Has this first full week back at work after the holidays felt like a long slog through thick mud on a molasses freeway? Trying to figure out how you’re going to make it to your next set of holidays, sometime in the distant, glorious days of May? Well, in the spirit of “it could always be worse,” this week’s Friday 5 considers the worst jobs currently on television. After all, those 6:30am starts may be tough, but at least we don’t have to work at any of these places.
5. CSI
The workplace: Forensic crime lab
Why you don’t want to work there: Some might get excited by the combination of science and mystery-solving, but those people have a stronger stomach than I do. Not only would you have to spend your days surrounded by bloody, decomposing corpses and their various innards, but you’d have to do it in a ridiculously dark room. Think of your poor eyes! I mean, this is a science lab. Turn on the damn lights, people.
4. How I Met Your Mother
The workplace: Lily’s kindergarten class
Why you don’t want to work there: You are the only adult in a room full of thirty 5-year-olds for eight hours a day. Do I really need to elaborate? (Note: I like children and am a teacher myself, though I teach 18-year-olds about representation on Battlestar Galactica. It may be the same field, but those fields are in entirely different countries.) I cannot imagine a job more likely to induce complete and utter exhaustion on a daily basis. To those that actually are kindergarten teachers, I salute you.
3. The Wire
The workplace: The Baltimore police department
Why you don’t want to work there: Sure, you get to fight the good fight, working to clear a rough city of some of its worst criminals. But that fight comes with a steep price. The stress will make it nearly impossible to enjoy a healthy relationship. You’ll spend five nights out of seven in the bar, trying to drown the worst of the day. The criminals you work so hard to catch will be released on a technicality. Perhaps most frustrating, you’re caught in never-ending political squabbles between morally bankrupt congressmen, self-interested superiors and ambitious mayors. Considering that, these days, the BPD isn’t even getting paid fully for the work they do, this job looks like a one-way ticket to Miseryville.
2. Prison Break
The workplace: a prison
Why you don’t want to work there: Whether you’re employed at the Fox River State Penitentiary of the first season or the Soma Prison in season 3, the job’s got to suck. In the first case, you’re spending all day quelling riots, removing the bodies of those who met the wrong end of a shank, and relaxing with your corrupt and immoral colleagues. In the second one, you’re stuck on a platform with a machine gun, watching all day for the inevitable Michael Scofield escape — and knowing that it’s only a matter of time before he finds a way to make you look the fool. No comfortable state pension is worth all that.
1. 24
The workplace: CTU, Los Angeles
Why you don’t want to work there: It sounds great, doesn’t it? You get to do all sorts of heroic and exciting deeds, are always privy to the latest intelligence, and share office space with some really hot people. But the simple fact is, at some point, you will die. Everyone does. And you won’t die in a quiet, gentle way, either. You will be shot by a trusted friend, trapped in a room with nerve gas, blown up in a car explosion, or possibly incinerated in a nuclear blast. Add this to the fact that you have to constantly watch your back to ensure the resident mole isn’t trying to frame you for treason, and it’s hard to imagine a less relaxing environment in which to earn a paycheck.
What do you think? What television workplaces would have you scurrying for the unemployment line as fast as your legs would take you?
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January 11th, 2008 at 11:07 am
Sunnydale High School. It was on a hellmouth and if you were a principal you got eaten.
January 11th, 2008 at 1:06 pm
Wernham Hogg, SLough, from the UK version of the Office. A little too close to home, as far as I’m concerned…
January 11th, 2008 at 1:15 pm
Oooh, Wernham Hogg is a brilliant one.
Any hospital seems to subject all or some of its staff to hideous ordeals but I think Chicago County probably wins where amongst other things staff have been subjected to brutal attacks in the toilets, stabbings, shootings, small pox infection, kidnapping and rape. Not to mention the minute you step out of the hospital you will get run over and lose your legs, crushed in crowds and even buying a coffee can get you shot. You will never have a successful relationship and if you attempt one the partner automatically dies or your child dies or both.
And then there’s the helicopters…
January 11th, 2008 at 3:07 pm
Happy time Temp services from “Dead Like Me.” Fake cheerfulness, and filing in a place that didn’t really seem to do ANYTHING.
January 11th, 2008 at 3:48 pm
See, now, I kind of always wanted to work in the lab on CSI. Something about all those extended close-ups made forensic labwork seem deeply fascinating.
January 13th, 2008 at 12:09 pm
I could not watch The Office UK back when I had an office job — it was just too realistic. After a whole day working on pointless, menial tasks, I didn’t want to spend my free time watching others do the same.
Bextera, Sunnydale High and Chicago County would be awful, too. They almost make an office job sound like a good time.
January 14th, 2008 at 10:54 am
I have actually just started watching The Office US, and am starting to think that the workplace there is even worse than Wernham Hogg (what’s it called? Dunder Mifflin? Something like that?).
I am also starting to grudgingly admit that it may actually be better than the UK original.
January 14th, 2008 at 11:11 pm
Jess, you may be the first English person I’ve heard admit that The Office US might be better. They won’t kick you out of the UK for that, will they?
January 15th, 2008 at 11:38 am
I hope not. I should say that my (albeit Scottish, not English) boyfriend also thinks that the US version is better; he couldn’t watch the UK version because of the intense cringe factor, but for some reason doesn’t feel that fof the US version, possibly because it’s more removed from personal experience.
From my point of view, it may also be down to novelty - I’ve watches both UK series a few times - and also near-total Ricky Gervais burnout.
March 10th, 2008 at 7:24 pm
Yes, but if I worked in Baltimore PD on The Wire, I could sleep with Jimmy McNulty. That guy sleeps with everyone!
(And the Panama prison is Sona, not Soma.)
March 13th, 2008 at 11:42 pm
Steph, you are absolutely right — it IS Sona. Thanks for catching that.
I’m sure McNulty would sleep with anyone, being the slut he is, but I think I’d be a bit nervous, considering exactly where that man has been.