The first job profiled in the series concerns the workers who clean out the insides of crude oil tanks in Texas. That certainly seems to me like a tough job.

Crude oil tanks, after awhile, collect sludge in their bottoms that isn't really good for much of anything. Even if it were, it has to be flushed out of the tanks before they can be filled again. The men who do this wear protective clothing and masks, carry oxygen bottles and work in short shifts—sometimes as short as 15 minutes. They use hoses to flush the sludge, which accumulates to a depth of four or five inches on the bottom of the tank.

But the chief problem with the work isn't the sludge or the lack of fresh air—it's the heat. Because the tanks are in Texas, and because it is summer, the temperature inside sometimes gets up around 120 degrees Fahrenheit.

In spite of all this, the men who do the work wouldn't trade their jobs for anything, at least according to NPR. They're well-paid—they'd have to be, I'd guess—and they consider themselves to be a kind of elite, sort of like the Special Forces in Afghanistan. The necessity of working fast and efficiently makes them a team, they say.

So while most of us wouldn't think cleaning giant oil tanks is much fun, they love it.

I got to thinking about this and other tough jobs after hearing the radio broadcast. I suppose no matter what it is, it's only tough if you make it that way. That got me thinking about Albert Camus' essay "The Myth of Sisyphus."

Sisyphus was a character in Greek mythology. He'd died and gone to hell, but he made a deal with Pluto, the god of the underworld, for a brief visit back to see his wife.

Unfortunately for him, he liked being back on earth so much, he decided to stay. He stayed too long, and the gods packed him back to hell. They sentenced him to spending the rest of eternity—a long time—pushing a heavy rock up a hill.

But that wasn't the worst of the punishment. Just as he got the rock to the top of the hill and relaxed, the rock rolled down to the bottom of the slope and he had to start all over again.

It sounds like a terrible fate, but Camus thought otherwise. He pointed out that Sisyphus was happy in his work because that's all he knew: trying to roll a rock to the top of a hill. It didn't matter to him that he never made it to the top—just doing it over and over again was what was important.

I don't know if that's how the tank cleaners feel about it, but it would seem to me like once you've seen the inside of one tank, you've pretty much seen them all: They're round, they don't have many openings, and their bottoms are all covered with sludge.

But maybe that's not the way to look at it.

Maybe like Sisyphus, the job is the real end-all of life. And maybe a job shouldn't be so much about what we do, as about the pride and satisfaction we take in doing it, and the satisfaction of seeing a job well-done.

A lot of workers never get the satisfaction of creating a product or harvesting a crop all on their own, from start to finish.

Instead, we have to be like Sisyphus. We have to find satisfaction in pushing the rock, not in getting it anywhere.

We need to learn how the oil tank workers find satisfaction in their work, sustain it, and make them our model.