Can enough good things be said about “Dirty Jobs?” In a recent episode, host Mike Rowe visited a Norcal Waste Systems transfer station in San Francisco. The show included all the de rigueur gross-out moments: scooping out the leavings in the back of a garbage truck that had just deposited its load, extracting waste from the tracks of a pit bulldozer and, most alarmingly, slogging through a water and waste-filled holding area beneath the area where transfer trailers are loaded. These are tasks that barely give pause to most of our readers. My wife nearly had to leave the room.

But what struck me most was the pride in and devotion to the job displayed by every one of the workers. Moreover, each seemed to have held his or her respective position for a very long time. Rowe asked just about every worker he met how long they’d been doing what they were doing, and the answer came back 10, 20, even 30 years. Amazing.