NOT MY JOB

Just as with most of my odd things topics, I ran across this picture while more or less randomly  surfing. It amused me so much that I lifted a copy of it. When I decided to use it here, I searched the web to see if I could determine its copyright status or at least to find a source which I could acknowledge. A search using webferret turned up more than 55 hits on the string "notmyjob". Most of them were connected with this picture, but none of them gave any real source for it. Checking again on Apr. 1, 1999, Webferret turned up 97 hits on the string "notmyjob". Apparently this picture is becoming a piece of WWW folklore, an example of the web equivalent of copier ( or fax ) humor. Somewhere out there is probably a forlorn photographer kicking himself roundly, so to speak, for not having copyrighted this gruesomely funny picture and profited from it.

One version of the picture did have a caption across the bottom identifying it as the winner of the "Not My Job Award" at ADOT ( Arizona Department of Transportation, I assume) in Litchfield Park, AZ 85 (1985? )

However, the flattened and striped victim in the picture appears to be an opossum, which does not seem a very likely animal to be found crossing a suburban Arizona road. Unfortunately, even in the cleanest version of the picture I found, the resolution was not sufficient that blowing it up allowed me to read the license plates. Several otherwise very similar versions of this picture on the web have relatively poor resolution, leading to the suspicion that it may have been reproduced several times. The model year of the cars should be identifiable by someone more knowledgable than I in such matters. If you can provide even that much information, please send me email, since that might lend circumstantial corroboration to the 1985 date or, on the other hand, exclude it.

The publicly available entry under "opossum" in the electric encyclopedia is

      [ The common ] name for several MARSUPIALS of
      the family Didelphidae, native to Central and
      South America, with one species in the U.S.
      Mostly arboreal and nocturnal animals, opossums
      have long noses, naked ears, prehensile tails,
      and black-and-white fur. They eat small animals,
      eggs, insects, and fruit. When frightened they
      collapse as if dead. Opossums are hunted as
      pests as well as for food and sport.

Other sources gleaned from Altavista, for example concerning the opossum in Colorado, say

        "... furbearers, such as beaver, mink, muskrat,
         raccoon and opossum, are directly associated
         with running water although some live near lakes
         and marshes",

      "Opossums are omnivorous in diet and usually
      are active nocturnally. The preferred habitats
      of D. virginiana are riparian areas and mesic
      woodland-savannah areas."

The identification of the victim as an opossum is by no means certain, being as it is rather severely post mortem and based on only a single not too terribly clear photograph. I guess it could be a rather large, thoroughly mangled rat, which species I know without even searching AltaVista, can indeed be found in Arizona.

Another possibility is that the photograph is a fake, produced by the clever addition of stripes to an ordinary picture of roadkill. However, careful inspection of the picture at the pixel level makes this appear unlikely. One thing I am fairly sure of though is that the subject is truly dead, not just "collapsed as if dead".

Again, if you do happen to know the source of this picture or have any other relevant information, I would be happy to get email from you about it.

One correspondent, SirCamulos@aol.com, comments that the location can be deduced as Pennsylvania from the following observations, which I have edited slightly in form but not content, and reproduced here with his permission:
 

1. The color of both the lettering and the background of the license plates.
2. The types of trees, the known native habitat of opossum, and  the road surface itself.  Roads in areas subject to heavy snow have a different appearance than those in areas that are not, not only because they weather differently but also because snow plows leave telltale signs.
3. The fact that there is no front license plate on the truck. Pennsylvania is one of the few states that has large snow falls and no front license plate.

Here are some links to other places using or concerning this picture.