Most grotesque tasks

In My Humble Opinion
21

For once, the Google ads actually make sense with the thread: Grease trap cleaner, vomiting information, and $99 rooters. Hmmm.

The worst smell I’ve ever experienced happened when we were visiting a family member’s ranch and came across a sealed plastic container. Unsure what it was, we opened it.

YOW!

It turns out that the kids had been given the job of lowering the population of ranch rodents one year. They’d killed a bunch of them, put them in this plastic bucket, sealed the lid, and forgot about it. Ever hear of anaerobic liquefaction? Yes, the rodent bodies had turned into the most foul-smelling liquid that has ever existed or will ever exist (if you have a counter-example, I do not want to know).

My nose burns just remembering that.

22

I grew up in a house that was on the outskirts of a town that could only be charitably described as the middle of nowhere. When my father died (in the room next to my bedroom), it took quite a long time for the funeral home fellow to get there to take away his body – so long, in fact, that by the time he arrived, rigor had set in mightily. My father was a tall man (6’8’’), and the old construction in our house meant that the mortician’s gurney couldn’t navigate the bends around the interior door frames. I had to help carry my dad’s body out, literally…bending…it around those tight turns. It was the most grotesque experience of my young life.

23

Mine’s fairly tame, in comparison. The summer I was living in this Hippie’s back yard, he asked for some help with plumbing. Huge wooden house on supports, crawlspace under the house, above dirt. Had me crawl underneath (he was too big) to get to some pipes, I was well in before I realized I was crawling though the neighborhood’s stray’s toilet. Some was fossilized, some not so much. Too dark to avoid, too little space to get around it, hadda crawl right through. Spiders, too. Good thing I’m not arachnaphobic, clostraphobic, or coprophobic.

24

To hide it. People notice when you go to the bathroom and run the water everytime you have a meal. People don’t think as much of it when your in your bedroom with the stereo on.

25

When I was a kid, one summer I collected a load of starfish on the beach. I put them in a plastic bag. I left the plastic bag in a bucket in the garage for the rest of the summer… quite a hot summer.

26

I worked for a year as a nurses aide.

When I get home tonite, I’ll tell my tale I have used to win several “gross out” contests.

27

Bump!

28

I used to help a friend out on his cattle farm. I’ve been up to my knees in cowshit many times doing various tasks, and fallen down in it more than once. I’ve also helped Friend and the local vet castrate bull calves. Once one testicle is done, the vet just tosses it aside. Unfortunately, because of the way we were all positioned, it usually landed on me. No fun, having bull balls land on you all day.

29

We used to have a tetraplegic in the family, and induced bowel movement therapy was right up there with catheter therapy. Don’t start me on the occasional bedsores.

Helping with my dad’s remains immediately post-mortem should have seemed gross, but it didn’t turn out that way.

30

Getting rid of a long since rotted cucumber. Half of it was liquefied, so it was swimming in its own rot in the bottom of the vegetable drawer.

At my parents’ house, incidentally. They never get to kvetch about the state of my fridge again (and I have things with their own systems of government, but mercifully all safely sealed in plastic containers that I can throw out all at once, should I choose to at any point).

31

I used to clean the playland at McDonalds. Diapers, bandaids, vomit, shit, wads of hair, various bodily fluids…and the method used to clean the place was basically, remove the big chunks and rinse with soapy water. My kids were not allowed to go in.

For at least the last year of my previous marriage, my alcoholic husband occupied the back rooms of our house and I stuck to the front. When he finally moved out and I went in those rooms to clean, it was beyond fucking description. There were mounds of old newspapers and magazines welded to the carpet because the toilet had overflowed. There were ancient not-quite-empty beer cans. There were “snowdrifts” behind all the furniture: dead skin he’d peeled off his feet. Okay, use your imaginations. I’m gagging.

32

One Independence Day at my beach club, someone unearthed a clambake that someone had buried in the sand long ago. There was a big pot with its lid clamped on, and a few kids were digging it out of the sand when it ruptured and this nasty black liquid started leaking out of the bottom of it.

No one I know could get within 20 feet of this thing without retching. The smell was so strong you’d have to turn away from it. It seriously could have made an effective weapon.

This thing would have ruined everybody’s Fourth of July if it sat on the beach, so it was up to a bunch of us to take care of it. Many ideas were considered, including dumping gas on it and lighting it on fire. We decided against that, since we didn’t know whether or not there was any buildup of flammable gas or liquid inside the pot. Instead, we tied our t-shirts over our noses and mouths and took turns running toward it, trying to grab the pot handle as we ran by, and dragging it toward the water. One guy would drag it a couple feet, start retching and drop the thing, and then the next guy would have a try.

Eventually, we dragged it into the water. I’ll never forget the smell.

33

(bolding mine)

I’ll have to steal that.

:smiley:

34

Personally, I think I earned every penny for every minute I worked at my mom’s dog grooming business. We often had severely neglected dogs come in with flea infestation problems so bad that the flea shit dyed the first two rinses red-brown when we washed them. One cocker spaniel came in with that problem, and hair so matted the only thing we could do was try to shave it off. It took some doing to find a spot where we could get to the skin to start shaving him. Then we found that he had infected sores from foxtail spurs that had burrowed into the skin. There were maggots crawling around in the infected sores. That explained the slightly nastier stench than usual that comes off a dog in that condition. Oh, and he tried to bite anyone who came close to him.

