Hi Mike,

My wife’s best friend is a manager at Pet motel. I’ve seen you do pet things before but maybe not on the scale that this place does. They are the largest in IL and just imagine what is left after a full day after a holiday weekend! They have cats, dogs and other different animals on day to day basis.

Info:
Best Friends Pet Care
(Formerly American Pet Motel)
22096 N. Pet Lane
Prairie View, IL 60069
Ph: (847) 634-9444
Fax: (847) 634-9260

Dear Mike Rowe... I would like to invite you to my coal burning steam production facility to help clean out the fire side of a boiler..making charcoal will look like a white collar job after diving into this continous ash producing demon. No respirator filters required. This process is done using a fresh air supplied mask..this being done working off of a three section scaffolding...after sliding under a 2000 pound steel and firebrick leveling gate. I seen you clean various boilers on the show, nothing like this though..so, if ya think you have what it takes...

..Mike..should have added, boiler cleaning in Macomb, Illinois. Western Illinois University..easy enough to find on-line or in the phone book...

Hey My name is Nick.

I am an Auto Technician in North Aurora, IL
So i guess it would be Auto Tech/ Riverfront Chrysler Jeep/ North Auror/ Illinois

Things get pretty dirty doing this job and we all at the shop would love to have Mike come through and so him a day in our world.

Golf Course Superintendent/ Hillcrest Country Club/ Long Grove,IL
Golf Course Superintendents all over the midwest must take a snow soaked, muddy courses and turn them into a piece of art for all to enjoy.

Stefan Sperlich

I've got a couple of suggestions all located in and around the wonderful city of Chicago!!

1.) Dump the green dye in the Chicago river for St Patties day.

2.) Might be a tad dangerous but since the public transit, the "L" in particular, is undergoing a ton of construction and updates, how about doing a bit on the Chicago Transit Authority. I see lots of potential there.

3.) There is wonderful Cafeteria/Deli called Manny's located at 1141 S Jefferson St that is the bomb-diggity. The fellow that usually works the corned-beef slicer is a real character. How about Mike cook up some potato pancakes, slice up the corned-beef, and dish out some kreplach!!

4.) A little late for this one, maybe for this coming winter, but how about a road salter. Chicagoans really like their roads salted when the conditions get a bit icy and I am pretty sure there is some dirt to be had in this occupation.

5.) Garfield Park Conservatory is one of the nation's largest conservatories and it is celebrating it's 100th birthday this April. With all the plant life, man-made lagoons, and glass windows I am sure there is some cleaning and maintenance to be done.

6.) Just outside of Chicago is the Illinois Railway Museum. It is the largest Railway preservation museum in America. They maintain and upkeep all kinds of trains from the newer to the seriously old.

7.) The Taste of Chicago runs for a week or so this year at the end of June. A gluttony fest that is jam packed with yuck and fun.

8.) The Uptown Theater is a historical Chicago landmark that is currently being salvaged from destruction. The Chicago Archicenter is profiling historical landmarks in an exhibit they have named "You Are Here" and the Uptown is in the most need of help and care.


I guess there are more than a couple of suggestions but hey, the more the merrier.

Re-posting for member.

machnhed1
Junior Member
Posted 02-19-08 09:43 PM
Spend a day as a paving contractor/laborer for family-owned Parrish Paving in Crystal Lake Illinois. With easy access from Chicago's O'hare airport you'll get to enjoy the following:

1) 400 degree asphalt on 90 degree summer days. You get to help spread the asphalt and tamp/shape the edges after the paver lays the bed. It's very hot.
2) A farmers tan. You wear work boots with socks (necessary to keep hot asphalt off your skin if it gets in your boot).
3) Sealing old driveways. The dirtiest job. You get to spread oil sealer on driveways and fill buckets of sealer to carry to remote parts of driveways. The sealer dries hard, so it will ruin your clothes and it reacts with the skin, so you have to put on an oil based tanning lotion before you begin to prevent it from reaching your skin.
4) Interact with the family:
- The owner: A big guy (think Pauly from orange county choppers) with a heart of gold.
- The oldest son: The brains of the operation. He'll push you and everyone else on the job site to the brink.
- The tallest son (he's 6'10"): He'll fight with his brother and keep you laughing.
- The wife: the straight laced bookkeeper who keeps everyone paid on time.

