timewaster wrote:
Jory wrote:
timewaster wrote:
It'd love to visit the Antarctic. I've always had a fantasy of working at one of those remote research stations.
I've got an Antarctica obsession, and I've got several books about life at the research stations on my bookshelf. According to them, it's not as fun as you'd think. To quote Nicholas Johnson's
Big Dead Place, "I have never heard of one returnee who finally quit because it's the world's highest, driest, coldest or whatever. People leave because of the BS." Also, "If Antarctica has an as*hole, McMurdo [Station] is it."
I can handle that kind of isolation/bs imo, I've had jobs like that before. Now that you mention it though, it's definitely something i didn't consider, those kind of closed working environments are as bitchy as crap. It's very much lord of the flies, the rules go out of the window and for as long as everyones locked up together people start thinking very strangely. Nts for ya imo, crazy sociable bastards.
Based on everything I've read so far, it's just a horrible working environment. People at the top treating people at the bottom like crap, 24 hours a day. Most of them don't even see Antarctica because they're cooped up inside washing dishes or something menial and mundane, and the pay is for sh*t. People go to Antarctica thinking it's all penguins and taking measurements outdoors and stuff like that, but it's more like working at a McDonald's in the middle of nowhere. The book I mentioned,
Big Dead Place, is highly recommended, by the way. I've got several books about life at the research stations there, and it's the best of them.