More Answers From Mike: Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | Page 4 | Page 5 | Page 6 | Page 7 | Page 8 | Page 9 | Page 10 | Page 11 |
Q: How did you get involved with the show?
A: I was hosting
Evening Magazine in San Francisco, and pitched a segment called
Somebody's Gotta Do It. We started to profile unusual jobs in the Bay Area, and before long, I found myself extracting the semen from a prize bull and placing it (very gently) into the uterus of a cow. That segment got a lot of attention, and we discovered there were tons of other exciting and dirty jobs out there.
That's when we pitched the idea to Discovery Channel and thus launched the
Dirty Jobs series.
Q: What was the dirtiest job you've had to do?
A: There is no obvious answer, but bat biologist has got to be near the top. Bracken Cave is about an hour outside Austin, Texas, and home to 40 million Mexican free-tail bats. A bat biologist enters the cave once a month to check on the health of the colony. To do so, he must wade through 3 feet of guano (bat excrement) and make his way to the far end of the cave, where the bulk of the bats roost.
The temperature is over 100 degrees. The air is filled with ammonia, and quite toxic. The bats, 40 million of them, are hanging overhead, urinating constantly, defecating deliberately and giving birth randomly. All of the aforementioned substances are falling upon us. The guano that we're standing in is filled with billions of flesh-eating beetles, which survive on dead bats that periodically plummet from the ceiling.
Bracken Cave is like no other place on Earth, and quite possibly the dirtiest hole on the planet.
Q: Do you ever get scared doing a "dirty" job?
A: I have a healthy fear of most dangerous things, but when you work alongside people who don't, you either suck it up or look like a sissy.
A few months ago, I was in Tampa, neck-deep in a muddy, slime-filled, methane-rich water hazard searching for used golf balls. (Yeah, it's a job.) Though golf balls were my objective, I was focused mainly on avoiding the water moccasins and snapping turtles that seemed to infest this particular hazard. At some point, I stepped on something in the murky, muddy ooze that shot out from under my feet with alarming speed. It was an alligator, and I haven't been the same since.
Q: Is there a job you wouldn't do?
A: I would never direct. Some things are just too hideous.
