Hard jobs
1. I acknowledge that MTV influences my life too much. Danny swears that if I got a Tivo or similar, I would watch less stupid TV and be able to focus my TV-watching time into the kinds of quality programming I truly enjoy, such as flashy science specials and Golden Girls reruns.
2. I complain about my job sometimes, and it does in fact stress me out and annoy me with fair frequency.
3. I was just caught the end of some MTV show about a young man who’s becoming a firefighter, and it made me realize that even though it’s stressful when the ICON enrollment integration mysteriously unenrolled the College of Business Admin from all her course sites again, at least I don’t have to go into burning buildings.
That’s a seriously stressful job. The closest I ever came to burning to death at work was when somebody left popcorn in the microwave too long.
I spent a couple summers detasseling on a crew run by three Middle Eastern guys who had very, very interesting ideas about acceptable labor practices. Some days it seemed like we were all part of a Chuck Norris movie; I wish he would’ve come busting through the rows to save me. That was hard work.
I hope it paid well. I mean, you did say “a couple summers”, which implies you went back. 🙂
My hardest crap-job was working at an AOL call center in the mid-90’s right when they switched from X-minutes-per-month to “unlimited usage”. They were under several class action lawsuits because they didn’t have the capacity to handle so many people online at once, and I was transferred to the department where you call to cancel your account. We were supposed to get a certain percentage of “retains” (convince them not to cancel after all), which made it basically the crappiest sales job short of a tanning salon in Hell. I was fired. 🙂