Christmas came early to those of us with weird senses of humor thanks to this article about the Cinco Jotas company’s overwhelmed ham sniffers. It’s all about old-fashioned quality control, you see, and ham demand during the holidays means these noses have to get a whiff of about four times as many hams as they would on an average day the rest of the year. As someone who only sniffs between four and six hams a year, I am damn impressed.
All of which got me thinking about other jobs intrinsic to our stupid lifestyles that I don’t want to do but which I am damn appreciative of.
Fitted sheet tag attacher – There is nothing better than buying a pair of fitted sheets and discovering they have clear labels that say TOP/BOTTOM and SIDE. I can’t think of anything more horrible than a life spent trying to figure out which is which and then attaching those tags. Fuck that shit.
“But Scott Colby!” I hear you saying. “That’s probably done by a machine!” Yeah? Well I bet that poor machine is miserable too, and when the fitted sheet tag attacher machine ends up leading the inevitable robot uprising I will just lean back and say I told you so.
Russian guy reading all our hacked messages – We are so dull. This guy must be so bored. If you’re reading this, Russian guy, I appreciate your dedication and the way you remind us all that nothing we do online is really private. Thanks bunches!
Video game QA person – Many modern games are basically to-do list simulators that provide a bit of escapism despite their inherent tediousness. Can you imagine having to test fetch quests for a living to make sure nothing breaks along the way? Somewhere, some poor schmuck is killing the same seven mutant devil sheep in the same cookie-cutter canyon for the same generic tavern owner to receive the same barely useful sword dozens and dozens of times today, all so nerds like you and I can go “eh, I guess this’ll help me relax a little while I pound a beer.” Video game QA people are the heroes we need.
Mayor of Worcester – Someone’s got to be in charge of that dump. Glad it’s not me.
Server engineer responsible for data backups at OnlyFans – Imagine this person on a first date: “Yes, hello, my job is to make sure petabytes of sassy foot pictures can be restored in the event of an outage. What do you do for a living?” Sounds rough, but no one should have to lose their important data.
It takes lots of different folks doing lots of seemingly insufferable tasks to make this big ol’ world of ours go round. What others have I missed?