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.
Autopsy Assistant. It was only the pathologist and myself. While he took the samples of the organs he wanted, I had to extract the brain. Once he was finished, I had to collect everything up, bag it, place it into the abdominal cavity, fill in the chest & head cavities with gauze, sew everything back up, wash all the blood off the body, and then put it back into a body bag. We had nicknames for different types of deaths.
Are you still in the field or did you switch to something else?
I’m doing something else in the medical field. I was a navy corpsman and I specialized in lab tech & denor. Believe it or not, civilian employers don’t recognize military medical training. I couldn’t even get a job as a phlebotomist after I got out and attended college. Plus, people make more per hour starting at Costco than denors make with experience. I had a few where the NIS were involved. Those were REALLY long days. Those guys didn’t have a sense of humor at all. But then again, most people working in the medical field have a morbid sense of humor.
Food service at a retirement home.
Cleaning a fryer wayyyy after it should have been cleaned. Needed a coat hanger to fish out the blockages in the valve. The grease trap had no joke 6 inches of congeled grease over the top of it. Had to get a serving spoon and scoop out a place to dump the grease.
Did that way too many times.
Not the worst it could have been in the slightest but never miss it.
That was someone’s retirement grease!
It was there before me. I bet it’s there after me. Part of me wants to go by and see if it’s still there.
When I was younger I was offered a gig to help disassemble an abandoned cottage by hand. Turns out it had burned from the inside when a fire had spread from the fireplace - somebody had went inside to try and keep warm in the winter and ended up burning themselves and the cottage. What adds some spice to the story is the fact that in the past the cottage was a “troll’s hut” funfair kinda thing where kids, myself included, went to meet the “forest troll” and do some drawing etc.
Had nightmares about it for quite a while.
I worked two separate jobs doing film photo processing when I was a university student. The first was at a factory that handled a lot of police photography. I saw way more crime scene photos than I needed to.
The second time was in the photo development lab for a high street pharmacy chain. I swear, either people didn’t realise their photos were developed and handled by other people, or some of them really got off on us seeing their weird shit.
I am cautiously curious… Do I want to know more about this weird shit?
It depends on your thresholds. Most of the weird shit was sexual, which I don’t have a moral issue with other than I didn’t consent to be exposed to it.
Spoiler
Unfortunately there were some other types of photos with content that we felt necessary to inform police about. Not explicitly CSAM, but children were involved.
Gotcha. People are so strange. You were very kind to put the spoiler tag.
You’re gonna read it anyway.
Damn straight I hit that spoiler… So glad I don’t regret it.
I don’t plan on shooting anything weird, but I still don’t want anyone looking at my photos! Luckily it’s pretty trivial to develop at home, for B&W, at least.
Caring for the donated cadavers used by a biology department for their pre-med anatomy classes. These were people once, almost always of a John/Jane Doe situation. Very gross and off-putting job, even if you could manage to not wonder about the lives of these former people.
I was very grateful that none of the cadavers we had at my medical school were John/Jane Does, and that we have a memorial service for the cadavers every year and invite the families to express gratitude.
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.
On a somewhat related note, Crime Scene Cleaner is such an oddly relaxing, thought a bit gruesome, game.
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.
cosmonaut
Found the Russian. Do any other cultures use that word instead of astronaut?
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”
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.
Probably all eastern block states. I know its true for example for East Germany.
Maybe any USSR countries are, just a guess.
Find something better to do.
Scottish Police Service. Turns out peeling back the curtain of the worse side of people isn’t conducive to good mental health for me so I got outta there.
Holy shit, we found a good cop
Aaaand they’re gone
Cops who quit because their job is horrible are the only ones who I might consider a good cop.
It’s the ones who relish their power and corruption which I worry the most about.
