So you think you have a crappy job?

Julio Cesar Cu has you beat.

Paid just $400 a month to de-clog the miles of sewage tunnels running beneath the Mexican capital, diver Cu comes across the nastiest of flotsam.

"The oddest have been dead animals, animal heads, dead people," he said. "Unfortunately a lot of bodies end up here."

Cu's job is to prevent blockages in tunnels of up to 20-feet (6-meter) wide that could cause sewage to flood onto city streets. "Once, we fished out car parts which I think would have fit together to make a whole car," he said.

It is so dark down amid the cold liquid waste of some 18 million inhabitants that Cu and his three fellow divers cannot see and have to feel their way along the tunnel walls. Dressed in a thick red wetsuit, Cu pulls debris out with his hands or unblocks tunnels with a stick.

The divers receive air through a tube connected to the surface and are attached to a safety harness to stop them being swept away, as happened to one colleague 21 years ago who died in a torrent of filthy water while clearing a blockage. [...]

"I like diving as a sport. As a job I like it even more," he said.

Four hundred dollars a month.