Monday is my first official day of unemployment – everything up until now has been a prelude, notice of my changing demographic. Even though the interviews are going well and freelance opps are on the horizon, I couldn’t help but engage in a little morbid thinking about the slew of vocations folks will be trudging off to Monday morning that are infinitely less appealing than a little stretch of unemployment:
This all started listening to my favorite radio program (yes, I know, I am a retro girl). Last week’s This American Life featured stories about crime, including Nancy Updike’s immersion interview with Neal Smither, a shyster who might make a used car salesman blush and a cleaner of every gruesome manner of crime scene and other instances of human gore. Of course we know that people die in unfortunate circumstances – murders, suicides, the solitary death of an old woman in a house of cats. But, once the cops and medical examiners pack up the bodies and tear down the tape, who cleans up the remains of, well, the remains? Answer? Guys like Neal. A slew of laws and regulations prevent even gutsy family members from toiling in their loved ones bio-hazardous waste. So, Neal brings in a team for a complimentary quote and immediate cleaning. In one anecdote, he remembered a sludge of intestinal goop so covered with maggots that he could actually hear their gooey movements.
Gross? Certainly. But also interesting because Neal was an unemployed stock trader who saw that nasty cleanup scene in Pulp Fiction and, apparently, found his calling. He’s been bleaching blood for four years and is getting relatively rich in the process. You can hear his story here – jump ahead to minute 8:40 to skip the opening act.
[Oh, and, yes, I’m avoiding movies until I’m on more certain employment footing]
Neal is not exactly an exception when it comes to the grisly gigs in science and medicine.
Consider some of the highlights from Popular Science’s Worst Jobs in Science:
There’s the Anal Wart Researcher: Yeah, you thought nursing was already twisted enough, what with the bed pans, disease and vials of blood, but nurse practitioner Naomi Jay one-ups all of that in her research on sexually transmitted anal diseases. All day long, she examines butts, searching for warts. And, finds them in about 1/3 of her daily specimens. That, my office cliché addicts, is really “hands on.”
Then there are the animal-loving veterinarian students who veer into research where they spend their days making animals sick to test various theories and devices. And, then euthanize their fuzzy friends at the end of each project. OUCH. Alcoholism, anyone?
From the heart-breaking, to the merely DISGUSTING…
Tampon squeezing. Apparently one of the least invasive ways to gather specimens for research on vaginal infections is collecting used tampons. And, the best way to extract? Manual squeezing. Ug.
Looking for a work environment that’s hot, full of bears and covers you with bugs? Be a tick catcher, just make sure you keep making enough noise to scare off the bigger beasts nearby. For not much more money than you could make flipping burgers, these Lyme Disease researchers head out into sweaty, swampy woods, dragging a rank blanket behind them to catch the pesky ticks. Their break? Stopping to tweeze the pests into jars. Weee!
What have we learned here? Some gigs just don’t warrant a fresh pair of khakis. Hit the snooze button, call your recruiter in the afternoon.
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