This is why I hate ACAB. The time it could take for a random good person to realize not only is their profession infested with evil, but then also find a new job and quit, is substantial enough that combined with the churn rate and number of cops, I may be calling millions of good people bastards for no good reason, which may actually make those people tend to disagree with me and my ideas that the police system itself is corrupt. They know they aren’t a bastard and from their perspective I’m just insulting them mindlessly. Someone insulting you for no reason can’t be that wise of a person, or have that good of an argument, they might think.
The system is corrupt. Many of the people are fine. Stop name calling people you’ve never met like children. Lower police funding. Demilitarize them. Restrict their powers. Investigate them more. Make punishments more strict for those with any power at all. But don’t call random people you’ve never met or even heard about bastards.
Lots of family and friends still in the service and doing as good a job as they can but for each good one there is no doubt an asshole.
But I can’t speak for cops in other countries, only experience in Scotland.
It was seeing how awful humans are to each other that really sold it for me, I’d rather live in my bubble, thanks.
nursing home. seeing two underpaid, coked out CNAs joke around as they stuff into a body bag the naked corpse of a man you were talking to 10 minutes ago really alters your perspective on life.
Test
I did telephone survey research in the 90s for a university which was about urban police presence and basically I had to call mostly poor people of color and write down all the horror stories they had about police beating the shit out of them, and do this as a job every day for weeks.
And I was really good at it (and more shitty telemarketing jobs) because I have a “good radio voice,” so people are willing to talk to me. When the survey was over, they asked me to stay on and do more, but I was so burnt out and depressed. I honestly can’t tell you any stories from it because I have done a really good job of forgetting all of them by now.
The only upside is that I went from an already decent 60 wpm to a 90+ wpm typing rate with greatly increased accuracy over the course of the work. And with mostly two fingers, baby!
I worked for an industrial auction company where I had to cold call plants that were being closed down or going bankrupt. These guys received dozens of calls a day from people like us while they were dealing with losing their jobs. Trying to buy all the equipment and profit on their ill fortune.
The goal was to be the first to call them before any of the other places. So once I had to break the news to the plant manager they were getting shut down. Sometimes the information was bad and nothing was happening to their plant but they still got tons of calls from vultures looking to pick their bones. It was a shameful job and all for just $32k a year. The owner had 2 rolls Royce phantoms and a private jet.
Worked security at a hospital, and was responsible for signing corpses over to the funeral homes. One week, there was a car wreck in a nearby small town- a pickup truck flipped and rolled with five or six teenagers in the back. I spent the whole night rolling them out of the freezer and passing them off to various funeral homes.
Not mine, but a friend of my dad’s would talk about the time he was an “asshole bagger”. He worked in a slaughterhouse, and his job was to cut a circle around the anus and pull up all the bits that might have poop in them and bag them up. He lasted a day.
Not super grim, but I worked in a hot warehouse unpacking cheap clothing from China, repacking it and watching the owners turn around and sell it on Groupon for a huge profit. Sometimes their family members would stop by in brand new Mercedes, BMW and other high-end luxury cars.
The others and myself were all promised better jobs like product photographer, website designer, etc. I only lasted there one week.
I cleaned out houses before a sale.
Most of the times I was called, the previous owner had died with no next-of-kin who gave enough of a fuck to do it themselves.So every day, I’d be going through all personal belongings of someone who had died recently, and divided it into 2 categories: worth selling, and trash.
95% of the treasured items the deceased left behind went into the second pile.We’re running into this right now. My family has lost a few members recently, and my mom’s gone into Final Prep mode.
Really really.
We kids are constantly discussing this. We can’t keep the broken antique sewing machine on which her great aunt made a quilt when she was a baby. We tell her “sure” but we all agree a lot of it is just going away. We have no space for this.
So much of what we keep is just for the sentiment, and that’s cool, but has no significant value to someone else if they don’t have a connection to it. It will go and make a memory with someone that starts at a thrift store.
As the world gets more consolidated for space and we lose the attics and crawlspaces where we host the treasures we will never use but know they’re there, we may have to reduce our baggage.
And that’s how I entered my own Final Prep mode decades early (ideally).
