Funny you should mention those. My uncle Gordie, who now is a lighthouse keeper on Machias Seal Island, used to watch ice in the arctic by being flown about it in a Lancaster (he raised his family on Baffin Island, and one of his sons-in-law is now a meteorologist at Eureka on Ellesmere Island).
Geordie has one heck of a tale of a fellow with the loneliest job. Back when my uncle was being flown about the arctic, there were a handful of meteorologists who spent six month shifts in remote huts on their own. One fellow, who was on the winter/night shift, started talking about his girlfriend during the radio transmissions. The relationship of which he spoke started getting more and more serious and intimate. My uncle figured he was just making it up to pass the time. My uncle was wrong.
The fellow really did have a girlfriend – it was one of the chickens with which he had been provisioned.
Come spring, the fellow was flown out and institutionalized.
My cousin Heather and her hubby (the fellow who is now up on Ellesmere), spent a few years as lighthousekeepers and meteorologists on Sable Island, which is a dust spot in the Atlantic Ocean – just a long line of dunes and a few wild horses.
They loved it.
I guess it must be hard to be lonely if you are alone with the right person.
I don’t have any lonely jobs to add here. I just wanted to say that I work circulation and reference at a small academic library here while studying for my masters degree in the evening, and we’re just getting busy again after the holiday break. Needless to say, my job involves heavy interaction with the public. So today we were swamped with customers, all of whom were complaining because they were getting outdated overdue notices of books they had already returned because some bozo forgot to send out the messages on time. For some unknown reason, a lot of them didn’t speak English very well, so we had to show them on the computer that the book was returned, and we knew the book was returned, and we weren’t going to charge them any money, so could they please stop shouting at us in Bulgarian. The circulation desk, by the way, is too small for the number of people who work behind it regularly. We have one fewer computer than we do circ desk librarians, which means that we are forced to play musical patrons when there is a crowd around the desk, which there often is, because our circulation software was apparently typed out by a billion blindfolded retarded monkeys on a fermented kiwi fruit bender after having been given a fifteen minute time limit instead of the customary billion years, so that it takes forever for each book to process. Oh, because of that, I might have accidentally lent a book to a patron without charging it out, or maybe it wasn’t me, because like I said, no one actually has his own workspace. We just lurch around the circulation desk willy-nilly, tripping over orthopedic chairs and cushioned mats placed there on the advice of an ergonomics specialist who apparently came to the conclusion that back and joint injuries could be best avoided by falling and smacking your head against a seat rest in a workspace that is smaller than my first college dorm room. So anyway, no one knows where this book is, and this is like the third such complaint in the past month, and the patrons pick their books up in the exact same space other patrons leave their books to be returned, and every time I mention this to my supervisor, he gives me a look like I suggested that we legalize acid brownies for first graders, and right about now forest fire lookout in the middle of nowhere is starting to sound like the best job I’ve ever heard of in my fucking god-forsaken life.
You spend hours per day on the road in the same seat looking at the same dashboard, hopefully scanning the radio stations for something other than static. You get occasional contact if you can tolerate the idjits on the CB, and you get to see people at truck stops and fueling stations, but everyone exists within their own little bubble and it’s even lonelier to be around people you can’t converse with than it is to be alone for 22 hours a day.
I don’t believe it’s the loneliest job in the world, but it’s certainly one of.
I spent 23 years on the road. I owned and operated an 18 wheeler. The name of the game is miles. You can’t make any money socializing w/ truckstop waitresses, as inviting as it might be. I grew to really enjoy my solitude, so much that in my current retirement I spend almost all of my time alone.
On another tack, there are, or were, many U.S. Coast Guard jobs in very remote locations. One that I know of is Kure Island. There is, or was, a LORAN Beacon located there. It used to be a manned station, but is now automated, if it’s still used. Kure is about 60 miles west of the Midway Is. and very near the International Dateline.
There’s quite a few isolated LORAN stations that are still manned by the USCG - and they are lonely jobs indeed. For the remote, isolated stations, members are assigned for a one year, unaccompanied tour. For their troubles, they will receive first choice of available assignments upon transfer, and get 30 days compensatory leave when they returm. I believe they also get additional pay.
Alcohol and depression can be big problems at those units, especially since many of them are near the arctic where daylight can be lacking for long periods.
The lighthouse appears to have been running normally until the 15th of December, but when members of the crew of the Hesperus, one of the lighthouse service vessels, made a routine visit to the lighthouse 11 days later, none of the staff of three were to be found. How or why the lightkeepers disappeared remains a mystery.
Most likely they got on each other’s nerves until a huge punch-up ensued, the survivor either committing suicide or falling off a cliff.
I’ve remembered a friend of mine had a job counting fish in rural Alaska for six months. She saw some of the local tribe every now and then, and could use the satellite phone once a week, but was otherwise totally cut off.
