[QUOTE=si_blakely]
Finding evidence of peoples porn habits on their PCs.
Blech
Hasn’t happened for a while, because I don’t generally do that sort of work now.
I rebuilt a laptop someone at church had just purchased - I don’t know what or who the previous owner was or did but … jeepers.
I worked on another friends laptop, too, and found … stuff … I didn’t want to see. He was embarrassed, I was “oh, it was probably the viruses downloading stuff” - but it wasn’t, he knew it and I knew it.
But I have also done a couple of investigations into Internet misuse - gathering evidence and suchlike. The worst bit was recovering the guys mailbox to find the … self-portraits … he sent to some woman who may or may not have been his wife. I knew (and liked) the guy, too.
The second investigation concerned a guy who’s fetish was coprophagia. I got some representative images and stopped looking. I had enough evidence and I wasn’t looking for more.
[QUOTE=Wile E]
<snip>Tom Cat pee. The top potential bioweapon. Although it doesn’t leave you wretching like the nasty diarrheas and vomit, it makes your eyes burn and water, your nose hairs curl up and die, your sense of smell lose go insane and attempt to strangle your brain and your lungs try to escape your body and head for the hills and the smell … never … goes … away.
[/QUOTE]
I accidentally got a big glop of hand soap on my cat one day, and had to hose it off of her in the shower*, and she fear peed all over the shower - that was some unbelievably stinky pee. And oh yes, it lingered. You wouldn’t think the smell of pee would be so bad in a bathroom where you kind of expect it, but that was some special pee.
If you think this episode would have cured her of hanging out on the bathroom sink counter, you would be wrong.
I think medical facilities should be in a class all of their own for disgusting work hazards. I remember coming back from lunch while working in the Histotechnology lab in a hospital, and the old birds who ran the Histo lab had decided to throw away the human leg that had been in the lab long enough (body parts taken off in surgery are “pickled” with formaldehyde and then retained for a certain period of time). They just put it, reeking and gross, into the biohazard garbage to be dumped later. I guess they had worked in Histo so long that the smell of old body parts or seeing the foot and leg in the garbage didn’t bother them any more, but it sure as hell bothered ME. I wrapped it all up and took it to the incinerator room myself rather than keep looking at and smelling someone’s cut-off leg.
Then there were the daily hazards that make up a lab tech’s job - blood, feces, urine, sputum, semen, sharps, crush injuries from the machines, cutting your hand off with the microtome blades, burning yourself and/or the lab down with open flames, infectious organisms, heat from sterilizing equipment, slip and fall accidents from spills, cancerous reagents, all part of a day’s work in a medical lab. Jeeze, I wonder why I don’t want to work as a lab tech any more?
[QUOTE=OtakuLoki]
Definitely not up to the standards of the others in this thread, but…
While I was in the Navy, someone found in one of the engineering spaces a yellow poly bag filled with feces. Now, one of the assumptions we make is that anything that is in yellow PVC is radioactive. So, we had a nice loaf, sealed in this bag, complete with a proper, air-tight seal. But, in general, we were also supposed to reduce the amount of rad waste we generated. Disposing of biological and radioactive waste was even more expensive than disposing simply of rad waste, so the Chief Engineer decided that someone was going to have to scan the waste and see if it could be cleared as being non-contaminated.
Which meant that the waste had to be spread out so that the probe on the detector could get within 1/4 inch of all surfaces of the material.
Volunteers were solicited. The division, to a man, remembered the real meaning of NAVY: Never Again Volunteer Yourself. Eventually the LCPO of the division decided that he didn’t quite have the chutzpah to make it an order, and did it himself.
But the stink of that incident took a couple of days to die down.
[/QUOTE]
Why in gods name couldnt you put it into the lead pig and do a mass count on it? That is what multichannel analyzers are good for=)
I worked in a Catholic cemetery as a teen ager. One summer day my job was to disinterr all the infants buried various places in the cemetery and rebury them all in a new baby cemetery, at the base of a group of marble statues of Jesus on the cross with Mary & co. standing below him.
The temperature was in the 90’s, and the Summer humidity in southern Wisconsin can be cut with a butter knife. Several of the babies had only recently died. Babies are not usually embalmed. I pulled them up from below permafrost level and carried them over to the cross in that diabolical heat. I swear I could hear their bodies swelling up and popping open.
I’d smelled plenty of dead cows and dead birds. Human corpses, I learned that day, have the same dingy-sweet smell. Kind of strolls up to the nerves in your nasal passages and says “yes, you’ll remember me.”
Adding to my ordeal was my friendship with the unwed mother of one of the babies. We had a hell of a time getting the church mothers to allow the burial, until the old caretaker I worked with at the cemetery threatened to tell how these same old gals had screwed around themselves back in the 1930’s
My friends used to come around while I worked, bringing 8-packs of those little Miller Shorty beers; kids lured by the nasty teenage novelty of a trip to a working graveyard.
This day they arrived for a unique treat. Also wandered up was my 12-year old brother. The babies were mostly in styrofoam and pasteboard coffins. The guys started to goad me into opening one of the coffins. I was by this time grossly dehydrated and jaded by inhaling dead baby fumes, so I “accidentlay” clipped the corner of a styrofoam coffin with my shovel. This revealed an air-tight plastic bag, inside of which was visible a hand-knit powder blue baby blanket with yellow edging.
