I want in! And so does the rest of the gazillions of people inhabiting this tiny planet of ours. Last week, an ad was placed online, encouraging people to apply for what is touted as the best job in the world. The job description?
Whoever “wins” the post gets to be the caretaker of a little island paradise in Australia. This is what is written in the job description as published in the official web site:
The role of Island Caretaker is a six-month contract, based on luxurious Hamilton Island in the Great Barrier Reef. It’s a live-in position with flexible working hours and key responsibilities include exploring the islands of the Great Barrier Reef to discover what the area has to offer.
You’ll be required to report back on your adventures to Tourism Queensland headquarters in Brisbane (and the rest of the world) via weekly blogs, photo diary, video updates and ongoing media interviews.
But that is not all! There are other tasks which the caretaker might be asked to do, including (but not limited to) the following:
Feed the fish - There are over 1,500 species of fish living in the Great Barrier Reef. Don’t worry – you won’t need to feed them all.
Clean the pool – The pool has an automatic filter, but if you happen to see a stray leaf floating on the surface it’s a great excuse to dive in and enjoy a few laps.
Collect the mail – During your explorations, why not join the aerial postal service for a day? It’s a great opportunity to get a bird’s eye view of the reef and islands.
Now tell me if anyone can ever resist that job? Apparently, everyone and his mom visited the site after hearing about the job opportunity, making the web site crash.
I don’t know about you but I have always dreamed of working for any one of the government’s intelligence or law agencies; say the FBI or CIA. This year, it seems that the FBI is going to make some people’s dreams come true. According to Reuters, the FBI is launching a mass hiring campaign for agents. The report states:
The FBI said on Monday it had launched one of the largest hiring blitzes in its 100-year history involving 2,100 professional staff vacancies and 850 special agents aimed at filling its most critical vacancies.
The agency, which seeks to protect the United States from terrorist attack, fight crime and catch spies, among other duties, said it currently has more than 12,800 agents and about 18,400 other employees.
Over 2,000 job openings in the FBI – can you imagine that? This is the premier government agency dealing with all sorts of issues and to be part of the FBI is an honor in itself. If you’re wondering why they are conducting a hiring campaign on such a huge scale, the answer lies in many things, one of them the September 11 attack. Though it has long been over, the FBI has since then received a lot of criticism for not having enough people to handle the needs that they face. These include agents and staff who are multilingual and experts in computer science. As such, the agency is seeking to add fresh blood to its ranks.
If you’ve got the skills – and you pass the security check – then this just might be the perfect time to consider a career move.
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.? ?
We have all been exposed to the various peaks of job opportunities which started with Information Technology, call center agents and then lately that of nursing and caregivers. The different trends towards emphasizing on the high demand for such jobs has become a yardstick in measuring which among the many job opportunities would be in the limelight.
This early, everything points towards blogging to be the next boom with regards to providing new job opportunities. The notion that this line of work is limited to people with a journalism degree is totally false. With the proper use of grammatical skills, anyone can blog about anything and for anyone if he or she would simply do the steps necessary to be good at it.
There has been a lot of rumors that people have been making money through blogging. Depending on their purpose, article writing and blogging with emphasis on quality content has truly been rising. It would not be surprising if by this year, a lot of people will be blogging and using this as their main source of livelihood.
