You ever wake up dreading going to work? Have nightmares about your boring routine at the job and wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat. Well have a read of the jobs below and it may change your perspective on the peevs of your role.

Dont complain about your workstation! Imagine having to go to the toilet in this job!

Nappy sorter
One lucky woman in the US spends her day sorting through thousands of used baby nappies before they are bleached, cleaned and reused. Cleaning one nappy every two seconds, the colourful contents often drip onto her shoes. No matter – she merely uses the next nappy to clear up the offending spillage and moves on without even a pause for thought.

Flatus odour judge
While odour judges might be used by dental companies researching the efficiency of toothpaste or mouthwash, one Minneapolis gastroenterologist recently paid two brave souls to indulge repeatedly in the odours of other people’s f*rts. 16 healthy subjects volunteered to eat beans and insert plastic tubes into them. The gas was collected and inhaled by the odour judges.
Remember that next time you want to complain about a funny smell coming from the office fridge.

Isolation chamber tester“Imagine taking a car trip cross-country with your family. Now imagine that it lasts for months on end, that you can’t open the windows, and that you can never get out of the car.â€? That’s how Marc Shepanek, NASA’s Deputy Chief for Medicine in Extreme Environments once described the severe psychological challenge that astronauts face on long-distance space missions. But at least they’re going somewhere. Just imagine the torture of the men and women picked to test the immobile isolation chambers on the ground. At NASA, space engineers responsible for on-board life-support systems regularly spend months at a time in uncomfortable captivity to test the equipment. Extra cash? No. Still not convinced? You try recyling your own urine for drinking water. Then repeat it a dozen more times over the next 91 days. Exactly.

Carcass cleaner

Natural history museums display clean white skeletons or neatly stuffed animals, but their field biologists drag in rather less attractive specimens, commonly carcasses ripe with rotting flesh. Each museum’s onsite taxidermist has his own favourite technique for sprucing his specimen up to display standards.

One zoologist swears by his preferred strain of flesh-eating buffalo-hide beetles, while Jeppe Møhl at the University of Copenhagen Zoological Museum deposits sperm whales and dolphins into vast empty tanks and lets nature take its course. Finally there’s the old Fatal Attraction boiling method which is useful for samples that even the bugs won’t touch. It’s an approach favoured by archaeologist Sandra Olsen, who can only say of boiling down tough old hyena paws: “It felt like inhaling the gases would literally kill usâ€? Luckily for her it merely gave her a lung infection.

Sewage plant gate cleaner
Working in a sewage treatment plant is a grim proposition at the best of times. But some lucky individuals are plucked from obscurity to scrub the gates that filter out all the ‘material’ from the water as it passes through the plant’s cleaning cycle. Not so much ‘diving for pearls’ as ‘diving for t*rds’, then.

Asbestos remover
The developed world now has a clear understanding of the risks of being in close proximity to asbestos (lung cancer, heart disease, skin complaints, infertility) and it is no longer used as a building material. Luckily, it is now uniformally being removed. One poor soul explains, ‘All day I crawl around in dirt, grime, and spiders in my underwear inside an air-tight suit wearing a very uncomfortable respirator. Millions of asbestos fibres float around me, getting in my hair and eyes. I would be a prison guard any day of the week over an asbestos remover. This is by far the worst job in the world.’

Taxi driver
The job you’re most likely to be murdered while doing. Enough said.

Job Descriptions courtesy of: http://workhate.blogspot.com/2004/01/worlds-worst-jobs.html

As we return from the Christmas / New year break and pour over the 100’s of emails we received during that time, we begin to think about the year ahead. What will we achieve? What will our children will be doing? And when is that next holiday?

What are your predictions for 2008?

Here are a few predictions from The Australian Newspaper:

WESTERN AUSTRALIA

THE West is set for another year of strong economic growth fuelled by record business investment to increase the production capacity for key exports, and more than $100 billion of investment projects waiting in the wings.

But with 800 people moving to the state each week to fill an insatiable job market, the Government faces a major challenge tackling the housing affordability crisis and chronic rental shortages causing hardship to many families.

With an election due in early 2009, there will be renewed pressure to loosen the purse strings to provide significant tax relief, including cuts to stamp duty on property sales.

FASHION

“YOU don’t bring me flowers any more,” trilled Barbra Streisand and Neil Diamond in the 1977 anthem but that’s just what you’ll be getting into in 2008 as designers deliver up a blinding array of blooms in the new season collections.

The fresh mood is more about a softening of lines than an endless Interflora remix of floral prints.

Gone are the sharp shoulders, leather and metallic’s of 2007, replaced with fluidity and lightness best
rendered by Lanvin’s superlative designer Alber Elbaz and also seen at Prada and Marc Jacobs.

There’ll be floaty frocks and soft separates, flowing trousers and feminine blouses to flatter any figure and age.

In line with the new Garden of Eden feel, there’ll be sustainable and organic products and production, as featured in Tamsin Blanchard’s book Green is the New Black: How to change the World with Style. Blooming marvelous.

BUSINESS

THERE are two opposite and approximately equal forces staging a tug of war with the sharemarket.

One is the subprime meltdown, a financial and social catastrophe that has seen hundreds of thousands of first home buyers in the US hand back their keys and walk away from heavy losses.

The other force is the China-India boom, which is showing no signs of going away and is underpinning our resource market in a way that has rarely been seen in the past century.

The latter, most likely, will win which means that share prices will go up. So will the sharemarket and the relevant indices, but to a lesser extent than in 2007.

The US dollar is moving downwards fast but at some point the giant economy will find itself having really competitive exports, which is the turnaround it so badly needs.
By then it may have got to parity with our dollar. One Aussie dollar will equal one greenback, say mid-year.