The pathos of this revolted them. “Stop! No! Don’t open it!”
(all except my godamn little brother “Come on! Go ahead and open it!” Though I didn’t)
[QUOTE=si_blakely]
The second investigation concerned a guy who’s fetish was coprophagia. I got some representative images and stopped looking. I had enough evidence and I wasn’t looking for more.
Added a new one that I wasn’t expecting yesterday.
I usually clean out all the crates at the end of the day with a 10% bleach solution. Right before one owner came to pick up her pup, the pup peed in the crate, so I left the pee in there to clean with everything else.
You know how you are never supposed to mix bleach and ammonia? I was in the crate, on my knees when the fumes got me - it felt like my eyes, nose and lungs were seared. Hope I didn’t do any permanent damage! Who’d a thunk that dog pee was THAT strong?
[QUOTE=Slithy Tove]
<snip> Human corpses, I learned that day, have the same dingy-sweet smell. Kind of strolls up to the nerves in your nasal passages and says “yes, you’ll remember me.”<snip>
[/QUOTE]
Dead body smells like nothing else, and if you’ve ever smelled it, you’ll never forget it. It’s hard to describe what makes the smell so bad; it just smells so very, very wrong.
[QUOTE=featherlou]
Dead body smells like nothing else, and if you’ve ever smelled it, you’ll never forget it. It’s hard to describe what makes the smell so bad; it just smells so very, very wrong.
[/QUOTE]
Yeah, I don’t get how people can describe it as a sickeningly sweet smell. It’s just sickening, there’s no sweet in there. Of course, I’ve only smelled dead animals, I don’t imagine dead humans could smell much better.
[QUOTE=Wile E]
Yeah, I don’t get how people can describe it as a sickeningly sweet smell. It’s just sickening, there’s no sweet in there. Of course, I’ve only smelled dead animals, I don’t imagine dead humans could smell much better.
[/QUOTE]
My WAG is that it assaults all your receptors, including for sweet.
[QUOTE=featherlou]
Dead body smells like nothing else, and if you’ve ever smelled it, you’ll never forget it. It’s hard to describe what makes the smell so bad; it just smells so very, very wrong.
[/QUOTE]
It’s probably hard-wired into our brains by evolution as a danger signal.
[QUOTE=aruvqan]
Why in gods name couldnt you put it into the lead pig and do a mass count on it? That is what multichannel analyzers are good for=)
[/QUOTE]
aruvqan, sorry I missed this question at the time you made it. The problems with the mass count were several: First off, the volume of material to be counted was larger than the counting chamber on our relatively small multichannel analyzer; we could have gotten around that by building a housing with lead bricks around the material to be counted, and using our most sensitive radiac, but that would have been very time and man-power intensive. Spreading it out and using a frisker, instead, would satisfy the decon requirements, quickly, for something that no-one involved really believed was going to be radioactive. (If you’re putting out glowing poop, you’ve got bigger problems than properly bagging and tagging it.)
More to the point, our Chief Engineer was from Georgia (I believe) and while that didn’t affect his technical abilities, nor even how good an officer he was generally, it did color how he processed language. When the report he recieved about the bag was: (spoilered for naughty language) “Sir, we just found a yellow bag full of shit.” he didn’t connect that with fecal matter. He just thought it was a generic bag of stuff. It wasn’t until after the rest of the Reactor Laboratory division refused to spread it out and count it; and he’d made it a specific order to the Division Officer that someone spread it out and count it, or else; and the LCPO took it upon himself to bite the bullet that he actually got around to asking why there’d been such resistance to doing the work.
[QUOTE=Wile E]
Anal glands. Another potential bioweapon. We should get hazard pay for expressing the glands
[/QUOTE]
Yes, you should. I had to take my cat Luna in to have her anal glands expressed a few times when she was younger. The experience turned her from a sweet, affectionate cat at the vet’s office (like she is to us at home) to a cat that hisses and growls through her appointments, and one the vet techs won’t handle without the elbow-length leather gloves. She peed in her crate when I took her in to have her teeth cleaned. Poor Luna And I’m sure the experience couldn’t have been any more pleasant for the vet techs expressing her anal glands…
Not a work hazard but a home hazard. My dear sweet but now deceased mother in law had a colostomy bag. Every once in a while the tube attached to her insides would get sucked inside of her and had to fished out. My wife had the routine down and it would take her just a few seconds. Then one day when the wife and children were gone, I hear MIL calling from the bathroom. Her tube has slipped and I had to fish it out. I tried the usual methods and they did not work. I then retrieved a set of hemostats from a hobby tool kit and was able to grab the end of the tube. Did you know that folks with colostomy bags have no control over when they evacutate? Just as I got the tube out I heard a weird noise then was hit in the face with what I can only call one of the most vile things that can come from a human body. She was able to pinch off the tube till she could aim to towards the toilet, by then I was leaning over the bathtub retching and washing the stuff off my face. After that experience, if the two of us were home alone, the colostomy bag was changed before my wife went anywhere.
WFT???
- the appropriate smiley is :o
