EDUCATION | Driving tomorrow’s achievements
08 December 2008
A Tribute to Dirty, Difficult, Dangerous Jobs
An Interview with Mike Rowe
An unlikely television program has become a surprising success with a devoted fan base. Dirty Jobs on the Discovery Channel, now entering its fourth season, has been one of the network’s top series in the United States since it began in 2005. In every episode, host Mike Rowe goes to a different job site, rolls up his sleeves, and works side by side with people who perform these tasks for a living every day. By design, the show seeks out people who do jobs that are very dirty, unheralded, and sometimes almost unimaginable to people in cleaner lines of work.
Mike Rowe had an almost 20-year career in performance and television before he conceived of Dirty Jobs and successfully convinced the Discovery Channel to back the project. He spoke to eJournal USA’s managing editor Charlene Porter.
Q: You have a set introduction for every show. Recite it for me and explain what it says about your regard for dirty jobs and manual labor.
Rowe: My name is Mike Rowe. And this is my job: I explore the country, looking for people who aren’t afraid to get dirty, hard-working men and women who do the kinds of jobs that make civilized life possible for the rest of us. Now get ready to get dirty.
That’s the mission statement for the show. We’re finding people who are doing work that most of us go out of our way to avoid. I spend a day with them as an apprentice, try to keep up with them, and have a few laughs. The success of the show, I believe, is a result of those underlying themes about work that we constantly come back to, not just because of the exploding toilets and misadventures in animal husbandry.
Q: There are a lot of things going on in your show. You introduce the audience to jobs that are unseen, even unknown, for the millions of Americans leading nice, clean suburban lives. At the same time, you highlight the skill, the dignity, the humor of the people who do these jobs. Is it intentional that you have those dual themes?
Rowe: It was very deliberate. The show started as a small segment on a local show in San Francisco. I was able to experiment quite a bit with what audiences responded to before I ever took the program to a network. I learned from doing these smaller profiles that there was a real mix between the interest the audience would have in the job itself and in the people who are performing the work.
There is no dignity in work alone. The dignity is in the people. You can’t do a show about work that highlights the good parts of it unless you also include a show about people that highlights the good parts of them.
Q: How many different dirty jobs have you done since the show has been on? And can you give me a list some of them?
Rowe: I finished my 200th a couple of months ago. We’re now in the fourth season of the show, and when we began the intention was to do 12 programs, 12 jobs. I ran out of ideas around 50, and ever since, we’ve turned the programming of the show over to the viewers. Most of the ideas come in from people who actually watch the show.
I’ve done everything from road-kill picker-upper, chicken sexer, artificial cow inseminator, bricklayer, tannery worker, roofer -- anybody who works with hot tar and asphalt deserves a medal. The list includes anything that would pop into your mind immediately, then a whole lot of things you never even dreamed of.
Q: I heard you say on the program once, “As my grandfather said, never trust a fellow with clean shoes.” Did he really say that? What did he do?
Rowe: My grandfather is the reason Dirty Jobs is on the air. He had a seventh-grade education but was one of those fellows born hard-wired with an innate understanding of construction and technical trades. He built my first car. He built the house I was born in without a blueprint. By the time he was 50, he was a master plumber, master electrician, a bricklayer, a stone mason. At the base of his brain, he just knew how stuff worked mechanically and technically.
I didn’t get that gene.
He was a naturally smart guy who was always dirty, always fixing things, always tinkering. My earliest memories are of him and my father, who worked as his apprentice, starting the day clean and coming home dirty and solving some kind of problem along the way.
Q: It’s clear in your words and your voice that you had a great deal of admiration for him.
Rowe: Yes.
Q: But some people today might look down on people with dirty shoes. Why is that?
Rowe: After doing a couple hundred jobs myself, I have formed a few theories about that. I don’t think anybody ever set out to disparage the worker, but as a society we have declared kind of a cold war on the traditional notions of manual labor. We do it in a lot of different ways. On TV, I first noticed it with Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, the first show that deliberately embraced the opposite of the Puritan work ethic. Today, you can see the portrayals of working people in prime-time television in a predictable way. Plumbers weigh 300 pounds and their pants are falling down. Delivery drivers are enormous, lazy people who are the brunt of the joke.
Then the advertising industry pitches the message that the reason we’re not as happy as we could be is that we have to work too hard. We work too much, and we’re constantly reminded we want to get to the weekend a little faster, punch out a little early, and enjoy retirement a little sooner.
So the traditional notions of work have become a target. A war on work has casualties — declining trades, a crumbling infrastructure — and those are things that affect us all.
Then there are larger national trends: policies that lead to the outsourcing of thousands of American factory jobs, the invention of the microchip and other technological tools that replace the traditional toolbox.
Q: You mean the transition from a production-industrial economy to an information-based economy.
