Mike Rowe tells good stories.

Ever see "Dirty Jobs"?

http://www.wimp.com/realwild/

Johnson, that just may be the most important thing I have experienced on this board. Lots of stuff to think about. Thank you again for posting it.

Johnson, I agree with you..Dirty Jobs makes everybody else's jobs seem easy. Another show that I watch and I find very interesting is the show called 'Flip this House'. someone I know just sold their house to a company that flips homes, and took a badly dilapidated house and turned it into a palace!

Some of those dirty jobs pay pretty well, and, they tell you up front, “this job is dirty”. What I have been finding lately is the clean jobs have become dirty! Employers are taking advantage of this economy. I have found myself as an unemployed paralegal, and where once this position was commanding 25+ dollars per hour, some new listings from employers are starting at 10 dollars per hour. Employers are realizing that many people who have lost their jobs will take positions that pay very little, because very little is better than nothing at all. This mentality is not going to help our economy recover. I found one posting from a sole practitioner who happens to be a paraplegic looking for a certified, experienced paralegal to draft and file all his documents. The paralegal duties were in the form of an unpaid internship, however, the qualified candidate would receive eight bucks per hour to feed him and wipe his hiney! I’d rather muck out pig pens!

Suzanne...... we are following each other around today LOL! You are totally right about the job market today. Every state throughout the nation is suffering with this. At one point, for whatever reason, there was no money for unemployed people. Those people went without checks for however long it was. And you were correct in saying that companies are hiring for less salary than employees used to make, mostly at jobs, where they were laid off due to the fact that the company was either folding or just laying people off because they didn't have the money to pay each and every employee. My husband was one of those people who had to take a job with which paid much less than his previous job because it was the only job out there at the time that he was experienced in. If you have to wash pig pens, and they are paying well, you do what you have to do for yourself and your family.

So.... 'splain to me why it's necessary for the sheep rancher to bite off the poor li'l lamb's testicles when he has a sharp, shiny knife in his hand?

Of course, I question why it's necessary to castrate the lamb in the first place.

Of course, I question the need for livestock husbandry even before that.

I think maybe the rancher was playing a trick on Mike and having a laugh at him later.

I get the point about dirty jobs and the need for folks willing to train for and do them, however, there's no need for anyone to go around biting off lambs' testicles on my behalf. I don't eat meat, let alone lamb. I think we could get along without sheep ranchers. From my point of view, that's a dirty job nobody needs to do.

I think it's just good to show people doing work that nobody really ever sees anymore or thinks about. That is, what used to be called real work, before we got the idea that we should all be organization workers and not get our hands on anything. There's an interesting-sounding book I'd like to pick up written by a motorcycle mechanic in Richmond called Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, by Matthew B. Crawford. The author had been a director of an NGO before abandoning that for motorcycle mechanics. The book got some good reviews in the national press.