Fair warning from the potential boss

It’s not-so-nice work if you can get it.

Duane Trafford’s now-famous advertisement for a non-whinger can only be seen as fair warning.

He says it is important to give a realistic idea of the job that’s going at his Mosgiel-based pest control company.

As it happens, he’s also given them what we have to suspect is a realistic idea about what sort of employer they’d have. Also helpful. When he wants to be, Trafford is clearly repellent. And not by accident. Most employers want to deter people who are simply ill-suited to a vacancy from cluttering up the process by applying.

Trafford brusquely explained that his employee would get wet, cold, hot, thirsty and hungry.

He also doesn’t want to hear from whingers or people having a mid-life crisis.

‘‘I’m not your mother,’’ he explains.

At least a dozen serious applicants have emerged and we’re happy to accept that not too much should be read into the fact that this was out of more than 20,000 page views.

Trafford would surely attest that this constitutes a perfectly good success rate.

He’s right to think that many employers would share his frustration.

That so many people wanting work are ‘‘soft as hell’’. Pest contracting is clearly hard. He has clearly had problems with those for whom he may not have been quite clear enough.

This time, yes, quite clear thanks. Good on him for that much. But he shouldn’t be surprised if the remark that really got the backs up his critics was ‘‘It’s a bloody job’’. That’s true in itself. But generally that phrase is too often used as a bastard’s charter.

It’s evoked just a tad too readily to sweep aside reasonable concerns and complaints.

A lot of people out there have left work with that phrase pretty much ringing in their ears. Not all of them are soft. Or workshy. Or in any way inadequate. Workers in physically tough jobs have been known to leave them.

This is not out of sookiness but because they know when they’re being treated badly on top of the inescapable privations of the work itself.

Most likely, Trafford has positioned himself well.

He will be able to choose a good keen man, or woman, who won’t need him to mother them.

But ideally they’ll have a list of their own. Of what they need from a boss. They should feel free, in the circumstances, to be forthright.