Mike Rowe Used to Work for Time Off…

Now he stays on the clock 360 days a year. 

Dangling from high-story buildings? Swimming in—to put it gently—filth? Scoff if you will, but Mike Rowe, host of the Discovery Channel’s Dirty Jobs , says the laborers tasked with such unsavory duties might secretly be having the time of their lives. Spirit caught up with Rowe during a rare break to ask why.

spirit: Are there qualities you’ve found that make a job underrated?

mike rowe: It’s dangerous to categorize jobs: good job, bad job, dirty, clean. You can make chick sexing—separating male and female chicks—a multi-million dollar pursuit. At a glance, there’s nothing good about the job. The air is full of crap and dander and teetering little birds, most of which get mulched up. It’s a heck of a thing. But it’s very possible to do very well doing that job that no one else wants to do, and enjoy it. The country was built on jobs like that. 

s: Tell us about a few gigs with an unexpected upside. 

mr: High-rise window washer.  Endlessly cool job. You start at the top and when you get to the bottom, you’re done. Along the way, every swipe, every stroke, it was dirty and now it’s clean. For some added fun, you get to put your butt on a 2 -by-4 and apply all the skills you’ve learned as a mountaineering expert. You rappel down the side of the building with a bucket of suds and a squeegee making clean that which was dirty only moments before. You’ve got a good friend on your right and a good friend on your left. Maybe you’re in Hawaii, overlooking Pearl Harbor. The view is fantastic. The work, while repetitive, is very skilled. It’s not just dragging a squeegee over a piece of glass. There’s actually a very specific kind of feathering technique you have to employ. The glass itself is usually 140 degrees because you’re in the direct sunlight, so you have to do it perfectly, otherwise the water will evaporate before you can wipe it away, leaving streaks. And it’s very profitable. In the end, the guy I worked with on the show—who started washing windows by himself for food 15 years ago—now has 40 or 50 employees, a contract on every high rise in Honolulu, and is a multimillionaire. He started by looking at something that nobody else wanted to do. 

Port-A-Potty Technician. The human race is never going to say, “Look, we voted and we’ve decided we’re not going to crap anymore. So, sorry, you’re out of work.” It’s never going to stop. So, there’s job security there. Secondly, you’re not going to be competing too much. There won’t be many people coming after your job. The challenge is really singular, and that is: your job is to figure out how to like being a Port-A-Potty technician. Once you do that, you’re set. You don’t have to deal with backstabbing or office politics. It’s important to remember: the hard part isn’t facing something difficult, it’s figuring out how to enjoy the challenges. 

Farming. To most people, farming just looks like too much work and the word “farmer” is a pejorative. But a true farmer? He’s a Jack of all trades: a vet, an architect, a carpenter, an electrician, a real generalist, someone who has an enormous skill set. That can be wildly fulfilling with the right attitude. A farmer I worked with on the show? In two days, we dug a well, ran some pipe, built an out-building, and delivered three cows, one of which was Caesarean. You’re never bored as a farmer.  

Waste Water Treatment. A lift pump weighs 4 tons and when it ruptures underground, the container that it’s in—a five-story silo—fills with anything that was in the toilet. Slowly the 4-ton motor is subsumed. Men, meanwhile, are running down a set of spiral stairs around this silo-like structure and muscling their way through a series of watertight doors. When they get into the chamber, they swim to the broken pump. They’re neck-deep in the most unthinkable filth you can imagine. When you get to the pump, you climb on top of it. From the very top, a crane lowers a cable. You affix it to the coupling device and then you hang on as an operator lifts the entire mess. The sound a broken lift pump makes when it breaks the seal of crap that’s been holding it there on the ground, it’ll haunt your dreams. The upside? Did you see Band of Brothers ? When you’re done with a job like that, a couple of things become apparent. The first: Nobody in town realizes what you just did for them. The second thing is the It’s A Wonderful Life paradigm. Remove yourself retroactively from civilization and visualize what a big city looks like without you and your team. You just saved the world, man. 

