Dirty Jobs
by: Sundi Rose
Mike Rowe, the star of Discovery’s Dirty Jobs, performs the sorts of tasks most of us couldn't bear to do but are really happy someone else will.Objective: To work more jobs than anyone else on earth. To toil in every state. To labor with men and women doing the kinds of jobs that make civilized life possible for the rest of us. To laugh. To sweat. To collapse. To laugh some more. To prove that hard work and fun can coexist. One peek at Mike Rowe’s resume and you know he is not applying for a job in any mailroom you’ve ever seen. As creator and executive producer of Discovery Channel’s Emmy-nominated series Dirty Jobs, Mike has had the pleasure of performing tasks NOT for the faint of heart. He has examined bird vomit, farmed maggots, repaired elevators, made bologna, cleaned gutters and dug for oil. He is a jack of all trades and a self-proclaimed master of none.
Before Mike became the hardest and dirtiest working star on TV, he sang for the Baltimore Opera (with no formal training) and peddled merchandise in the midnight timeslot on QVC. He learned much about live television during his three years there and worked on a few shows, for TBS, History Channel, FOX and PBS. He officially lives in San Francisco, yet he only spends a few days a month there, due to his heavy travel schedule with Dirty Jobs and his hosting duties for Deadliest Catch, Shark Week and Egypt Week Live. He stays pretty busy, having apprenticed on over 200 jobs in almost every industry and shot in nearly every state. He told SVM he works these jobs (that most of us would avoid at all costs) to “pay tribute to a nation of unsung heroes.”
When asked about the actual purpose of Dirty Jobs, Mike described the show as a way to “conclusively demonstrate that fun and hard work are two sides of the same coin.” Never taking himself too seriously, he is entirely suited to the role of guinea pig because he is decisively not an actor and the show is entirely unscripted. Mike really performs these jobs and admits to being pretty bad at all of them. He confesses, “I have sustained numerous injuries and multiple humiliations while performing the dirtiest jobs America has to offer.” He performs these jobs with pride and an unmatched sense of humor and humbly admits to the special skills of being “very low maintenance and unusually prompt.” These two things have come to be invaluable as he travels the country doing things most citizens would turn their nose up toward.
Spending so much time with the Americans that keep our country running and allowing for civilized life to soldier on, Mike started www.mikeroweWORKS.com. This website is dedicated to the preservation and celebration of careers in the trades and hopes to bolster enrollment in trade schools and technical colleges. It serves as a call to arms, in the hopes of redefining our nation’s dysfunctional relationship with work. He says, “For the last thirty years we’ve been celebrating a different kind of work. We’ve aspired to other opportunities. We’ve stopped making things. We’ve convinced ourselves that ‘good jobs’ are the result of a four year degree. That’s bunk. Not all knowledge comes from college. Skill is back in demand. Steel toed boots are back in fashion. Work is not the enemy.” The website is an ample resource for the Americans looking for information about jobs inside a particular trade. Executed with the same level-headed and pragmatic humor we see Mike employ in every episode of Dirty Jobs it is an invaluable way to call attention to the decline of the trades that Mike believes is “everybody’s problem.”
