I’ve always thought that the poor souls in Hell who are forced to wash Satan’s notoriously foul rear end surely have the worst job ever. (I’ve forgotten the Biblical citation for the passage in which these ablutions occur. You’ll have to trust me on this.) Even Satan’s most hard-hearted demons — those who are able to oversee, without breaking into tears, those poor souls who are forced to watch an endless loop of Nancy Pelosi’s speeches — feel compassion for the Rear Enders (their official job classification).

Their job is made worse because Satan is literally the boss from Hell. “You missed three dingleberries!” the Evil One would scream in that irritatingly screechy voice of his. “Use some elbow grease, minions!”

I’ve never had a job quite as bad as the Rear Enders, but I’ve had three that come close.

Setting dynamite. On a summer break from college, my job for a Eugene, OR, explosives company was to drag dynamite, crammed into wooden boxes, into a tunnel that was dug into the side of a hill. (The company was blowing up the hill for its gravel.) I didn’t know it when I signed on, but working around dynamite, especially in closed spaces, gives a person a splitting headache. So there I was, a pampered college student on my hands and knees, dragging heavy boxes of dynamite down a cramped tunnel, all the while suffering from a pounding headache. College life never looked so good when school started back up again.

Setting pins in a bowling alley. For a few years in the 1950s, I set pins, usually in the summers, in a small eight-lane bowling alley in Compton, CA. It was loud back there in the pits, hot as the dickens, and physically demanding. In the course of an eight-hour shift, I would lift approximately 8,400 pounds of pins (at 3.5 lbs a pin) to distribute among the chutes in the rack. I would sometimes go home with bruises on my shins, the result of pins ricocheting off the sides of the pit and into my legs.

Digging a slit trench latrine in the Army. While on bivouac in Germany, my buddy, Richard Marino, and I, both Privates, were “volunteered” by our First Sergeant to dig a 20-foot-long trench for a latrine in hard soil. Ditch-digging beneath a hot sun had an influence on me in one important way: I removed ditch-digging from my list of potential careers.

There was one upside to the task: After we had dug the trench, it was mildly entertaining to watch my fellow soldiers — some of whom had laughed while I was digging the ditch — as they squatted precariously on a horizontal pole suspended out over the ditch, their bums on display before the world. You can be sure that I indulged in some sweet schadenfreude as I contemplated that sight. Until it was my turn.

Have you ever had a job that was tougher and more grody than mine? I didn’t think so, namby pambies.