Skilled Laborers, Generally. We don’t have anywhere near the army of skilled laborers in place to wage war on the crumbling infrastructure that we need to repair: the plumbers, electricians, carpenters, and so on—the Dirty Jobbers. It was that way when unemployment was 7 percent, and it’s that way today.  Washington is promising 3 or 4 million “shovel-ready” jobs, and I think, Wouldn’t it be great if ‘shovel-ready’ was something people aspired to? You’re trying to create jobs that we’ve been systematically demeaning for two generations. Rosie the Riveter is dead. It’s going to be a tough sell. 

s: Your mission statement declares we’ve “demonized dirt” and made “work” a dirty word. How do we make up for it?

mr: I’m no expert, but my theory is that these changes happened very, very slowly and on a lot of different fronts. How we got to the point where the idea of getting dirty and working hard felt like a sucker’s bet, that’s part Madison Avenue, part Silicon Valley, part pop culture, part American Idol —an amalgam of reward mechanisms that celebrate the exact opposite thing of actual hard work. 

s: Is it as simple as putting away our hand sanitizer and getting dirty?

mr: You can follow your bliss however you want in your life, but maybe that’s not the best way to choose a job or a career. Nobody follows their passion into waste water treatment or window washing. You do it because you’re hungry and you’ve found a job nobody else wants to do, and then you do it well, with a good attitude, with an entrepreneurial spirit. People are going to need to be willing to do work for work’s sake and find their happiness in learning to enjoy a job that they might not have dreamed about their entire lives. And that’s OK. There’s nothing wrong with hard work or a dirty job. I can’t tell you how many millionaires I’ve met who are covered in crap. 

s: So it’s only blue collar jobs that are underappreciated? 

mr: I think the big lie is accepting the notion that there are blue and white collar jobs. What I’ve learned from Dirty Jobs and talking with the people I’ve worked with, all of whom seem to line up in that blue collar category, is that this is a false distinction. What’s going on is not really between blue and white collar; it’s actually between an employee mentality and an entrepreneurial mentality. Many of the people on Dirty Jobs seem, at first blush, to fit the employee model, except they just drew a really short straw so they’re on some factory line covered in somebody else’s crap.

 s: And a lot of those people on the factory line aren’t exactly smiling. 

mr: Yeah, I’ll grant you that there are plenty of people out there covered in crap who are miserable if you’ll give me that there are plenty of people wearing a suit and tie who are drones. Let’s take the drudgery and the drones and push them to the side and admit that these are the people who, basically, fit the employee model. The more interesting model is the entrepreneur. The blind spot that we have right now, socially, is that we don’t look at entrepreneurs and associate them with dirt. We associate them with private jets, and that’s dangerous fiction.

s: You weren’t always such a tireless worker yourself, were you?

mr: I basically got my own bluff called. I had figured out that in show business if you didn’t care too much about fame and you weren’t too concerned with fortune, you could actually make a really good living and have about six months off a year. I was motivated, mainly, by the six months a year I got off. I didn’t care at all about the kind of work I got, so I’ve had hundreds of jobs in the entertainment industry. Dirty Jobs , frankly, was a miscalculation. The original show was three hours of the show you know today, dedicated to my granddad. I wanted to do that for him while he was alive, because he’d worked a lot of these jobs. But I wasn’t looking for a series. I certainly wasn’t looking for a hit. I was looking for a couple of cool assignments. This show went into production five years ago and didn’t stop shooting. We had our first hiatus a few months ago. Basically every state, five continents. I began to work 360 days a year. Fortunately, I loved it and I still do. 

s: What else did your grandfather teach you about dirty jobs?

mr: He’s the reason the show’s on the air. He was a master plumber, carpenter, architect, and stonemason all by the time he was 30. He showed a commitment to skilled trades, an ability to put anything together. As a result, he was the hero of his community. Carl Knobel was the guy you called to fix anything. He built the church I grew up in and the house I was born in and he was a role model for everyone who knew him. Today, if he were walking around, he would be invisible. That is the problem. We know who Kelly Clarkson is. We know who Michael Jackson’s doctor was. But the guys like my grandfather who used to be everywhere, omnipresent, a solution on every block, when manufacturing was in the DNA of the country and when fixing things was not only celebrated but revered? They’re disparaged today or looked down upon. The difference between a dirty job and a good job was entirely transparent once upon a time.