Laura on Life

Some Dirty Jobs

By Laura Snyder

[March 27, 2008]  The other night, I was watching a show on TV called "Dirty Jobs." This show was, in essence, saluting those people who work at jobs that most of us would consider pretty nasty. Sometimes the host, Mike Rowe, would interview these people and ask questions about the job they are doing. I have never once heard him ask them how they got into this line of work, though.

Perhaps the guys who harvest slimy eels (by separating the slime from the eel), got the job because they didn't know what they were applying for until it was too late. Imagine trying to compose a help wanted ad for this position:

Help wanted: Person who enjoys fishing and boating. Ideal candidate will have no prior experience. Must have strong stomach and long, waterproof gloves. Casual attire. Benefits include lots of sunshine; working with sea animals; free lunches, if you can keep them down; and a pension, if you stick around long enough.

Then, when someone applies, they grab him before he can change his mind, throw him on the ship and indoctrinate him in the art of de-sliming eels. They don't take him back to shore until he is brainwashed into thinking he is not qualified to work anywhere else.

Forgive me. Perhaps there is that one guy out there who was born to de-slime eels, but I'm having a difficult time imagining that.

Most parents have had to de-slime a kid at one time or another, but not because we signed up for it. How were we to know? It doesn't tell you that in any child-rearing books. When a child is slimy, however, you can't just let him walk around like that. The slime would eventually ooze into crevices. Clearly, you have to do something.

"Dirty Jobs" featured all kinds of jobs like de-sliming eels. Those are the jobs you tell your kids they will have to do if they don't go to college. So, in a way, this is an educational show. If your kids watch this show, even once, that will be all that is needed to encourage them to do well in school, pick a career before they leave high school and make sure that the career requires a college degree.

Of course, some children might think that having Mike Rowe's job would be a cool career. I think they should ask Mike if he was conscious and sober when he was shanghaied into signing on that particular dotted line.

Parents have a great deal of training for dirty jobs. We never applied for the job. No one ever told us what we were getting ourselves into. Somehow, though, we have found ourselves scraping moldy food off our kitchen walls, trying to extricate sand from a toddler's mouth, trying to mask the stench of a full diaper bin and wiping little hands that have been playing in the cat litter.

All you need to do is look under a child's bed to see the challenges we parents have to face on a day-to-day basis. You'll find live bug collections, underwear they were trying to hide because they'd had an accident and a bowl of stale, half-eaten cheese doodles that were smuggled in after bedtime. By half-eaten, I mean they were sucked on until the cheese flavoring was gone and then left in the bowl and hidden under the bed. That's called spelunking for cheese doodles ... or maybe just doodles.

Those "Dirty Jobs" people have nothing on parents. In fact, the only difference that I can see is ... they get paid for it.

[By LAURA SNYDER]

You can reach the writer at [e-mail] Or visit www.lauraonlife.com for more columns and info about her books.