I’m not asking about the worst job. I’m asking about the grimmest one. For me it was when in my teenage years I was making candles you would put on a grave. Most of the time is was just filling the form, burn the right shape and passing it forward. But sometimes I had to fill in for a person who was selling these things, and that is where it gets grim. It was decades ago but I still remember one lady who asked what would be the best candle to memorialize her late husband. And she gave me the whole life story of her and her husband. I shit you not, it was the most touching love story I have ever heard. I quit the next day.
Not me, but one of my best friends founded a company to clean up murder scenes, houses in which someone has died and their corpse rotted away for weeks, accident scenes… that sort of thing. His stomach seems perfectly unaffected by gruesomeness of all kinds, so he figured he’d market that particular ability of his.
His lowest rate is $300 / hr for “simple” cleanups and he’s doing very, very well.
There’s a great German TV show from a few years back about a crime scene cleaner “Tatortreiniger”. It’s more philosophical/funny than gruesome and worth a watch if you don’t mind reading sub-titles. The BBC did an adaptation in English, but I’ve not watched it yet.
Does he wear a hazmat suit or something similar?
Yeah he wears heavy biohazard protection, complete with the hood and the respirator and everything. He’s better isolated than a cosmonaut on the job.
Found the Russian. Do any other cultures use that word instead of astronaut?
Maybe any USSR countries are, just a guess.
Probably all eastern block states. I know its true for example for East Germany.
Find something better to do.
Taikonauts are Chinese. All three words, Cosmo, Astro, Taiko - naut describe the same job; it just depends what agency certified you as to what you get called.
Or maybe it’s about relative protection of cosmonaut suits vs astronaut suits, like they thought, “well maybe not quite as well as an astronaut, but better than a cosmonaut”
On a somewhat related note, Crime Scene Cleaner is such an oddly relaxing, thought a bit gruesome, game.