World's Worst Jobs

Janitor at a Porno Theatre

Janitor, in itself, is a pretty bad job. But, porno theater janitor is the worst job on the list. The main responsibility of the porno theater janitor is to take his mop and rag and wide up after each show is finished. Unlike a traditional theater, it's safe to assume that sticky substance under the chair is something other than Coca-Cola Classic! At least you get to see all that porn for free and you'll probably be very popular among your male friends, although this is probably not a job you want to talk about with your mother, or your wife for that matter.

Guard at Buckingham Palace

Guard duty at Buckingham Palace is regarded as one of the worst jobs in the British Army. Besides the fact that they have to stand for hours, no laughing allowed, they also have to look their best. Soldiers spend several hours each day cleaning and pressing their uniforms and polishing their boots in preparation for one of the many kit inspections that they are likely to face before taking up their positions outside one of the royal palaces. Any soldier whose turn-out is less than immaculate is likely to face a variety of punishments, such as extra guard duty.

Animal Masturbator

Researchers who want animal sperm -to study fertility or for artificial insemination-have a suite of attractive options: They can ram an electric probe up an animal's rectum, shove an artificial
vagina onto the animal's penis, or simply do it the old-fashioned way-manual stimulation. The first option, electroejaculation, uses a priapic rectal probe to send electricity pulsing through the animal's nether regions. "All the normal excitatory signals that stimulate ejaculation, like touch, sight, sound and smell, can be replaced with the current from the probe," says Trish Berger, professor of animal science at the University of California, Davis. "It's fascinating. Of course, this is a woman talking." Electroejaculation generally requires anesthetizing the animal and is typically used on zoo dwellers. The other two methods-the artificial vagina, or AV, and the good old hand-require that animals be trained to the procedure. The AV-a large latex tube coated with warm lubricant -is used primarily to get sperm from dairy bulls (considered the most ornery and dangerous of bovines). The bull gets randy with a steer; when he mounts the steer with his forelegs, a brave technician, AV in hand, insinuates himself between the two aroused beasts and deftly redirects the bull's penis into the mock genitalia, which he must then hold tight while the bull orgasms. (Talk about bull riding!) Three additional technicians attempt to ensure this (fool)hardy soul's safety by anchoring themselves to restraining ropes attached to a ring in the bull's nose. Alas, this isn't always absolutely effective: Everyone who's wielded an AV has had at least one close call, and more than a few have been sent to the hospital. The much safer "digital pressure" is used mostly with pigs, who are trained from an early age to mount a small bench while the researcher reaches around with a gloved hand and provides appropriate pleasure-er, pressure.

Sewers Cleaner

Ramesh Sahu works in the sanitation department of Calcutta, cleaning out the city's sewers. On a regular basis, Rakesh sits in a low crouch at the bottom of a seven-foot-deep manhole, sloshing away in a swirl of human waste and sediment. Equipped with a hoe and a steel bar, and wearing only a pair of loose purple underpants, Rakesh empties the thick black sludge from a clogged sewer into a bucket that his fellow crew members hoist up and dump in the middle of a narrow road. A small mountain of decaying excrement accumulates between the manhole and a rickety wooden vegetable cart. Two co-workers reach down and yank Rakesh out by his sore, extended arms, his body splattered with putrid muck. At 27, with a wife, three young daughters and a monthly income of about $100, he has been a sewage worker for the Delhi Jal (Water) Board for the past 10 years.

Brazilian Mosquito Researcher

Scientists fighting malaria must study the biting habits of the mosquito that spreads it. In Brazil, that's the Anopheles Darlingi, which doesn't fall for the light or wind traps researchers use in Africa: this smart little sucker will come near scientists only when they offer themselves as bait. In the early evening, when mosquito activity is busiest, a mosquito dinner- researcher finds a nice buggy area and sets himself up inside a mosquito-netting tent with a gap at the bottom. Mosquitoes fly in low and get trapped inside, where the researcher sits stoically, sacrificing his skin to science. He needs focus only on his legs to keep him busy: whenever a mosquito chooses a drumstick dinner, the researcher draws it into a mouth tube and then expels it into a container. Veteran researcher Helge Zieler used to put himself on the menu twice a week. On his best evening, he caught 500 Anopheles in 3 hours. Meanwhile, of course, the skeeters feasted on his entire corpus-a grand total of about 3,000 bites, or an average of 17 per minute for 180 minutes on end. "It's not so bad," he says, explaining that his personal response to mosquito bites is an immediate itch that goes away naturally in a few minutes. Except when his response is to contract malaria. Despite taking prophylactic chloroquine, Zieler developed a case that took him two years to shake.

