Worst Job In The World

Once I moved to Seattle in 1990, I had to look for a job. In perusing the Want Ads one day, I found what I thought had to be the two worst jobs in the entire world. The first job was counting DIRTY diapers for a diaper service. Ick. The other job was at the coroner’s office. The job description said you had to be able to lift dead weight... as in dead body-type weight. It also mentioned being able to handle encountering decomposing bodies, as well as having to crawl under houses to look for said decomposing bodies. Ok, first off, I can barely carry a package of bottled waters from my car to my house. Forget hauling a human. As for crawling under a house... um, hello... spiders! And dirt. I would be freaked out before ever getting to a rotting corpse. So, for twenty 22 years I have thought that coroner’s office job was the world’s worst. Then, this week, another awful task popped up in the news. In Thailand, someone has come up with a way to brew the world’s finest (and apparently most expensive) coffee. It comes from coffee beans eaten and then pooped out by elephants. According to the report, the elephant’s stomach acid breaks down the protein that makes coffee bitter. “You end up with a cup that’s very smooth without the bitterness of regular coffee”. Swell. You also end up with a drink that tastes like poop, and costs about $500 per pound. My vote for the World’s Worst Job goes to the person who has to sift through the elephant dung for the coffee beans. Seriously, no amount of tips could compensate for doing that job. I can’t imagine which genius thought making a drink from anything coming out of an elephant’s butt was a good idea. I have no creativity when it comes to the culinary world. I would have made a terrible caveman. It never would have occurred to me to eat a cow or chicken. And what about artichokes? Not on your life. I’d still be sitting in my cave, shivering and hungry, wishing somebody would invent SOMETHING. Next time I think I’m having a bad day, I will remember the poop-sifting baristas in Thailand. Oh ya, I got it good!