Giant Pigeon Poop Scooper
Qualifications
Unsurprisingly, a poop scooper must have experience with bad smells, particularly faeces. It is unlikely that amateurs have dealt with poop of this magnitude, which is why before they are hired as professional scoopers they are put through rigorous training to get them used to the job.
The most well known and despised training course is known as the Roof of Hell. Trainees are made to scrub an entire roof of a makeshift house clean, cleaning roughly 3 tonnes of giant pigeon poop. Most jobs won't require cleaning 3 tonnes of poop at one particular time, thankfully. Cleaning the Roof of Hell is also timed, and in every single training facility is a local scoreboard and a national scoreboard.
The local scoreboard scores every single trainee that has cleaned the Roof of Hell at that particular facility, while the national scoreboard looks at everyone that has ever cleaned the Roof of Hell. This is possibly the most competitive a trainee gets, as everyone tries to beat the national record, which is currently set at 38 minutes.
Payment
Professional, paid poop scoopers are not paid salaries. Instead, they are paid per roof. Many workers work under a specific facility, and when someone calls for a cleaner, the manager recommends a particular worker. They are called out, and based on the size of the roof and the amount of poop, they are paid a certain amount. Following a worker to the house needing cleaned is an evaluator; evaluators are the people that work out the costs per job.
History
Poop scooping has long been an occupation. Ever since giant pigeons were used as a mode of transport, people needed some way to remove the excess poop from their roofs and so people were hired to clean them. As the job became more in demand, professional establishments formed where people could train in the field.
Social Status
Poop scoopers are both looked at in disgust and are revered in society. Many people wonder why one would take a job like this, but many also thank them for doing so. The majority would agree that they wouldn't want to be a professional poop scooper, and so they often leave extra large tips as a thank you.
Some taverns and inns don't invite poop scoopers in, these are usually the more wealthy establishments. They believe that poop scooping jobs are reserved for those that cannot afford to do anything else, and believe that anyone who picks such a disgusting job is disgusting in nature.
This belief is fairly outdated, however. Nowadays, poop scoopers are looked to more as heroes than anything else by the mass, as giant pigeons are used regularly and without poop scoopers, the cities in the Region of Sarra would be flooded with pigeon poop. Literally.
Tools, Dangers & Hazards
Poop scoopers carry many tools in their arsenal. Such items include shovels, used to scoop large amounts of poop from roofs, scrapers, to scrape off poop in hard to reach places, and water, used to deep clean places in the roof that haven't been cleaned in a while. There are usually spare tools stored in poop cleaning vans, in case there is an emergency.
One of the main hazards of being a poop cleaner is falling. It is easy to fall from rooftops, especially when one goes to throw the poop off the roofs. There is an estimated 100 falls per year, with 26 resulting in deaths, based off of 60 years of statistics. Sadly these deaths are often overlooked by poop cleaning companies, as their employees are not valued much.
The month of the great poop scooper strike was the most terrible calamity of the century. Roofs collapsed and people got buried under the poop... Seriously, these people need a union! I love the interaction between Giant Pigeon and Poop Central, though from the description I wonder whether the population was fooled into keeping these beasties alive. Maybe there are some rednecks with guns shooting them to keep them off their homes? I also wonder whether static roof defenses would be an alternative option. Come to think of it, the political-social climate with different poop cleaning companies has potential. That's as much as I got considering it's poop scoopers. I had a good laugh!
I'm glad you enjoyed this article! People actually use giant pigeons to get around the city, despite having wings. Similar to how humans use cars even though we can walk. I wouldn't be surprised if there are some people that do shoot these birds to get them off their homes :P