Wow, I need to start putting up some shorter posts, or I’m never going to get through the couple dozen draft posts that have accumulated on this blog! Clearly I haven’t stuck to my new year’s resolution of staying under 600 words. Whoops!
With that in mind, I’ll keep this very brief. Back in December I found a TED Talk video with Mike Rowe, the host of Discovery Channel’s popular show Dirty Jobs. He was speaking at an Apple conference in Monterey, CA — so pretty much the opposite demographic that he works with on the show (i.e., working class America).
He tells the story of filming a specific episode when he was struck with a rare feeling: he thought someone was doing their job incorrectly, but then realized he was absolutely wrong. The job was sheep farming, and Mike was learning how to castrate the lambs. It turned out the legally approved method (tying a rubber band around the scrotum for about a week until the “parts” shrivel and fall off) is actually less efficient and more painful than the farmer’s method of choice (making a small cut in the scrotum and using his teeth to bite off the testicles).
So Rowe, with balls stuck on his chin, has an epiphany about the dirty work he’s seen on a regular basis throughout the show’s history. This leads him to reconsider the very notion of work, especially how it fits into the social landscape of 21st century America.
