty, outdoor jobs may not be for you either.
The person employed outdoors may also be prone to illness during cold and flu season, but this susceptibility may be overcome by making an effort to bolster your immune system. Be sure to take plenty of vitamin C, E and fish oil to keep your system strong and able to fight off infection.
In some cases, the outdoor job may bring on cold and flu symptoms more often in winter, but there are many health benefits also involved. The person at an inside desk job remains sedentary for most of the day and may be prone to weight gain and atrophy in the muscles. Conversely, the active outdoor position provides fresh air, aerobic activity and a chance to develop a muscular physique. Overall. choosing a career that takes you outdoors can be an asset to your health, mental well-being and a great way to make new friends.
Perhaps you have a knack for banking, finance or inside sales, and although these jobs are rewarding financially, they may not be suitable for you as a long-term career. Try your hand at what interests you the most, and remember you can always change your professional pathway at any stage in life. Work a few years indoors and sample the outdoor opportunities when you feel the time is right.
For some people in the workforce the concept of working inside is not only depressing but it is also an unacceptable work environment. The thought of going to work each day, sitting at a nondescript desk in a small office or cubicle and doing the same tasks over and over again is enough to drive them crazy.
For some, then, the only option is outside work but why?
There are many reasons why people choose outside occupations and, in some cases, only the people doing them understand why they like the work. For example, it is hard for some to comprehend why anyone would want to be a sailor; this is an atmosphere where workers are surrounded by water, 24 hours a day. To a sailor, however, there is no other job that they would rather do. So why do workers choose to bypass inside jobs for the lure of working outside?
Working Outdoors = Open Spaces
Many workers do not enjoy working in a confined space, like a small office or a cubicle and opt for an outside environment. It is the lack of outside stimuli that makes the inside jobs distasteful to them and the thought of working in a small area day after day, week after week is incomprehensible.
Working Outdoors = Variety
Typically, with most inside desk or factory jobs, the tasks are dull and repetitive, and some workers can not survive in that type of atmosphere. They don’t enjoy doing the same job over and over again and, as a result, will pursue work opportunities outdoors.
Working Outdoors = Exciting
Many outside occupations offer exciting, thrilling opportunities that inside jobs can not match. There are a percentage of workers who seek out these types of opportunities and could not envision working in any other kind of surroundings. They are thrill seekers and only those types of jobs will satisfy them.
Working Outdoors = Fresh Air
As silly as it may sound, some workers want to work outside in the fresh air and sunshine. Of course, there are times when it will be cold and wet but that is acceptable for them also.
There are lots of outside jobs where is it not possible to have supervision it place to direct workers and for some this is a perfect setting. They don’t like to be told what to do and without a boss at the location they are allowed to work more freely.
All in all, working outdoors opens a wide variety of options and a number of different types of workplaces you can enjoy. It’s not hard to find something to suit you, regardless of your talents and skills.
Who was it that said, “do what you love, and love what you do?” If the great outdoors is in your blood, there is a good chance that being chained to a cubicle is not. Why not make a living working with living things? Your career choices are endless. From a job in a home garden centre to running your own landscape company, there is a way to put what you love into what you do.
Some people work at a job they hate and wait until retirement to do what they really love. Working outdoors means that you don’t have to wait until your twilight years to spend your days doing what you love.
2. Stay in Shape
Connecting with nature is not only nourishing for the soul; but it is great for your physical health as well. Gardening is a wonderful way to stay in shape. Thanks to the physical activity involved, you won’t have to carve out time to run to the gym!
3. Nurture Your Gifts
If you love working with flowers and plants, there is a good chance that you have a natural gift for it. What better way to nurture those talents than through daily practice? A novelist becomes a better writer the more she puts words down on paper; and a natural gardener betters his craft the more he digs around in the soil.
4. Fulfill a Lifelong Dream
Is it your dream to someday run your own nursery? Staring out working as a gardener can teach you things through experience that can help you realise that dream. The more work you do in the garden, the more knowledge you acquire by daily exposure to the best methods and newest technologies in horticulture.
Finally, working with plants and flowers will help you touch the lives of countless people. Flowers bring people together for weddings and special occasions. Giving flowers sends messages of love and commitment. They simply make people happy.
Finding a way to make a living doing what you love is an unrealised dream for many people. If you love to garden, and you are good at it, find a way to make it into a career.
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:
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.
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.
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:
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.
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:
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.