Portable Toilet Cleaner

This job is a sort of combination of garbage collector and gastroenterologist, and arguably more disgusting than both put together. Although most people in polite society methodically avoid situations where they need to use a portable toilet, modern outhouses can be lifesavers. As gross as they can be, they'd be worse without the folks who clean them for a living. Using a tank and a vacuum wand, cleaners must suck up all the waste in a portable toilet. After picking up any stray toilet paper, they also wash down all surfaces that could possibly be soiled, including the walls. This is when a high-pressure hose comes in handy. Usually, cleaning one portable toilet takes only a few minutes, and most workers clean from 10 to 60 of them a day. But it's not always that easy: Portable toilets that tip over require more damage control. Nevertheless, some cleaners grin and bear it -- and take home $50,000 a year.

Flatus Odor Judge

Odor judges are common in the research labs of mouthwash companies, where the halitosis-inflicted blow great gusts of breath in their faces to test product efficacy. But Minneapolis gastroenterologist Michael Levitt recently took the job to another level-or, rather, to the other end. Levitt paid two brave souls to indulge repeatedly in the odors of other people's farts. (Levitt refuses to divulge the remuneration, but it would seem safe to characterize it thusly: Not enough.) Sixteen healthy subjects volunteered to eat pinto beans and insert small plastic collection tubes into their anuses (worst-job runners-up, to be sure). After each "episode of flatulence," Levitt syringed the gas into a discrete container, rigorously maintaining fart integrity. The odor judges then sat down with at least 100 samples, opened the caps one at a time, and inhaled robustly. As their faces writhed in agony, they rated just how noxious the smell was. The samples were also chemically analyzed, and-eureka!-Levitt determined definitively the most malodorous component of the human flatus: hydrogen sulfide.

Cat Food Quality Controller

British man Jon Hanson had what he describes as the worst job in his entire life: quality control on cat food. His task involved several test as he describes. Test 1: Bury face in a huge tub of it and sniff it to make sure it's fresh. Test 2: Plunge arms in it up to the elbows and grope for bony bits and take them out. Test 3: Scoop up huge dollop of it, smear it flat on surface and prod it with fingers to test how much gristle is there. Uggghh!

Roadkill Remover

Pretty self-explanatory. Roadkill collectors not only have the job of peeling the remains of dead creatures in decay off the road in various states, they also get to do it while braving oncoming traffic.

Monkeys Chaser at a Safari

Marin from Canada was hired to work in a safari zoo. He had to be caged-in in a car and drive around from one reserve to the next. Monkeys always climb on top of the car and usually enjoy a free ride for a while. At the exit of the monkey reserve is a zoo worker equipped with a stick. His duty is to prevent monkeys from leaving the reserve on a car. Imagine chasing monkeys in the glowing sun for eight hours.

Horrific deaths

Steve Irwin: Impaled by a Stingray

Is it even possible to start a manly list about anything without the Crocodile Hunter? Steve died as manly as possible on 2006, while filming a documentary entitled "Ocean's Deadliest" in Queensland's Great Barrier Reef. His heart was impaled by nothing less than a short-tail stingray barb. His legacy will impale us forever.

Eleazar Maccabeus: Crushed to death by a War Elephant

Here's a guy with balls of steel, just like his whole family. During the Maccabean revolt, where Jewish people revolted against Seleucidic and Syrian rulers, Eleazar identified a war elephant that he believed to carry the Seleucid King Antiochus V --due to the special armor the elephant wore-- so he decided to endanger his life by attacking the elephant and thrusting a spear into its belly. Yes, the dead elephant then collapsed upon Eleazar, killing him as well, but remained a hero for eternity.

Empedocles: Jumped into a Volcano

Diogenes Laërtius records the legend that pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles died by throwing himself into an active volcano (Mount Etna in Sicily), so that people would believe his body had vanished and he had turned into an immortal god; however, the volcano threw back one of his bronze sandals, revealing the deceit. Another legend has it that he threw himself in the volcano to prove to his disciples that he was immortal; he believed he would come back as a god among man after being devoured by the fire. Ok, it didn't work, but here we are talking about him, which makes him inmortal in a way.

