On a walk down 5th Avenue today in the height of heat (well, let’s be honest, basically every time feels like the height of heat this week) and after seeing some idiot running on the sunny side of the street without carrying water, I started thinking about some of the jobs that I would absolutely hate to have during this heat wave. To be fair, most of the jobs I am about to list are jobs that I would hate to have at basically any time but right now they seem especially unpleasant. Also, I am pretty sure that these jobs can fit into one of the three following categories, or some combination of multiple categories, thereby making them especially awful:
(1) Jobs that involve mostly being in the out of doors during the sunny part of the day and especially those jobs that include intense, or even not so intense, physical exertion of some kind;
(2) Jobs that involve dealing with things that are stinky which are necessarily made extra stinky by the oppressive heat;
(3) Jobs that involve dealing with the public because, let’s be honest, the heat makes people crazy.
These items appear in no particular order mostly because the heat has made me too lazy to come up with any sort of scoring system to make ordering them make sense. Also, if you have suggestions for jobs I might have forgotten, feel free to send them along and if they might my highly rigorous standards (AKA as long as they are funny and/or things that I would hate doing) I will add them in! And without further ado, Rebekah’s Official List of the Worst Ever Jobs to have in NYC During a Heat Wave.
1. Sanitation worker2. The people who clean out the port-o-potty’s in Prospect Park or, let’s be honest, anywhere at all
3. The counter person in one of those trendy, or not-so-trendy, food trucks
4. Traffic cop, both the people who give out tickets and the people stuck standing in the middle of the asphalt surrounded by hot and angry drivers who they have to tell where they can and cannot go (wearing pants and one of those silly orange vests for safety)
5. The lady who sells empanadas (or as I like to call them, fried sandwiches) on 5th Avenue and then has to push her cart all the way back to Sunset Park which involves going uphill
6. Emergency response people
7. Door men at fancy hotels (sort of related question: are there door women? I have never seen one.)
8. Security guards who have to wear black t-shirts and stand outside looking tough. In my experience looking tough makes you hotter
9. Delivery people for restaurants
10. Postal workers
11. Seriously pregnant women (that counts as a job, right?)
12. Someone working in an ice cream store that has run out of ice cream
13. Winder washers
14. People that lay asphalt
15. Anyone working on the roof
16. Camp counselors
17. People who work in the kitchen. Believe me, I just boiled some peanut butter and honey and other shit to make homemade granola bars and basically almost died
18. Movers
19. People who deliver kegs of beer to bars and have to somehow get them down the stairs and also people who deliver sodas and beer to grocery stores and bodegas
20. People who work in a store that’s air conditioner has broken or that has owners who are too cheap to buy an air conditioner and so not only are those people stuck working in the stuffy stuffy place in which they work, drowning in a pool of their own sweat, but also they have to deal with all the people who come in expecting a rush of coolness only to find stagnant heat and then they say something stupid like “what, no air conditioner?” and you have to try and not bite their heads off
21. People who have to wear costumes as part of their job. This is not so common in NYC but I’m told we have that racist guy who runs around Central Park in an Elmo costume…although, come to think of it, he sort of deserves to be hot and uncomfortable (thanks, Paul Haney!)
22. Anyone who has to work in a basement with no air flow with a lot of machinery which overheat to the point where when they walk outside they actually feel cooler (Paul Haney again!)
So, that’s the list. Feeling thankful (for once) that the bar in which I work is The Most Air Conditioned Place Ever.
franklyrebekah 
Two hot jobs in my past — 1974 and I am working at Kean’s Cleaners in Maplewood (your Bama remembers) in an April heatwave, no A/C and all cleaning and pressing done on-site. Jump to 1987, training for sales with Acorn Structures I am required to help build a house for 6 weeks. In July. In Manassas, Virginia. Interestingly, I got used to the heat as well as walking in, around and on top of an unfinished house sometimes 6 stories up. You got both of those covered in your list!
Both of those things sound terrible! HA!
Ugh. That reminds me of the summer I managed the Neighborhoodies store nextdoor to your bar before you worked there! I was working at a heat press in a hot box. Remember when you brought me a fan so wouldn’t die? You’re the best friend ever!
Ha I do remember! I walked it all the way from the Atlantic Center!!!!