Rowe: Exactly. So we’ve redefined what a good job looks like. It’s not that people with muddy boots are considered bad. They’ve just been marginalized. We no longer celebrate guys like my grandfather. We don’t denigrate them necessarily; we just ignore them.
Hard work needs a public relations campaign, so I’m getting a Web site started to focus some attention on these issues. I’m calling it MikeRoweWORKS ™, [www.mikeroweWORKS.com] and I’m thinking along the lines of “Rock the Vote,” only more like “Back to Work!”
Q: You have been an actor, a singer, a TV performer, all pretty clean jobs. When you were at the age of deciding what to be when you grew up, did you make a conscious choice to get a clean job?
Rowe: I made a deliberate choice when I was 18 years old. My grandfather lived right next door to us, and he was as present in my life as my dad. I couldn’t do all the things that my grandfather could do, so I simply got sick of failing. I had an appreciation and respect for the kind of work he did, but I decided to go as far from it as I could and try and find something that came as easily to me as construction came to him.
Q: What do you mean failing? Your grandfather gave you a hammer and you couldn’t hit the nail?
Rowe: I could get the nail in the wood; it’s just that it wasn’t easy. I can hang drywall; it just takes me longer. I was constantly struggling to do what they did with ease. I got sick of that. I didn’t know anything about entertainment; I didn’t know anything about performing, but I did know that it was going to require a completely different part of my brain. As [American poet] Robert Frost said, “Way leads on to way” [from “The Road Not Taken”], right? Next thing I know, I’m dressed like a Viking, and I’m singing in the national opera. Then after that, I’m selling stuff in the middle of the night on QVC [a cable television shopping channel]. Then I’m producing a show for American Airlines that airs on all their flights. Then I’m working with Dick Clark, then Joan Rivers; then I’m a freelancing travel guy; then I’m at the Discovery Channel.
The big irony for me is that after 18 years of freelancing in television, I finally have a hit on an international network that is the leading provider of nonfiction entertainment in the world. All I had to do to get this job was to go back and embrace the precise things that I spent my adult life running from.
I ran from that because I didn’t want to fail in front of my dad and my grandfather. Now whatever success I have has a very specific price. That is, my willingness to fail every day, not just in front of them, but in front of millions of people in 173 countries. The only way to pay tribute to a really good landscaper, for instance, is to put a novice landscaper next to him — that’s me — and let the viewer watch the two of them do the same basic job. That’s how the show pays a tribute to these people. Watching me doing the job with the landscaper — or whatever worker we’re featuring — viewers can connect the dots and realize that most jobs are harder than they look.
Q: You also have said on the show that some of the happiest people you’ve ever met go home every day smelling bad because they work with stuff like sewage and garbage. Are you saying that workers you meet in dirty jobs are generally happier people than you meet in cleaner professions?
Rowe: It’s a generalization, but I’ll stand by it. Happiness is a tough, subjective thing to define. But I will say that after a couple hundred of these experiences, the thing I find is balance in the lives of people I’ve met. People with dirty jobs have a balance in their lives that I don’t see in my friends who are actuarial accountants and investment bankers. They start their day clean; they wind up coming home dirty, but somehow they seem to be having a better time than the rest of us.
I have a lot of theories on that, but at base, it has to do with the sense of completing a task. So many “good” jobs these days don’t give you a sense of closure. For a lot of people in office work, the desk looks the same at 6 p.m. as it did at 6 a.m. How do you know when you are done?
People I work with — hey, they got a dead deer in the road. They do their work and it’s gone. You got a ditch to put in. In the morning, it’s not there. In the evening, it is. People with dirty jobs live in a world of constant feedback. For better or worse, they always know how they’re doing. That matters.
People in the building trades — the stone mason who can walk through town and point to structures he created. That’s a legacy. Even skilled factory work is really a rewarding thing when it is mastered. That’s the exact thing we don’t portray fairly in our culture today. Most manual work is now presented as some form of drudgery.
We shouldn’t try to draw a stark line between clean and dirty, hard and easy. These aren’t opposites; they’re different sides of the same thing. People with dirty jobs seem to have an innate understanding of that — and a better balance in life.
Q: Besides dirty jobs, you do dangerous ones too. I’ve seen you swimming with sharks, grabbing alligators, hanging off of cable cars at the top of a 3,000-meter cliff. You do these jobs for a day and hope your luck holds out. But what’s your sense of the motives of people who perform dangerous jobs day after day?
Rowe: I’ll tell you a story. You mention swimming with sharks. I was working that day with Jeremiah Sullivan, the guy who invented the shark suit, which divers can wear to get in the water where sharks are circling and come out with all their limbs. So I’m standing at the end of a boat with Jeremiah, about to dive into a shark feeding frenzy. I’m wrapped up in this protective shark suit, which is kind of like chain mail that a medieval knight wore. I’m scared to death, by the way. Right before we jump in, Jeremiah says to me, very matter-of-factly, “Look, Mike, man-to-man, I got to level with you.”