J. G. Parry-Thomas: Died breaking a Speed Record

In 1927, the Welsh racing driver J. G. Parry-Thomas was trying to regain his own world land speed record that had been broken just weeks earlier by Malcolm Campbell on the same beach of Pendine Sands. His car, Babs, used exposed chains to connect the engine to the drive wheels while the high engine cover required him to drive with his head tilted to one side – the right. On his final run the right-hand drive chain broke at a speed of 171 mph (270 km/h), setting a new record, but partially decapitating him as well.

Thích Quang Duc: Lit himself on Fire to make a point

Ok, we agree this wasn't the best way to protest, but he made his point. On 1963, Thích Quang Duc, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, sat down in the middle of a busy intersection in Saigon, covered himself in gasoline, and lit himself on fire, burning himself to death. He was protesting President Ngo Dinh Diem's administration for oppressing the Buddhist religion.

Kenji Urada: Killed by a Robot

After working on a broken robot at a Japanese Kawasaki plant, 37-year old Kenji Urada forgot to turn it off. Big mistake! The Robot woke up, said "hasta la vista", and pushed him into a grinding machine with its hydraulic arm. Ok, he died, that's awful, but we'll always remember him as the man who second man ever to be killed by a Robot. And by the way, the first ever, Robert Williams, went to hit himself with the robot; not manly enough for our list.

Les Harvey: Killed by Rock and Roll

Out of all music styles, only Rock and Roll is manly enough to kill you. On 1972, scottish guitarist of Stone the Crows, Les Harvey, was rocking his guitar on stage with his band at the Top Rank Bingo club in Swansea, and then, rock and roll took his life: he was electrocuted by touching an unearthed microphone with wet hands.

Félix Faure: Killed by Sex

In 1899, French president Félix Faure died of a stroke while in his office. That's the official story, but it is popularly believed that he died in the arms of his 30-year-old mistress Marguerite Steinheil, while receiving oral sex. Au revoir!

Georg Richmann: Killed by a Ball Lightning

Yeah, that's right. Richmann was a German physicist living in Russia. On 1753, created a kite flying apparatus similar to the one built by Benjamin Franklin a year earlier. He was attending a meeting of the Academy of Sciences when he heard thunder, and ran home with his engraver to capture the event for posterity. While the experiment was underway, ball lightning appeared and collided with Richmann's forehead. He died, but we'll always remember him as the man who stood manly in the way of electricity.

Franz Reichelt: Fell to his death from Eiffel Tower while testing his invention

Reichelt (alias the flying tailor) designed an overcoat to fly or float its wearer gently to the ground like the modern parachute. To demonstrate his invention he made a jump of 60 meters from the first deck of the Eiffel Tower, at that time the tallest man-made structure in the world. The parachute failed and Reichelt fell to his death. 

World without people

At the other end of the chronological spectrum, anything made of bronze might survive in recognizable form for millions of years—along with one billion pounds of degraded but almost indestructible plastics manufactured since the mid-20th century. Meanwhile, land freed from mankind's environmentally poisonous footprint would quickly reconstitute itself, as in Chernobyl, where animal life has returned after 1986's deadly radiation leak, and in the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, a refuge since 1953 for the almost-extinct goral mountain goat and Amur leopard. Many of the buildings in Manhattan are anchored to bedrock. But even if they have steel beam foundations, these structures were not designed to be waterlogged all the time. So eventually buildings would start to topple and fall. Once the power goes off, the pumps stop working. Once the pumps stop working, the subways start filling with water. Within 48 hours you're going to have a lot of flooding in New York City. Some of this would be visible on the surface. You might have some sewers overflowing. Those sewers would very quickly become clogged with debris—in the beginning the innumerable plastic bags that are blowing around the city and later, if nobody is trimming the hedges in the parks, you're going to have leaf litter clogging up the sewers. There are places in Manhattan where they're constantly fighting rising underground rivers that are corroding the tracks. You stand in these pump rooms, and you see an enormous amount of water gushing in. And down there in a little box are these pumps, pumping it away. So, say human beings disappeared tomorrow. One of the first things that would happen is that the power would go off. A lot of our power comes out of nuclear or coal-fired plants that have automatic fail-safe switches to make sure that they don't go out of control if no humans are monitoring their systems Imagine if one minute from now, every single person on Earth disappeared. All 6.6 billion of us. Human history just stopped. What would happen to the world without us?