Man Up

Today, I stumbled upon a couple of new shows. They are so obviously geared towards men.

How do I know this…well…the commercials are full of machismo. Four-wheelers, ginormous trucks, sports etc. The only reason that I was subjected to commercials in the first place is because I was watching the boob tube that does not have a DVR. It’s archaic.

Anyway, the newest shows are Dirty Jobs and Deadliest Catch. Dirty Jobs, hosted by Mike Rowe is an exploration of all the jobs that you never want to do. Mike tags along with a regular worker on his or her job and gets right in and gets his hands dirty. The first installment of one that I watched today was maintenance of elevators in New York. They were scraping layers of grime and grease off parts of elevators. Then they had to go to the bottom of the pit and clean up all the crap in the dark, dirty, stinky (apparently people enjoy peeing into elevator shafts…..who knew?) bottom of the elevator shaft (lots of shaft and lube references…again…man show). The second was hand making bricks? WTF…I never imagined that someone did this by hand. Again, they managed to find the opportunity for shaft comments. It is quite the process let me tell you. It took just one show for me to be quite thankful for my mind numbing job.

The other show made me pretty thankful that I have a desk job as well. Deadliest Catch follows Alaskan king crab fisherman in…yes, you guessed it Alaska. Besides the obvious charm of having to grind up tons of frozen and fresh fish into mulch and create a bait bag for the crabs, you get to enjoy being tossed around on a huge boat with the angry sea kicking your ass. You would think that they would go out and do their job when the sea was calm and peaceful. But no, there is apparently only so many weeks a year that they are allowed to fish. So, come hell or high water (pun intended) they are out there. At the beginning of the show they showed the men going to the store shopping for food for the three weeks that they are out at sea. Okay….so there are probably 6 or 7 seven guys on this particular ship (there are several ships, but they only showed the shopping trip for the one) and they spent $2,800 and some odd dollars. What the hell are these guys eating? I get that men can chow down…but c’mon!! I digress. Cut to the ship at sea, there are these gigantic metal ‘traps’ that they have to get into the ocean. Each ship carries different amounts of traps/cages depending on the size of the ship, crew etc. Each cage is probably 7x7x3 and I would say it weighs several hundred pounds. It gets hoisted onto the launch pad by a gigantic magnet, baited and dropped into the sea. The fun part starts when the boat starts pitching and lurching. Then the baskets start swaying back and forth and you can imagine that’s not particularly conducive to launching the traps. They have 160 or so of those damn things that they need to launch and Mother Nature has just decided to pitch a fit.

They have winds coming in and 50, 60, 70 mph all different directions, throw some rain in there and bam! They manage to get all the traps out in 18 hours and that’s where it left off. Can’t wait to see the ending of that one…because you know the boat managed to blow a head gasket and is at ½ power with one mother of a storm coming their way. There was a brief mention of their payday being $35,000. They are earning every single cent let me tell you.

It was nice to see these men being men. I could almost smell the testosterone. Thank you Discovery Channel. Another addition to my series recordings.