What's the worst job you ever had?

[MothBalls]

Just curious if anyone else ever had a wake up call like I did.

In my younger days right after high school I was a tire changer, for big rigs, tractors, earth movers. I drove a service truck rigged out for doing this. I got moved to fleet accounts. One of my accounts was a trash company, 300 trash trucks. Every day I had to stop by and fix flats or change bald tires. Crawling under trash trucks to jack them up and have trash juice spill on me was just friggin horrible.

Then I got the worst call of all. A chicken farm with 3 million birds. They used to take the chicken crap and put it in piles 4 meters high by 100 meters long to dry in the sun. Then a tractor would drive over it scraping off the crusty layer to process as fertilizer. Under the crust it was still wet and juicy.

The tractor was on the top of the pile, ran over a broken bottle and blew out a tire. The operator said he couldn't drive it down because it would flip over, the tire had to be changed there. When I got home, my girlfriend wouldn't let me in the house. I showered with a hose in the back yard. I stunk for three days after that.

The third day was the day I decided to go to college. I promised myself that I wasn't going to spend the rest of my life on a pile of chit.

[AVGWarhawk]

Nasty brother, no doubt!!!! Chicken crap does stink the high heavens. I can not say I had a bad job after reading your tire changing days :rotfl:

[UnderseaLcpl]

Worst job;

Body detail in Iraq. Had a few SVBIED (suicide vehicle-borne IED) victims and bombers to be sorted out. We were supposed to separate the bomber's parts from the victim's parts (yeah, right) As it was I I pushed my elbow into a pile of what I think were intestines while trying to grab an eyeball. Never did get the smell out of that uniform.

[KeptinCranky]

Well, nothing to compare to the above, but nevertheless unpleasant...

Picking tomatos in a greenhouse.... especially having to clear out the rotten ones, but that's not as bad as rotten cucumbers... yechhh


the trouble with tomatoes is they spray some sort of waxy stuff on them that gets on your hands in layers and is almighty difficult to remove, the plants also have tiny irritant hairs that give you rash.

I became a postman after that, go figure...

[Platapus]

For me it is a tie

Story 1. There I was, no Sh*t,

Brand new troop fresh out of EOD school. Steely-eyed and ready to save the world.

Was on the primary recovery team for an F-16 that crashed. Primary recovery team is also responsible for "aircrew retrieval". We had a torso pretty mangled up and well infested with insects.

Team lead hands FNG (me) two pairs of latex gloves... uh oh

My mission was to ascertain whether this torso was just joe pilot or joe pilot wrapped around some piece of avionics.

So I am sitting on the ground, in the middle of an salt flat squeezing and feeling this maggoty insect infested body of an American.

One of the things that was beaten into us in tech school was that if you are handling an aircrew body you better handle it with respect. After all, this was a person who just gave his life in the service of his country.

I did the best I could. It is amazing how difficult it can be to tell the difference between bones and avionics.

Pretty rough for an 18 year old.

Story two

About three years after story 1, I was on a tertiary recovery team for this F-16 that dumped into the shallows of the Great Salt Lake. Tertiary recovery teams are normally not expected to be involved in body recovery...

We were on our small floating derrick trying vainly to use our magnometers to find the aircraft. Mags don't work so well in salt water. We get a hit and our imager shows the M-61A1 internal gun, which we have to recover.

As the M-61 broke the surface we discovered that the pilot was intertwined in the barrels of the gun. We were not set up for aircrew recovery. We had no body bag we had no gloves, we had nutton.

The only thing we could do is reverently wrap the pilot in a tarp and place him as far downwind as we could. He had been down there for about three weeks and the brine shrimp had found him. For the next 8 hours of our duty, the pilot was out of the water in the hot sun. It was not pleasant.

Surprisingly these types of days were never mentioned in the advertisements.

Of course I could not feel all that bad. After all, I was the one still alive.

A reverent salute to all those military members who die in the performance of their duties in peacetime. No medals, no speeches. No one ever knows their names but the families and coworkers.

[1480]

A. My 1st express passenger train versus person on foot not paying attention job. Took 5 hours and a shovel to find and recover most of the remains.

B. Investigate the foul odor call. Dude croaks in an SRO during July and there is no air conditioning in the building. Well as the man who called 911 tells us "...its rotten" He was on the money: the carpeting the body was on needed to be cut around him, because he was fused to it, then he "popped" when lifted. Not good!

