The UK’s 7 Worst Jobs

According to a recent survey, these seven jobs are the United Kingdom‘s WORST jobs ever. Not only do do the people who have these jobs sound utterly miserable with their daily tasks, but they are also paid a pittance for it.

I wonder though, if some of these jobs could actually be more interesting than say, sitting in front of a computer all day in a tiny cubicle where you rarely get to see any real daylight or form of nature. In that case, I’d rather have the Zoo Keeper’s job – but no thanks to the hospital laundry, a cubicle sounds just fine to me.

1. ZOO KEEPER

IT sounds like a great job, but London Zoo keeper Sebastian Grant reckons life on the other side of the animal enclosure is anything but rosy.

?The thing about looking after animals is there is a lot of mess,? he explains. ??What comes out of the end of an animal needs cleaning up. Animals are also potentially dangerous. Even an anteater can tear a hole in a man.
?As well as being dirty and dangerous, this job has long hours. We start every day at 8am ? even on Christmas Day. And you don?t go home until the work is done, so the hours can be very long.

?I?m not saying driving a cab is easy, but it?s certainly not a harder job than mine.?

2. FRUIT MACHINE ENGINEER

ROGER EASTAFF reveals he would drive round pubs in Coventry fixing fruit machines, payphones and pool tables.

He says: ?An average day was spent in horrible urine-scented dive pubs. Aside from finding used condoms and syringes in pool tables and cleaning vomit off payphones, there was the constant threat of having a pool cue wrapped round your head for the sake of a handful of change.?

3. HOSPITAL PORTER

WHILE working as a porter, Frazer Payne?s daily duties involved wheeling the dead to the morgue.

He says: ?On one occasion as I tried to move the body, the trolley scooted away from me and I stumbled after it with the corpse in my arms. This set off a whirlwind of panic as the other patients began screaming and fainting. When I finally got the body to the morgue, rigor mortis had begun to set in and the body started to sit up.

?In order to slide the bench into the freezer I had to put my knee on the legs and lie across the body to push the upper torso down. I was never so glad to be sacked.?

4. JIGSAW MAKER

WORKING 11-hour shifts in a cramped factory with two 15-minute breaks for ?3 an hour was normal for James Prendegast.

He recalls: ?My job was to lean on and deflate the plastic-wrapped boxes of jigsaws as they rolled out of a plastic wrapping machine.

?Every week this machine would seize up and when they opened it, thousands of jigsaw pieces would fall out. Virtually every jigsaw was missing at least one piece.?
5. BOX FACTORY WORKER

SAM JORDISON worked in a warehouse for a week where they flattened old cardboard boxes and sent them to wholesalers.

He says: ?It was physical agony but it was the mental pain that weighed heaviest. I was working with a guy who?d been there for 20 years. He told me he dreamed about boxes, saw boxes when he closed his eyes and could taste boxes when he ate. And every 20 minutes or so he would shout ?BOXES? at the top of his voice.?

6. LAUNDRY WORKER

HOSPITAL laundry worker Ralph El Turk was paid 18 pence an hour extra to work with dirty bedding.

?It just wasn?t worth it,? he says. ?Masses of dirty laundry would come down these big shoots.

?They would be covered in human waste, blood, and once, with what looked like someone?s kidneys. You spent most of the day with your face in, or near, urine.?

7. WEEDKILLER SPRAYER

AFTER dropping out of university, Dan Kieran took a job spraying weedkiller along roadsides.

He says: ?Every day I had to wear a green boiler suit and carry a 35-litre tank of toxic weedkiller on my back. My 12-hour shift consisted of scaling the banks that run alongside motorways.

?When three months of this hell had ended I went on to spray the streets of Slough, which was worse.

?Kids would run up shouting, ?Ghostbuster!? and laugh in my face. One day an incontinent lady tramp came up, patted me on the arm and said, in a soothing voice, ?I bet your parents are proud.? ?

Fossil Treasure Trove In Australia

We have an unquenchable thirst for knowledge about everything. This includes a desire to solve the many mysteries of the past and reweave some of the lost tapestries of history. So a find like the caves in the southern Nullarbor plains of Australia is treasure indeed.

The caves contained fossils, complete skeletons of animals that are no longer found today. Most of these creatures are found to be from the middle pleistocene era. The bones have been dated to confirm that these are from creatures living 800,000 to 200,000 years ago. Some of these species did not make it past the ice-age.

With the use of the fossils, 8 new species of kangaroo have been completely identified. Two of the species are of tree dwelling kangaroos, kangaroos that adapted to living in the branches of trees. There were also fossils of various species wallaby, various species of large lizards among them one of the King’s skink (a large lizard), mulgara and a pair of parrots.

Internet Code of Conduct

At last! Steps are being taken to put a code of conduct on the net. With so many millions of users spanning the globe, it is about time that some measures are taken to protect the interests of the users.

Talks on this matter were initiated by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Vodafone groups. Working with human rights groups they aim to have the code available before the end of the year. The target is to get more protection for the internet journalists. Currently, exercising ones right to free speech online can get one thrown in jail. They also aim to get rid of the practice of monitoring legitimate online activity.

If they are successful, clearer guidelines will be in place and internet users can be properly held accountable for their online actions. The internet is meant to be free for all to use but some safeguards must indeed be put in place without curtailing the freedom of the people.

China’s River Dolphins Extinct

Most people love dolphins. There is something about that seeming big grin that they have and how playful they are that sparks our interest. They are amazing creatures with their sonar and intelligence.

Most of the time dolphins are found in the sea. There are a few however whose natural habitat is fresh water. They aren’t that common. Unfortunately, most of us may never get a chance to see them since the Yangtze River dolphin or baiji are now considered functionally extinct.

The baiji are also called the goddess of the Yangtze by some. There used to thousands of the dolphins swimming in the Yangtze in the 1950′s. By the mid 80′s their numbers were down to the hundreds. Now the expedition to help protect them couldn’t find even one.

It is a great loss for the world. The baiji was an ancient species. There is fossilized evidence showing that the baiji have been in existence for 20 million years. Thanks to pollution, over fishing and the damage to their habitat, they are now gone.

Baby Plesiosaur Fossil Found in the Antarctic

Millions of years ago, dinosaurs roamed the earth and another piece of evidence of this has been found one of the islands in the antarctic. This baby plesiosaur is about five feet long and is almost completely intact, much to the delight of its finders.

The expedition was led by James E. Martin, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology’s Museum of Geology where the bones will be put on display. Other members of the expedition included Judd Case of Eastern Washington University and Marcelo Reguero from Argentina‘s Museo de la Plata.

The best known image of a plesiosaur for most people is Nessie or the Loch Ness monster as it is often called. Though this skeleton is a mere five feet, an adult would measure about 32 feet long. It wasn’t easy to transport the fossil. It was finally flown by helicopter to its new home.

Since the bones were found in volcanic ash, the scientists speculate that the plesiosaur may have been caught in an eruption. It could have been killed by the blast or by the lava or ash from the explosion.