There are many jobs in this world that I personally would not want to do, nor am I creative enough to think of all of them in order to list them here. So, I shall tell you that recently, as I arrived at the office, I was confronted by one of the plethora of evidently necessary yet indubitably under-valued careers the working world offers.

The entrance to my office building is a veritable jungle of elephant palms and ferns, the former standing hundreds of feet tall (I’ve never been good with measurements). During our less-than-productive days in the office, we can look out our fifth story windows and wave to the birds perched in the fronds atop the palms. We’ve even given some of them names. But, while coconuts falling on noggins kill more people each year than shark attacks in the islands, who counts the number of persons shat upon from on high? Even if not that many get splattered on any given day, there remains avian guano aplenty “making its mark” on the pavement below. This is where my nominee for under-appreciated and likely under-remunerated laborer of the year comes in.

There is a position whose duties require the employee to toss buckets of water across the sidewalk and then, using a stiff broom, scour the daily deposit of bird dung off the cement so as not to offend passing tourists or secretaries heading for lunch.

I’m not going to say I like seeing white speckles all over the sidewalk like some concrete form of measles, but it doesn’t necessarily seem to me to be something that needs taken care of on a daily basis. You know, it’ll rain eventually, or the offending splotches will, in their own good time, just fade away. But evidently the administrators or investors who run this joint think otherwise. They actually pay someone -- albeit probably not well -- to man the bucket and broom each day and scrub, scrub, scrub at excrement spots marring the stark, grey beauty of the concrete. At least he gets to be outside.

Now, this thought leads me to further considerations about this poo-cleaner’s probability for being the poo-ee due to the fact that he spends the better part of his day under those very same palms where those very same birdies perch.

I took a peek out my window today to see if I could catch the otherwise elusive scrubber at his work to see if he has a method for avoiding that which he cleans up. Do you suppose there’s a certain score kept by those that ply this trade as to how many times fecal matter has found its way onto their heads, shoulders, or other exposed parts? Does one gain prestige with one’s colleagues should one take a direct hit somewhere in the cranial region from a passing hawk who has had a recent meal that was evidently of the fish persuasion? Is one shoulder worth more than the other, and can you get bonus points for taking two hits at once? Wouldn’t you wear a hat at least?

To put it shortly, I have only seen the bird poo-cleaner man at his duty (I said “duty”) station once, and he was working on a comparatively minor patch of guano out toward the middle of the sidewalk. At this point I began to wonder if other cities have this career field open to willing but otherwise unemployable souls, or is there a bird poo cleaner-man union? I can only imagine that places like Venice or the Antarctic -- places people visit just for the soul -- could pay out a king’s ransom to their armies of poo swabbies. Imagine Saint Marc’s Square without the pigeon dung or the South Pole without, well, I was going to say without penguin number two, but I’m not at all certain that such is an issue due to the partially aquatic nature of those little beasties.

I mean, this is not a job path that my career counselors mentioned back in high school. No, they wanted us all to be middle managers, morticians, or at least a respectable bail bondsman; they never once mentioned that someone, somewhere in the world, was making a living keeping our walkways free of semi-offensive avian excrement. Of course, there were never many birds nor many public squares in what I affectionately refer to as Crap-tastic-castle -- you would think differently, wouldn’t you?

So, as I look down tomorrow upon the pedestrians doing their best impression of bustling around this tropical city, I shall seek to spot that elusive cleaner-upper of flying pooping machine deposits and perhaps even pin an award on his chest. The order of the Platinum Turd. Delightful -- but not worth the ribbon it comes from.