C. The inner city version of the "shootout at the O.K. Corral". Inside of a one bedroom apartment, a dope deal gone bad. 4 verus 2 and 5 DOA's. I will describe the scene as this: Sam Peckinpaw would have proud!

[Yahoshua]

Mine was nowhere NEAR as bad as everyone elses' thus far (thankfully?).

Was working a job as a residential construction worker at Mountain Home AFB in Idaho.....in the winter. Now the cold up there in Idaho isn't a nice "dry" cold like you'd get in the plains or in the mountains of colorado.

No, this cold HURTS and no amount of thick clothing (aside from woolen long johns) will help you keep warm enough to move around inside a dark, partially finished, and exposed-to-the-elements building. All the while having a foreman with a serious weed growing up his @$$ yelling at me and everyone else because we weren't working fast enough to satisfy his bean-counting mind (this job was going to take 5 years anyway and we were the 5th or 6th company on the job and most of our work was fixing somebody elses' mistakes).

We were shacked up in hotels (sardined basically) and since we only worked 5 days a week we all either had a limited amount of time to either find our own lodgings or go home on the weekends. So I commuted 200 miles home to Fort Hall every weekend and drove back up Sunday nights.


Miserable.

[SUBMAN1]

Worst job? Probably 2 tours in Alasks on fishing boats - 7 months total. One in winter, one in summer.

The weird part - I hated it, yet I loved it - explain that?

-S

[Yahoshua]

You liked the freedom but not the work that came with it?

[SUBMAN1]

Originally Posted by Yahoshua

You liked the freedom but not the work that came with it?

No - the sea. Something weird that made me 'belong' there. Possibly getting killed at least once a week I think I could do without.

-S

[buddha95]

circumsizing street bums at the free clinic.
$5.00 an hour,,,,,,,,,plus "tips"

[Platapus]

[QUOTE=1480] Well as the man who called 911 tells us "...its rotten"/QUOTE]

One of the things we used to dread when I was riding on the inner city squad was the call of "unusual odor" coming from an apartment.

Every one knew this would not be a good call. It takes days to get the smell off your own body

[Platapus]

I recognize that this is a violation to the spirit of the thread as this is not a job I had but a job I saw someone else do.....

About a thousand years ago, I was watching a documentary on pig farms. This documentary focused on the raising and breeding of the pigs. Pretty interesting stuff.

The propagating of the pigs (proPIGating?) was all handled scientifically. Computers were used to track the individual matings, artificial insemination was used to control and protect the sows. All clean and high tech......except.

Except for the collection of the pig semen. This was done manually and I do mean manually.

The documentary interviewed this guy whose job it was to manually stimulate the boars and collect the semen. Yup his job was pounding pig puds or wanking weenier weenies.

He would be sitting down next to what appeared to be a ramp like the ones used to milk goats. He was talking about how he gets to "know" each boar and varies his technique according to the boar. I am not making this up!

And then the documentary showed him "working". OMG! if you have never been around pigs it is eye opening!

And during the demonstration the guy was not wearing any gloves!!! ewwwww.

I do have to mention that evidently this job does take some skill in order to quickly stimulate and ...... "finish" with the boar.

So when ever I think that my job sucks, I frequently think back to this guy.

No matter how bad it gets, at least I am not masturbating pigs to orgasm.

[Takeda Shingen]

I've got you all beat: SubSim General Topics Moderator.

In seriousness, I suppose the worst job I had was in high school working in the meat room of a local supermarket. I didn't cut the meat, as you had to be specially trained. Rather, I was in charge of removing and storing the excess fluids and inedible parts for removal. The entire facitlity was refrigerated, so there was no smell, but I would swear that on some days it looked like a Wes Craven flick was shot in that room. Still, does not compare with the chickens.

[SUBMAN1]

Originally Posted by Takeda Shingen

I've got you all beat: SubSim General Topics Moderator.

In seriousness, I suppose the worst job I had was in high school working in the meat room of a local supermarket. I didn't cut the meat, as you had to be specially trained. Rather, I was in charge of removing and storing the excess fluids and inedible parts for removal. The entire facitlity was refrigerated, so there was no smell, but I would swear that on some days it looked like a Wes Craven flick was shot in that room. Still, does not compare with the chickens.

Chickens smell! yuck! Tasty though!

Worst is driving by a beef slaughterhouse. That is the worst smell on planet Earth! Enought to turn you off to beef for months on end!

-S