The Slice: Maybe skip this until you are done eating

What better day than Friday to recall readers’ worst jobs?

A few of these would make anyone long for the weekend.

“Cleaning chinchilla cages,” wrote Pat Pedersen.

She was 14. “It was gross.”

I believe her.

“For being so cute they are very messy and stinky.”

Bob Delzer worked at a large cemetery. He recalls being low man on the totem pole, as he put it. His job?

“Cleaning out the chimney in the crematory.”

Moving on. Karen Mobley had an answer. “My worst job was laboratory bug counter.”

She was in grad school in Oklahoma. “I sat in a little office and would do a census on the contents of vials filled with bugs vacuumed off of diseased cliff swallows. I would identify what species of tick or flea had been on the swallow and determine how many were male or female and record it in a spreadsheet.”

And here’s one from Chris Caraway of Medical Lake. He was right out of high school and worked at a plant that made batteries for submarines. “My job was to stand in front of a conveyor belt, and as the batteries rolled past, nonstop, I had to paint the positive terminal red, and the negative terminal green.”

He recalls that he lasted about a week.

Warm-up questions: If Spokane had an imaginary friend, who or what would it be? Is it OK for reporters covering Bloomsday to hope for an English speaking winner?

Today’s Slice question: We’ll get to the question in just a moment. But first, a note from a friend.

“Last winter I decided to move into the 21st century,” he wrote. “So, I changed my Good Paper subscription to the digital edition. It has worked out OK, I guess. Reading the ‘real paper’ is definitely a lot easier in many ways, but that is offset by not having to schlep to the box to get the paper and by not having to dispose of same in the recycle bin.

“But the real downside was just uncovered, if you will forgive the pun. I have begun working on my spring honey-do list, which includes painting and floor work. Of course, any such project requires the copious use of old newspapers, of which I now have none. Dang!”

OK, here’s the question. What is your No. 1 use for old copies of the S-R?

Write The Slice at P. O. Box 2160, Spokane, WA 99210; call (509) 459-5470; email pault@spokesman.com. Anyone familiar with shared workplace refrigerators knows perfectly well why communes, which flourished in the late 1960s and early 1970s, soon faded away.