Upon browsing Digg this morning I found an interesting post which provided both humour but the truth about some of the ‘perfect’ jobs that you only wished for at a young age.
5) Pirate
The truth of a pirate’s life is totally opposite from how it’s portrayed in the films you will have no doubt seen, there basic day to day duties would involve a similarity to a cleaner of a hotel. They would have to perform the same mind-numbing tasks each day – every day.
Disease played an important role in the typical pirate’s life, the lack of vitamin C resulted in scurvy which would result in your teeth falling out, frequent bleeding from your nose and gums and an upset stomach which would be unpleasant for the rest of the crew.
4) Cowboys
Despite what you see in the classic Wild West movies an actual real cowboy’s daily chores couldn’t be further from the truth. Real cowboys simply walked alongside cattle on horseback to get them to trains so that they can be loaded with goods. Some of these walks could have been over 1,000 miles so the job of keeping the cows moving (and in the right direction) was one of the worst jobs of its time.
Not to mention this job was severely underpaid for the amount of work it entailed.
3) Knights
Although the thought of being able to roam your land and fight off any unwanted presence sounds like an appealing job. Many of the knights in the past were hardly called upon and their ‘real life’ involved a great deal of farming in order to keep their family from going into starvation.
In the event that they were called to battle, if they got injured they would receive a painful death as back in those days most wounds would turn septic leading to extreme pain until it got unbearable and they died.
2) Samurai
The major drawback to being a Samurai was the extent of the code of honour and the discipline when/if you went against it. They had a ritual called ‘seppuku’ which translates into escaping capture, if at one point they felt like the enemy forces were to capture them they had to slice their stomach from left to right committing suicide.
This ritual was also used as a punishment if a Samurai ever did anything against the code of honour as it was a method to regain that lost honour.
1) Private Investigators
When PI’s are mentioned people assume the guys that solve crimes and get paid a big wad of money for doing some top secret work. In the real world many insurance companies and collection agencies used PI’s in order to follow people around who are trying to avoid the truth – for example people claiming health benefit money for having a bad back or people claiming to be out of work.
Another popular task of the average PI was during divorce cases, if wives could catch the husband at anything they shouldn’t it will dramatically affect the divorce settlement. Basically you would be following some guy around for days watching his every move.
Posted: October 6th, 2008 under Funny.
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