Trucking Jobs in Dubai that Stink (Literally)

Over the Road Truckers don’t necessarily need to be reminded of how tough their jobs are. They work hard for days at a time. The time off can feel a day short before it’s back to pounding the pedal. But sometimes a story about a trucking job comes along that just can’t be ignored.

Most Americans know very little about Dubai, a city in the United Arab Emirates. The country of UAE is part of the new Middle East. It’s technically current, it is investor and Western World-friendly, and infrastructure is being created at a manic pace. New skyscrapers, resort communities and highways are appearing literally every day.

With all this progress in mind, it may seem strange to us here in North America to find out about a trucking job created there out of necessity that’s, well, pretty crappy. Dubai put such an emphasis on attracting the world’s greatest architects and engineers to make their fantastic skyscrapers that they overlooked the job of building an adequate sewage system to service all the new developments.

The Dubai skyscrapers are literally filling up their water systems with human waste and it had nowhere to go. That is, until professional tractor trailer drivers showed up to do a job that sounds like one of the worst you could ever get: A skyscraper waste water trucker.

As Kate Ascher explained on NPR Radio Boston recently, she discovered this engineering goof and resulting trucker crap haul industry nearly by accident. She was in the UAE compiling interviews and pictures for her upcoming book The Heights: Anatomy of a Skyscraper. She drove by a seemingly endless line of trucks that smelled horrible, being attended by drivers who didn’t seem happy at all.

She says, “I’m told they can wait up to 24 hours before they get to the head of the queue¦Then they go right back to the buildings across town, fill up again with another load, and turn right back around to get in the line.”

Yuck.

Is your job still sounding bad to you? We hope not.