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Italian Miner Avoids Work for 35 Years, Then Retires

You may not like your job, but I'm willing to bet that you're nowhere near as good at avoiding it as an Italian coal miner was recently revealed to be. According to The Telegraph, "Carlo Cani started work as a miner in 1980 but soon found that he suffered from claustrophobia and hated being underground.

Cani started doing everything he could to avoid hacking away at the coal face, inventing an imaginative range of excuses for not venturing down the mine in Sardinia where he was employed. He pretended to be suffering from amnesia and hemorrhoids, rubbed coal dust into his eyes to feign an infection and on occasion staggered around pretending to be drunk. The miner, now aged 60, managed to accumulate years of sick leave, apparently with the help of compliant doctors, and was able to stay at home to indulge his passion for jazz."

Possible Preaching Angle:

I'd probably rather play jazz than mine coal too, but what's wrong with our ideas about work when our vocation becomes something that we spend a career avoiding?

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