A while ago I made a bet with my boyfriend’s roommate, and I lost. As a result, I was supposed to watch an episode of “Dirty Jobs” with Mike Rowe on the Discovery Channel.

Before writing this column, I had never really sat through an entire “Dirty Jobs” segment. Every so often, I would catch snippets of the show and be entertained, but it never really held my interest for an extended period of time.

This time, I actually gave the show a chance and watched an entire episode. I watched a re-run where the first half featured scientists who explored uncharted areas in caves in order to discover new species of insects. The second half featured fishermen who fished for slime eels to sell as a delicacy in Korea.

Rowe and his whole camera crew got down and dirty during the first job when they crawled on their hands and knees in a mud-filled cave to discover insects, all in the name of science. It didn’t sound that bad at first, I mean, yeah they were crawling around in mud, but people have dirtier jobs than that. Then, one of the scientists mentioned that the mud was mainly comprised of cave cricket poop.

Plus, when Rowe had to spelunk his way through a narrow cave passage, he got stuck. I don’t think I’ve ever been more nervous watching a show before, and it didn’t help when the scientist said nothing when Rowe asked what the plan was if he couldn’t get out.

Luckily he did, and the show moved to the second segment about slime eels.

To catch the eels, the fishermen baited traps with dead fish to lay on the ocean floor. The crew would pull the trap up and throw the eels onto a platform where they proceeded to separate them from the slime. The slime looked like giant globs of mucous, and the eels kept producing it (I’m not sure why they bothered to separate slime from eel because they just made more of it, but they did).

Now I know I don’t watch this show that often, but it had me exclaiming “Ew!” every minute, and it was probably the grossest job I’ve ever heard of. Even Rowe admitted it was the dirtiest job he’s done.

Overall, the episode was entertaining but more importantly, the whole show is very inspiring. After watching it, you have a newfound appreciation for people who do these dirty jobs day in and day out. It’s a show about the average working man or woman and what they do to help keep our country running. The show really makes you think about life and what is important. It also serves to humanize the average worker and shows that despite having some of the dirtiest jobs in the world, they still take pride in what they do. Without these people, life would not be the same and Rowe helps capture that sentiment.

And if that’s not incentive enough to watch it, Rowe is hilarious and quite sexy!

Colleen is a junior in Media and she is very glad that she lost the bet. She can be reached at [email protected].