Dirty IT jobs

Computerworld (US edition) lists some of the grubbiest jobs in information technology.

You may be ordered to crawl into the nastiest corners of your office — or to explore the nastiest corners of the Web. You may be required to stare zombie-like at a network monitoring console, waiting (possibly hoping) for the alarms to go off, or be chained to an endless series of spreadsheets and Word docs, looking for minute differences in data. You may end up berated, belittled, or sobbed at for circumstances that have nothing to do with you.

Even dirtier IT jobs: The muck stops here – data crisis, engineers, IT jobs, malware – Computerworld

Let me tell you about the time I (briefly) worked as a field service engineer for Burroughs Machines.

One of the items in our tool case was a pair of hairdresser scissors. It turns out that the long haired young women who operated one of the computers than included a band printer would often get their hair caught in the mechanism. Lessor scissors would hack at their hair, the idea was to make a clean cut so a hairdresser could clear up the style later.