Security Or Enjoyable: The Eternal Employment Dilemma

        Last week, I mentioned people who taste cat-food for a living, as well as people who climb 1,700ft poles to fix a flashing light without any safety ropes. I mentioned these because I thought they were the oddest jobs I could imagine. Well, it turns out I was wrong! Ever fancied being a hair boiler? No; how about the person who makes sure that shoes coming off a production line have no wrinkles in them? Don't think that'll be a good talking point at a party? How about the endless excitement and daily challenge of being a furniture tester? Why not be adventurous and dive for golf balls at the local golf course? It turns out that there's tons of crazy jobs out there, all as interesting, mind-numbing or socially awkward as each other. But, someone's got to do them, right? And considering golfball-man can make somewhere around £60,000-£70,000 a year, I bet there's a few people working in awful jobs who would happily hold their breath in return for being a higher-rate taxpayer. Possibly more if you decide to move to Florida and enjoy an added perk of the job: avoiding alligators. 

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The Riots, And The One Large Causal Factor That's Been Overlooked.

I want to start today by telling you about this guy I know. He grew up in one of the poorest areas in Scotland. School clothes were always hand-me-downs, which doesn't always do wonders for someone's self esteem. He didn't get his first bike until age 12, after saving up months of paper-round money as his family simply didn't have the money. TV was simply this pretty box that other people had, a telephone was that thing that you walked down the street to get to, and you gave it 20p to ring your date on. It's something that's somewhat hard to imagine, but those are just the luxuries in life! The idea of the toilet being in the garden as a glorified hole in the ground today would be unimaginable anywhere, but that was the norm for our man. When he had his weekly bath, he didn't pull out the plug, he simply tipped the water out and hung it up in the shed. This wasn't even in between working in the cotton factories in the 1800's, this was the 1970's! So what's he up to today?

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What will you spend 150,000 hours doing? Something fun, I hope?

Sometimes, I've often looked at a mushroom and thought a little too hard about how it came to be sitting on my chopping board. For the moment, we'll overlook why I'd bother thinking about mushrooms instead of simply eating them. What I mean by this, is that they must have been cut by someone from wherever mushrooms grow, and then packaged. It's this person whom I think about. I mean, most people will tell you (while they're still young enough not to be dragged into that realm of scepticism and mis-trust that we call "being grown up") they want to be a fireman/doctor/lawyer/policeman. One of my friends actually wanted to be a bus. No, not a bus driver, or anyone who works on or in a bus. I mean, she wanted to actually be a bus. I know, right? Anyway, that aside, the person who cut my mushroom must've had these dreams about what they'll do as a dream job when they were younger. And now they're cutting mushrooms. What happened to the dream?

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You've got to love cold-callers. Well, someone has to, I suppose!

Did you know, that our sewers need cleaning out regularly? No, I didn't know that either (because I don't have a dirty mind, boom boom) but apparently so, and it can't be done with a little robot either. No, they have to send someone down to do it, and this leads me on to a very important question: How did that guy get that job? I mean, I'm not going to knock someone who does it, because I wouldn't do it and it therefore makes him or her far braver than me, but it's not exactly a regular response to the standard "what do you want to be when you grow up" question, is it? So how does this person end up doing it? You've got to be seriously dedicated to do it, or took the phrase "I'll take anything going" a little too literally. Can you imagine the sudden fear on their faces when, at a party, someone asks "so, what do you do?". How do you explain that one?



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