6

Cleaning Loose Debris On Power Lines With Flamethrower Drones

Whether it's random debris or some bully throwing brand-new laces up there, trash ends up hanging out on power lines. Sadly, since shoe elves don't get hazard pay, some poor schmuck has to climb up a pole and clean that shit up -- two things people usually like to avoid. Like these guys do:

Tencent Sina

In China, high-voltage line maintenance workers are using flamethrower drones to clean the mostly plastic junk from the lines. The flames can reach up to 400 degrees C (752 degrees F) and take only 15 minutes to burn dangerous high-voltage lines clean. Did we mention those are high-voltage lines? Feels important.

5

Picking Christmas Trees With A Helicopter

Unless you come from the kind of mad National Lampoon family that goes out and chops down their own, getting a Christmas tree usually consists of making a trip to the store and getting some teenager in a vest to load it into your trunk. And even for them, the danger level registers somewhere between "splinters" and "being an unwilling participant in a family argument." Generally, nobody is super concerned about their health while handling a Christmas tree.

Luckily, even the most hazardous Christmas tree job won't have anyone wondering about their health and safety. That's because they're too busy screaming "WOOOOO!" while doing it. Since 1976, Christmas tree growers have deemed harvesting their trees by hand to be too "unrealistic." Instead, they now harvest by helicopter, which sounds so much more sensible.

4

Mountain Climbers Have To Clear Garbage (And Corpses) From Mt. Everest

Garbage collection ranks up there with plumbing, sewage system work, and lard-making as occupations that you might not want to sign yourself up for, though you thank God everyday that they exist. While your average sanitation worker might have to get their hands dirty with old diapers, used needles, and last night's Chinese food, it could be worse. They could be doing the job up on the world's highest mountain. Mount Everest's trash collectors aren't mere garbage men -- they're garbage mountaineers. And they do their jobs while freezing their toes off ... sometimes literally.

savingmounteverest.org

Mountain climbers carry 176-pound trash bags, and once those are full, they're winched up to helicopters which whisk them away to a camp below. Which is a good thing, because otherwise sherpas would have to carry these them-sized bags by hand through somewhere called the Khumbu Icefall, which doesn't sound like a pleasant walk in the park.

And there's a grim reason these trash bags are, well, people-sized. It turns out that picking up trash is the best part of this job. Sometimes they have to collect the remains of camps whose occupants perished. Helicoptering possibly haunted trash isn't something you find on everyone's resume.

3

Horse-Riding Librarians Delivered Books During The Great Depression

Normally, the guardians of study materials and the dictionaries with all the bad words circled aren't the kind of people you look to for advice on angry mob management skills or how to best brave the wilderness in search of clever children. But some ladies living in the 1930s had to do exactly that.

Kentucky Digital Library

2

A Librarian Was Tasked With Keeping The Manhattan Project Secret

Another librarian job! Before now, it was probably in your top ten of most boring fields. Sitting quietly in a room is basically the dictionary definition of mind-numbing. Sure, things occasionally get spiced up by punishing loud patrons with spitballs and wedgies and stern looks, but ultimately, being a librarian pretty much guarantees you'll never do anything which warrants, say, an FBI probe and crushing existential guilt.

But that's what happened to Charlotte Serber, keeper of America's greatest secret, the Manhattan Project. Seber had been hired as the head librarian of the facility's scientific library by J. Robert Oppenheimer himself. Why would one of the greatest scientists of all time care about a librarian job? Because he wanted Seber to do something more: devise security methods for keeping all their information safe.

Los Alamos National Laboratory

1

The Knitting Spies

"Danger" and "knitting" are not words that go together in a sentence, unless that sentence is "Grandma didn't know the danger she was in, knitting in that dinosaur park while strapped to that pillar of meat." Face it, nobody's going to look at your new scarf and say, "Oh look, how brave!"

However, during times of war, ladies would occasionally make danger-knitting their lives. Crafty spies realized long ago that codes could be knitted into your average baby bonnet, turning local housewives into domestic James Bonds. They would do things like count train cars and monitor their comings and goings, sneak plans for bombs and aircraft, and generally be around to code messages while listening in on important plans, because who suspects the knitter? This allowed grandmotherly spies like Molly "Old Mom" Rinker to sit on a hill, knitting and observing British troops, all the while passing her eagle-eyed observations straight to George Washington.

John Vachon

But by the time the big wars came along, knitting spies had kicked it up a stitch or two. Nobody suspected Phyllis Latour Doyle, knitter extraordinaire, who parachuted into Normandy during WWII, to be a secret agent working for Britain. Once there, she simply grabbed a bike and rode into enemy territory with a sunny smile and a helpful disposition, chatting with German soldiers like they were old neighbors. When she heard some juicy military intelligence gos, she used a variety of codes from her spy lexicon of about 2,000 knotted messages, which she would put into a silk yarn that she would wrap around a knitting needle. That needle would go into a flat shoelace, which she used to tie up her hair and simply bike right out of enemy territory again. That's artsy and crafty.

Which just goes to show that Philip J. Fry was right: Never trust grandmother types during times of war. They'll stab your right in the back with those needles.

You can challenge Dawn to a fist fight @dawnsmash, or do the same thing but with Dungeons & Dragons over on Discord.

Learn every stitch known to mankind so you too can knit wartime secrets!

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