You will have a ratings winner this day.

quote:

Originally posted by DJModChickie:
Re-posting for member.

machnhed1
Junior Member
Posted 02-19-08 09:43 PM
Spend a day as a paving contractor/laborer for family-owned Parrish Paving in Crystal Lake Illinois. With easy access from Chicago's O'hare airport you'll get to enjoy the following:

1) 400 degree asphalt on 90 degree summer days. You get to help spread the asphalt and tamp/shape the edges after the paver lays the bed. It's very hot.
2) A farmers tan. You wear work boots with socks (necessary to keep hot asphalt off your skin if it gets in your boot).
3) Sealing old driveways. The dirtiest job. You get to spread oil sealer on driveways and fill buckets of sealer to carry to remote parts of driveways. The sealer dries hard, so it will ruin your clothes and it reacts with the skin, so you have to put on an oil based tanning lotion before you begin to prevent it from reaching your skin.
4) Interact with the family:
- The owner: A big guy (think Pauly from orange county choppers) with a heart of gold.
- The oldest son: The brains of the operation. He'll push you and everyone else on the job site to the brink.
- The tallest son (he's 6'10"): He'll fight with his brother and keep you laughing.
- The wife: the straight laced bookkeeper who keeps everyone paid on time.

You will have a ratings winner this day.

Mike and Dave , Parrish Paving is the Paving contractor that we were planning on using for the taping. I let Bud ( The Owner of Parrish Paving . ) know about the possibility of you guys coming out this coming Spring/Summer. We can do the Paver repair work here at Casey with me and my father Greg. Then from one family to the next , go out and pave with the Parrish family. The Parrish's have been awesome customers of ours for years and have become good friends of my father ( Greg) and I over that time period. So yes you WOULD have a ratings winning combo in this !!! Family repair work, to family paving spells a Dirty Job.


Jeremy

I would sugesst the Oberweis Dairy factory, in North Aurora, IL. i work at one of the ice cream and dairy stores, the Naperville North store. I cant personaly say that its a dirty job, but even in the stores we can get pretty dirty. so, just a thought.

Flight Attendant, Ryan International Airlines, Rockford, IL.
Mike,
As glamorous as a Flight Attendant may seem, it's a dirty job. We have to clean, serve, pick-up vomit, clean lavatories on a 10 hour flight, catch people joining the "mile-high club", etc. You name it, we've seen it! All of this, and we still have to look great, be happy, and get yelled at, eat a meal in a tiny space while someone hands us a used diaper and thank them for it. Our company is based in IL, but we go all over the world and see a lot of interesting things. It's a dirty job! Please think of us!

I have worked at a Christmas tree farm in northern IL for 20 years. I started when I was 13 and still do it part-time as I am a 4th grade teacher now. The tree farm (Williams Tree Farm) is one of the largest choose and cut farms in the nation. We do all kinds of dirty jobs. Anything from, cleaning out reindeer stalls, to getting covered from head-to-toe with green-z-it a product that helps lock moisture in trees before the dormant season. We get covered with tree sap, mosquito bites, ticks,and much more as we shear or shape the trees. We have so many dirty jobs that I could in no way do them justice without taking up a good part of your day reading about them. It's the best place to work and get dirty anytime of the year. I started when I was 13 and plan on working there seasonally until I die.

Hotel Housekeeper/ AmericInn Oswego, IL

Every day is something new. Someone threw up in the jacuzzi. Hotel parties and mobs of people. Silly string covering every inch of the carpet. It's dirty, it's hard, and I gotta do it all again tomorrow.

Service truck driver/Keister's Tire Center/Monmouth, IL

My fiancee is a service truck driver for Keister's in Monmouth, IL. His job is to fix or replace tires. He mostly deals with farm equipment and semi tires. Many of the tires he changes are as big as he is. He travels a lot and is on call 24 hours a day, every other week. Which means he gets called, at all hours, to go fix tires for truck drivers or farmers.

When he comes home from work, he smells like dead fish, because of the chemicals he works with, and is covered, from head to toe, in dirt and who knows what else.

He changes tires in ditches, on the side of the highway, and in fields and pastures. This means he wades through and lays in dirt, mud, and manure, before he even get to touch the grease and grim on the tire. He has even been bit by a farmer's dog.

Mike, I think it time that you helped change tractor tires!!!