“Yeah?” I say.
He said, “This is going to hurt. You’re not going to die, but this is going to hurt like hell, and you need to know that.” It was an amazingly sober moment because in that second he put personal accountability and awareness squarely on my shoulders.
Q: It’s going to hurt, sharks are knocking you around, snapping at you, and Jeremiah does it anyway, day after day?
Rowe: Every day. Interestingly, the places where I’ve been that you mention, rightly, as dangerous — they have a very low incidence of injuries and accidents on those work sites because workers in these places have this sense of their own personal safety. They aren’t lulled into a sense of complacency about it. I think that can happen in a factory or workplace where management hangs banners about “safety first.” It becomes a platitude, a buzz phrase, and that’s when people can get hurt. Your own safety is your own business, and you can’t lose sight of that.
Q: Looking back on the winding path of your career, what do you say to someone on the verge of adulthood trying to figure out what to do in life?
Rowe: There is a term in Greek literature for a reversal of fortune. It’s called peripeteia: when the character realizes he was wrong about everything, when Oedipus realizes he’s been sleeping with his mother. Bruce Willis realizes at the end of The Sixth Sense that he’s been dead the whole movie. That’s a peripeteitic discovery. So I’d say to a 19-year-old that it’s OK to realize that you are completely wrong about something.
I had one of these moments a couple of years ago: Everything I thought I knew about work has been wrong. What I saw growing up was right. I realized how I had overreacted in my intent to get as far away from it as I could. Now through fate, luck, or serendipity, I’ve been pulled back, and I’m completely surrounded by the very people I grew up with. I spent 20 years avoiding something that seems destined today, and it’s all fine. Everything is happening the way it’s supposed to be happening.
So the practical advice that comes from that to somebody who is 19 years old is, don’t limit your options. Don’t do it. Today, a lot of people 18 and 19 years old aren’t being told that they could have a lucrative career in the technical trades. It’s not part of the path that most parents assume their children should take. The college route, the “ideal” jobs, the “ideal” clothes, the lifestyle — everything we celebrate in this culture doesn’t really redound to the plumber, the electrician, the steamfitter, or the pipe fitter. There are opportunities in all those areas. Their ranks are depleted in the United States today. Our infrastructure is crumbling. There is a real opportunity to master a trade and either strike out on your own, or be employed by a decent company, make a good living, raise your kids, coach their baseball team, and have a balanced life.
You may look at that life and say, nope, I’d rather be a corporate executive. Fine. All I’d suggest is that you look at all your options before you make those kinds of decisions.
I want this Web site, mikeroweWORKS, to really help kids in making some of those decisions, presenting those options about opportunities in skilled labor. I’ve already received lots of great feedback, much of it from parents who want a place where they and their kids can investigate career options that aren’t necessarily college-dependent. So I want kids to be able to do that, and plumbers, electricians, and all kinds of contractors say that they would like a place to chat, exchange stories and experiences. Eventually, I see mikeroweWORKS as a robust place where people can gather to share, educate, and celebrate the business of working.
Swimming with Sharks
In his blog, Mike Rowe shared a story about one of his most dangerous jobs.
[The job of the day was] to make and test a “shark suit,” a steel mesh contraption consisting of several hundred thousand tiny, metal rings that must all be welded together by hand. To test the suit, I headed out to sea. I was accompanied by Jeremiah Sullivan, a dyed-in-the-wool lunatic who fears nothing and should have his own TV show. Jeremiah and I proceeded to create a massive pond of blood and tuna bits. Many dozens of sharks appeared and surrounded the boat in a frenzy of uncontrolled dining. The water was a boiling mass of gray skin, red blood, and white teeth. Then wearing full scuba gear and shark suits, Jeremiah jumped directly into their midst. I followed. Together, we descended 50 feet [15 meters] to the bottom. I knelt next to him as he opened a bait box full of bonito [a fish in size and characteristics between mackerels and tunas]. Sharks love, really love bonito. Within moments, the pandemonium that had existed on the surface was transferred to the ocean floor. We then began the actual job, which was to test the effectiveness of the suits we were wearing. In other words, get bit by sharks. On purpose.
When I say that we were completely surrounded by dozens of ravenous sharks, I am not exaggerating. When I say that we were bitten, rammed, and slammed into the sandy bottom time and time again, I’m not engaging in hyperbole. And when I tell you that I was profoundly frightened for my life, I am not even kidding a little.
I was bitten four or five times. Jeremiah, many more. We’re both fine, albeit bruised. Shark suits work. Hallelujah.
Mike Rowe blogs about many of his experiences on http://dsc.discovery.com/fansites/dirtyjobs/dirtyjobs.html.
The opinions expressed in this interview do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.
