Jobs I Never Knew Existed
I’m not going to sit here and say I know everything. I might say it if we were in person, but declaring things like that on the Internet is just plain egotistical. But while I was wandering around the lovely city of Melbourne this afternoon I was struck by one of the most absurd sights I have ever seen: Someone dusting/cleaning the traffic lights.
I know there must be heaps of jobs undertaken by the council in order to maintain the continuity of society and the successful running of Melbourne, but dusting the lights?
I realise that there are indispensible jobs to be done in Melbourne, such as re-planting the lovely flower bed on St. Kilda Road and hosing down Fed. Square after the Socceroos have played. 
But dusting the lights? Truth be told they did look a lot better (see photo on the left) after a bit of a dusting, but one must wonder if there are possibly more constructive things they could be doing? I don’t expect miracles like the saving of light aircraft or anything, but maybe reminding people to put their phones on silent before entering a lecture theatre, or stopping people from disrupting lectures by berating us with political campaigns. Maybe even filtering spam by hand, I don’t know! I just figure that enough rain falls in Melbourne to avoid the necessity of cleaning traffic lights.
I suppose I’m going to end, yet again with unanswered questions: What other jobs are there out in the real world which just don’t make sense? How quickly can we replace these silly jobs with robots? Are they even necessary?!
July 27th, 2006 at 9:14 pm
yeah like theatre light tech?
just so you know oh great william, some people earn very good money by dusting for near hours on end… take myself for instance. Is it a waste of time? why yes. Could my time better be spent saving a light aircraft a la superman style? probably. but when i’m dusting and cleaning all the things that people like you take for granted to be clean so that you can do other equally great thing like learn to be a halfway decent engineer, or others who use their office to teach hundreds of children every day all the basic things you already know, or cleaning street lights so that they don’t break down as often and provide the stipulated level of light that vic roads demands of city traffic lighting so that you can see the car coming towards you at night. maybe there might be someone out there who needs to see a bright bed of flowers to make their day a little better than the shitty existance it is. and yes, maybe one day their might be robots capable of cleaning such things, or making things like this a automated part of life, but until some brilliant engineer decides to make something that can actually do this, then the job will always be needed.
please don’t demean people with crappy jobs. everyone likes to think they can affect someone else for the better in some little way each day, and if that means you take the best job you can do and do it well… so be it. i’m sure you’ve had many meaningless, crappy jobs and i know that in each of them, for most people, the best way you can survive is to hope that by you doing your job, someone else is better off, someone else is thankful for your effort.
July 27th, 2006 at 11:50 pm
I think I may have again been mis-interpreted, or just genuinely failed to construe my meaning. I will therefore try and extract my foot from my proverbial mouth:
I wasn’t demeaning dusting as a general profession, or for that fact any job, manual or otherwise. Merely trying to comment on the hitherto unknown need to clean traffic lights. To me they have always seemed the sorts of things that are put up, get a bit of a clean every time a bulb needs replacing, and get replaced/repaired when someone inevitably runs into them.
I realise that there are many jobs that go un-noticed and unappreciated by the public at large, God knows I’ve done a couple. I just never thought cleaning the traffic lights was one of them. Changing flowers I did recognise, and appreciate. I just figured traffic lights were designed to go without cleaning between bulb changes or complete overhauls. Seems I may have lost the tone in the last paragraph of the original post, but hey-ho. If we could all understand each other there wouldn’t be any variety now would there?
July 30th, 2006 at 11:09 am
Another unusual one is the concept of the “greeter” @ Big W. Type of security guard to make sure you don’t bolt up the down escalator & to freedom with stock? Maybe. But always seems to be a motherly type that has to say hello to everyone, which must be completely frustrating for them at times… Would assume that the management personnel who came up with the concept probably never spent the day in that role…