Hello Dirty Jobs,
I have a very dirty job for you. Here in the Midwest, during the month of July, many of the teenagers and young adults home from college detassle. Detasseling is a job that involves walking through acres of corn fields pulling the tassels off the stalks to produce seed corn. These kids start early in the morning (6 or 7 am) and work sometimes for 8 to 15 hours depending on the position they hold. Most of the kids are just "pullers" but you will have some that are the crew bosses (in charge of crewsof up to 15 kids that go to the different fields), assist crew bosses, and field bosses(In charge of the Crew bosses and are the ones that postion the pullers in the field, give breaks, check to make sure the tassles are getting pulled correctly and moving the machines from field to field). The kids must walk through the fields from one end to the other. The corn is socking wet from the humidity that hangs in the air, it is extremely hot (no breeze can reach you while down in between the stalks that can sometimes be 6 foot tall) and muddy (the farmers will turn their irrigators on the previous night so the ground is literally a big mud puddle. I have heard stories in which the pullers get their feet stuck in the irrigation puddle and lose a boot or a shoe!). Many kids don't make it past the first day because of the heat, humidity, dirt and work. My own children have done it since they were 12 years old. My two oldest (21) are now Field Bosses and my youngest (16) is a Crew Boss. Detasseling last from the usually just after the 4th of July until the first week of August. It's a hot (mid-day temperatures reaching 90 degrees with humidity levels around 80%), dirty job but in order to have the seed corn that America needs, it must be done.
My name is Tracie and I live in Delavan, Illinois. It’s a town of about 2000 people and teenagers have been doing this job since before my grandfather was born. Our little town would love to welcome you and your crew and to show you what teenagers from the Midwest are made of. They are tough, hard working young adults who know the meaning of working hard for the money!! The company they work for is Dare Detasseling that is located here in Delavan.
Thanks Tracie McConnell
Delavan, Illinois

Specimen Processor,
Quest Diagnostics,
Woodale, Illinois.
The job is to process all human specimens that come into the loab for testing. This includes blood, serum, urine, feces, sputum, pap smears, histology specimens ( i once got an 85 year old woman's breast implant). The position must also handle all samples that spill or break intransit by recovering the requisition (aKA wiping the poop or blood off, and sterilizing it). The position must then measure out up to 4 L of the smelliest urine on the planet (60 yr old man urine prserved with HCL), take an aliquot and put it in que to process.
This Job is dirty and EXTREMELY DISGUSTING! After doing this JOB these is little one can do to gross me out now. Think about it, nobody is sending stuff to the lab because they are healthy of feeling great.I've done a lot of dirty jobs but this one was the worst!

My grandfather has a cattle company in rural Southern Illinois, located in Elkville, IL. A couple of times a year you have to "sort the cows", which basically means you sort out the young bulls of the herds to be castrated. Once they're steers they'll be the beef sent to butcher. The job involves: rounding up the entire herd (bull, cows, and calves); sorting the young bulls from the rest of the herd; having a veterinarian at the farm with his tools, he has the nasty job of "stickin' 'em & snippin' 'em"; and then you load them on a trailer or let them go back with the herd. Simple enough, don't you think?

P.S. It's better to do this on a muddy day.

Re-posting for member.

epah
Junior Member
Posted 02-24-08 07:36 PM
What about a Veterinarian Assistant at an animal hospital! Some of the dirty jobs that assistants do is expressing anal glands, helping with surgical procedures, setting up fecals for egg idenification and collecting urine from dogs. I am the Office Manager at an animal hospital in Aurora, Illinois called Eola Point Animal Hospital. I would love to show Mike Rowe how "dirty", helping dogs and cats can be!

Re-posting for member.

denise8
Junior Member
Posted 02-24-08 05:04 PM
I work for a uniform sales and rental company. One of our customers is sugar recycling plant. The name of the place is Pullman Sugar. They are located at 700 East 107th St., Chicago, IL. Phone: 773-821-9114.
I think this would be a very dirty job dealing with sticky syrupy mess every day. Not to mention I heard that they also clean up spills on highways when they happen and recycle that too. I'm sure the equipment gets pretty nasty as well.
This business is part of the Dutch Farms Complex where they deal in all kinds of dairy products and other foods. If the sugar recycling place isn't dirty enough maybe the rest of the place is.

Re-posting for member.

rescueandheal
Junior Member
Posted 02-24-08 03:19 PM
How about a place that does animal rendering recovery. I have a co-worker who works part time for Millstadt Rendering in Millstadt IL just about 15 minutes from St Louis MO. He tells of tails of having to use a winch to pull in dead animal carcasis from the farmers fields. So time frozen sometimes NOT. Its a very stinky and messy job. One time he tells us of a time he was about 3 hours away on the road for a pick up and the truck would not go faster than 30 miles a hour and the temp was near 95 degrees. No a/c in the cab too. The phone number is (618) 538-5312. or millstadtrendering.com

Hope to see you there.
Michael Douglas

A fun job that is always changing is working as a Building Service Worker in Wetzel Hall at Western Illinois University in Macomb, Il. From the surprises that can be found on a floor bathroom after a long weekend (or just during the weekend) to cleaning out the garbage shoot at any point in the day. Most of the dirtiness can be found working the late night weekend shift, after the students have spent a night partying. So I hope to see you soon Mike.
The Penthouse RA