Best job in the world

Remember Australia's major tourism promotional ad-campaign entitled "Best Job in the world" back in January 2009? I found out about it through the Yahoo! homepage (Information Technology at work yet again) and I'm pretty sure some of you might have been as interested in it as I had been.

Let's take a look back at the offer: $150,000 Australian dollars to laze around a beautiful tropical island for six months including free airfare from your home country to Hamilton Island on Australia's Great Barrier Reef and back and all you had to do was blog to the whole world about your day to day experiences and maybe appear on web videos or TV every so often. After receiving thousands of applications, a British charity worker named Ben Southall (pictured above) was selected for the job beating out 34,000 other applicants.

I had not followed up on it until now and here's what I found (again through the internet): The winner Ben Southall survived a deadly sting by a fingernail sized jellyfish called "irukandji" just days before his dream job came to a close. The full story can be found HERE. Thank goodness he survived because it would have been quite a tragic ending to such a wonderful story. It would have been the worst way of waking up from a dream in my opinion and of course it could have provided a blow to Australia's tourism industry contrary to the promotional intention of the whole project in the first place.

On a side note, here's a little something about the irukandji jellyfish: it is found in the seas off of northern Australia and it is so small that it can go unnoticed in water measuring only 2.5 cm across (both bell and tentacles). Its sting is often felt as nothing more than a painful irritant with a rash akin to that of prickly heat. By the time more serious symptoms appear, it may be too late to save a life.

About.com on the irukandji