Brad Hollerbach is the Director of Information Technology for the Southeast Missourian. His opinions are his own and do not reflect those of the newspaper or its editorial board. He writes this blog primarily for his own amusement and to parody the absurdities of the world we live in. He lives with his wife and two cats that don't really care for one another in Cape.

'Dirty Jobs' Host Is As Entertaining As His Show

Posted Thursday, January 28, 2010, at 12:00 PM

I went to see Mike Rowe on Wednesday evening when he appeared at the Show Me Center as a part of the University Speaker Series. Mr. Rowe is the host of the TV show Dirty Jobs that airs on the Discovery Channel.

Mr. Rowe's show is a fairly simple concept. He shows viewers jobs that are necessary in our modern world, but are far from glamorous and always involve getting dirty. Usually, really, really dirty.

And while showcasing those jobs, he actually does them, acting as a surrogate guinea pig for we the viewers. No, I don't want to make charcoal and wouldn't normally care how it is made, but I will certainly watch Mr. Rowe work his way through the filthy process.

Got a vat, vessel or container that needs the insides cleaned out and/or painted? Call Mike.

Got something disgusting that needs to be moved or removed, probably by hand. Call Mike.

Got poo? Definitely, call Mike.

While I've not seen all 250 jobs that Mr. Rowe has showcased on his show (each episode focuses on two jobs), I've seen a couple dozen.

I can empathize with him and the dirty jobs he has done. While I've not used a "turd burner" as Mr. Rowe mastered on the January 6, 2009 episode of the show to reduce human waste collected in an environmentally sensitive area of Alaska to ash or crawled through a sewer, I've had my share of dirty jobs.

Although I never thought of them as dirty jobs at the time. They were just work that made me money. I never loathed any of them. Well, OK, there may have been one or two that made me seriously evaluate my hourly wage.

Here are some of the dirty jobs I've done over the years.

In the middle of summer, moving a large pile of dirt left over from the installation of a septic tank for my Great Aunt Anna.
Hauling hay. The square bales, not the round ones. Alfalfa is really nasty, especially if the baler is malfunctioning and generating Franken-bales, twice the size of what they should be.
Cleaning out the bottom of silo filled with wet and fermenting brown stuff.
Cleaning out various livestock sheds by hand.
Logging. Felling and bucking large cedar logs with my dad into ten-foot lengths that could then be split -- by hand -- into decorative rails.
Picking wild blackberries in 95-degree heat and humidity not much lower. Got a whopping 50 cents a quart.
Demolishing plaster and lathe walls.
Installing insulation of any kind.
Pretty much anything that has to do with drywall and joint compound. I'm not the whitest Caucasian on Earth, but I am pretty fair-skinned. After a round of sanding joint compound, I always look like Casper the Friendly Ghost with glasses.

I really enjoyed Mr. Rowe's nearly 90-minute appearance at the Show Me Center. Probably, half of his time was devoted just to fielding questions from the audience. What I like about Mr. Rowe is that he seems "real." Approachable might be a good word. It's the same way I feel about Jay Leno. A lot of celebrities just don't seem "real," having lived in the rarified air of the rich and famous for too long.

There was one ironic thing that I couldn't ignore about Mr. Rowe's appearance though.

He was speaking at a University to a crowd that contained a large number of college students, praising the merits of hardwork and getting dirty while doing a worthwhile job.

What I found ironic is that the reason a lot of the people go to a university is to avoid a living that requires hardwork or getting dirty.

That's just my perspective, of course. I have a college degree and generally make a living bereft of getting dirty, but I enjoy working with my hands on something other than a computer keyboard. That's what I do for fun.

Oh, and writing this blog.

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My favorite episode was the one with the ostriches. Mike had to try to put covers over the birds' heads. I could tell Mike was scared to death of those birds. It was very, very funny.

-- Posted by BobMiller on Thu, Jan 28, 2010, at 12:15 PM
Here's a youtube link to the ostrich video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqAlHjPq_J8

-- Posted by BobMiller on Thu, Jan 28, 2010, at 12:26 PM
MrSnooty, I'm not opposed to Mr. Obrien. I've watched and laughed at and with him, Leno, Letterman, the Daily Show and the Colbert Report many times, but I think Ferguson at 11:35 is the funniest.

He has very little to work from (no band, no sidekick, and extremely cheap and cheesy props) but consistently makes me laugh. That's my opinion.

As far as Leno goes, I read his biography a few years back and he's always given me the impression that even after all his success he is still a blue-collar kind of guy, like my dad.

If he has a fault, it might be that he is too loyal to NBC which is one seriously screwed up television network. My cat could run it better.

Thanks for reading.

-- Posted by Brad_Hollerbach on Thu, Jan 28, 2010, at 2:42 PM
Periodically, I've tried to think of a unique dirty job that I could submit to Mike Rowe. However, since he's done 250 jobs it's hard to come up with something that he hasn't done and that viewers would actually watch.

However, I think I may have thought of one over lunch.

What if Mike Rowe were to clean up after the an episode of Mythbusters? Those guys can create some serious messes.

TFR

-- Posted by Brad_Hollerbach on Thu, Jan 28, 2010, at 2:45 PM
The thing I appreciate about Rowe is that he treats his subjects with dignity and doesn't make them the butt of jokes and jibes.

He doesn't condescend or patronize the folks who are actually doing the jobs, even though you can tell he's having a hard time getting some of them to be interesting.

You want a dirty job? Be on his production crew. Remember, THEY'RE the ones who have to crawl in those places FIRST to shoot him going in.

-- Posted by ksteinhoff on Sun, Jan 31, 2010, at 4:19 AM
In contrast with Rowe, I worked with a feature columnist whose shtick was to write first-person stories of him doing Rowe-like things, but his always had the approach "I'm going to write about something like I'm a real klutz, but we all really know that I'm smart, graceful and this is just a put-on."

We photographers enjoyed making his life hell.

Shortly after we had hired him from a paper on the other side of the state, he did a bit where he was going to ride his bicycle from his old home to his new one.

On the day I drew the assignment to meet up with him about 40 or 50 miles from town, I was a little ticked off when he commanded, "OK, you've got your pictures. Load my bike in your car and take me home."

"Joe (not his real name), maybe that's the way they did things at your old paper, but here we don't fake things. If you write that you rode your bike all the way across the state, our readers expect that to be true."

I loved the sight of him in my rearview mirror when I pulled away. When I saw him a day later, he was so sunburned that he glowed in the dark.

On another day, he was going to be dragged through a mud puddle to test whether an advertised laundry detergent actually worked like its TV ad said.

After going through the puddle once, the writer was ready to take off. The photographer said, "Joe, we're going to have to do it again using a different camera to be on the safe side."

"Joe, we're going to have to do it again. The light changed just as you hit the puddle."

"Joe, one more time, I saw the splash cover up your face."

"Joe, let's do it from another angle....."

RULE: never PO the photo staff.

-- Posted by ksteinhoff on Sun, Jan 31, 2010, at 4:29 AM
Good point, ksteinhoff. I didn't bring that issue up, but almost every time Mike Rowe squeezes into a vat to clean it, a vidoegrapher has already gone in ahead of him.

I can remember only one time, where they outfitted Mike with a camera to shoot his reactions (climbing the Macinaw Bridge cabling).

TFR

-- Posted by Brad_Hollerbach on Sun, Jan 31, 2010, at 11:01 PM

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