I hate some dog owners. And the breeders who produced all those inbred stupid cocker spaniels in the late 80s should have had a shotgun jammed up their asses before having it discharged into their guts.

Even given that story, expressing canine anal glands is still one of the worst things I’ve had to do routinely. Anal glands smell worse than rotting shit, by the way, and they usually squirt right into your hand when you do them. I can still remember the feel of dog-warm funk spurting out like the world’s biggest zits and splattering against my hand <ugh> That would need to be done between 30 and 70 times day, depending on how busy we were.

I will never have anything to do with grooming again and I don’t particularly like dogs because of having been around way too many of them. Nothing kills your positive feelings for animals worse than being shit on, pissed on, and bitten by them. And in a few cases the damn things try to hump you. One of our groomers got an unexpected “facial” from an overly-excited mutt who apparently went from hello to get a condom in only a few seconds.

I can still stand cats because they were both less numerous and less nasty. Their attitudes toward being dried or washed were usually either, “Holyshitgetthatthingawayfromme!” while trying to escape, or hunkering in stoic misery while giving the Evil Glare of Imminent Death™. Despite the EGID™, they actually tried to injure you far less often, and with less perceptible animosity than dogs. Dogs were just plain mean sometimes, like it was something personal, while cats always just gave me a, “fuck off and leave me alone,” vibe if they were unhappy with what I was doing.

Maybe because of my experiences with pets as a kid, I now think that keeping pets is kind of disgusting. It’s not like keeping slaves (even if you treat them well) or crippling your kids so that you can keep them small and lovable longer, but I don’t view the whole pet culture as being morally neutral. And this is coming from someone who is an ardent meat eater and who thinks PETA is made up of a bunch of fanatical morons.

35

I helped a friend and his brother pump out a septic tank once; my friend’s brother was actually in that business but was short handed. We got it done but it strained the friendship for a while—I eventually got over it but I told him flat out: Never again.

36

I used to work at Radio Shack.

37

Oooh, Sleel’s story reminds me of a vet tech story. Our clinic was next to a grooming place and sometimes they would bring an animal by that needed to be looked at. Once it was a shit-tzu. For those that don’t know, these dogs have long facial hair that needs to be kept trimmed or at least groomed pretty meticulously. They also have short snouts and buggy eyes, which is a combination that can lead to problems. This one had been neglected and the hair over its eye was matted and gunky. When we got it cleared away, we saw that the eye ball had ruptured from the infection. It was twice the size of the other eye, and basically imploded. Grossest thing I’ve ever seen.

Despite that and other gross shit, though, I don’t think animals are inherently gross. As long as they’re kept clean and healthy, this crap doesn’t happen, and I love living with animals.

I’m surprised how many things in this tread follow the theme of dead and/or rotting things in closed containers for long periods of time. Seriously, don’t do that! Ever! Why doesn’t everyone know this?

38

On several occasions, I’ve had the lovely responsibility of x-raying rotten appendages.

Nothing, and I mean NOT.ONE.SINGLE.THING, compares to the sensory delight of manipulating a jellied, gangrenous foot.

The appearance (black), the texture (both crusty and slimy at the same time), the smell (indescribable)…oh fuck ick gag.

39

As I said earlier, I was a nurses aid for a year.

I worked in what was euphemistically called a “combined facility”, which is to say we had an ER, and a few hospital beds, and we also had 40 beds of long term care.

Basically it was a combo ER-Nursing Home. It was interesting, to say the least.

In our facility was a woman. She was old when I got there, well into her 70’s, if I recall correctly.

She would sit in her chair, gazing into space, having seizures. She was essentially curled into a not quite fetal position. She had a catheter, so the majority of the time her care consisted of turning her every few hours and making sure she didn’t choke to death during feeding.

Feeding was pretty much a “shovel this almost liquid stuff in, and hope enough of it trickles down her esophogus to keep her alive”. Again, near constant seizures interfered quite a bit with this whole process.

She was the oldest down person patient in the state at the time.

Well, every 3 days, was Enema day. We would prep her ahead of time by placing several large garbage bags under her posterior. We would turn on a heating lamp so she wouldn’t get cold, and make our rounds, to return in an hour after the fleets had been… administered.

There’s something magical about the results of an enema. A putrid puddle of liquified shit, which usually ended up in the bags, but would occasionally not. Therein lied great fun, as we would clean this lady up (her twitching and such the entire time), strip her bed and remake same.

The keystone moment for me involved my hair. See, back in the day, I had long hair. One day I forgot to tie it back, and had forgotten that it was Fleet Night.
“No problem,” says I to myself. “I’ll just be real careful.”

During clean-up that night, a large hank of hair slid forward, and plopped right onto one of her large shit-smeared buttocks. Reacting in horror, I jerked back.

The hair peeled off of her backside, and then in slow motion (like a john woo movie, but without the spiffy wardrome) the hank of now fecally festive hair arced up, back, and right into my open (mid shout) mouth.

I did not vomit. I am amazed by that fact, even today, 13 years later.

I could go on. There were many horribly gross things in that place. The guy whose toe fell off in the bath. The woman who would regularly ask us to come clean her up after she had packed her vagina full of vaseline trying to masturbate.

The guy whose penis had split about 1/4 of the length down the bottom from the miatus, due to his pulling out of his catheter tubing.

Yeah. While I learned a lot, and it made me a better person, I woudl have to be in dire straits to take up that line of work again.

40

If that story doesn’t make you fill out a living will, I don’t know what will. What a horrible existence.