Doing a similar job… without any form of protective clothing, and for less than US$5 a day.
Back when I used to frequent the “love hotels” in Japan, e.g., with hourly rates, I would be impressed with the speed of the cleaning staff. They would turn the rooms around in no time at all.
I worked on an assembly line during the summer just out of high school. While it wasn’t gross, the sheer mind numbing repetition drove me nuts, as well as the inane conversations of the coworkers.
Doing things like that for a day can/could be fun. But having done several of the things he did but as a living, even short-term, can be another story. I was a honeydipper (if they called it “shit-sucker” no one would answer the ads) one summer back in college. The first day was kinda fun, the next week a nightmare as the reality sunk in. After that it was a paycheck and little more.
My daughter is a nurse. She enjoyed her job in labor and delivery, but a headhunter made her an offer to do home visitation nursing and she couldn’t refuse the money. She couldn’t take it. She told me that 90% of the homes she visited were ok or tolerable, but there was one home in ten that she just couldn’t handle.
I’ve asked her several times for details, but she still cannot describe the things that grossed her out. Luckily, her old job was happy to have her back, and she got a raise to boot.
Collecting on debts from cocaine addicts. It’s not as physically gross as some of the other jobs I’ve worked or seen mentioned here, but it only took a few years of doing it to guarantee myself a spot in Hell if it exists. It’s far easier in the long term to deal with a job that kills your back than one that kills your humanity.
I grew up on an egg farm. When it was time to send retired hens to the soup can my dad would round up neighborhood teenagers and we’d spend the evening carrying chickens from the cages to the truck. A couple of weeks later we’d get a shipment of 3 month old pullets, who were much easier to take from the truck to the cages.
Btw, it’s not just roosters that have spurs on their legs. They don’t feel good sticking in your hands.
Years ago, when I was still an actual paintcharge, part of the job was cleaning out the sink traps. Now this was still back when we used casein paints, which are based on milk proteins. Holy hell, did that smell bad. I’d always warn the rest of the shop on days when it had to happen. Take a poll: before or after lunch? Cuz that would stink up the entire scene shop, even with the loading door open.
Picture a 2’ cube filled with the nastiest stinking sludge you can imagine. Scoop it out into 5 gallon buckets, mix with sawdust to harden and schlep out behind the theatre to harden.
The story I heard, was that he was invited to come do a shift at the cleanup from Hurricane Katrina, specifically, cleaning out the refrigerators that had been left for weeks or months, full of food, in a tropical climate, with air-tight seals. He didn’t take them up on the offer.
There is no shit (literal or figurative) anywhere that’s as bad as anaerobically rotting food. So yeah, Katrina fridge-cleaning is pretty high on the list (though it at least paid reasonably well)
I’ve seen something similar in Bangkok, where they use prisoners for the job. Hopefully volunteers.
I haven’t had any really bad jobs.
Roméo Dallaire comes to mind though - military commander forced to sit by and watch - ordered not to interfere - as genocide was happening in Rwanda.
My brother worked an injection molding machine while at university. He said that many of the doctors just couldn’t understand communism: that there would be people stupid enough to work towards the destruction of society as we know it…
Yeah, there was one other job that felt really good for awhile, but after I got put in jail for doing the job, then told by the “upper people” that they would pay fines and court costs if I “just pled guilty”, it would be all right. Horse-crap.
March-April, 1970, I was working on a gubernatorial race campaign in Alabama. We were a “bumper sticker crew”, whose job was to stand on a roadway lane line, and when traffic got stopped by a red light signal we offered drivers to put a “WALLACE FOR GOVERNOR” bumper sticker on their cars.
The campaign put us up in pretty nice hotels (mostly Holiday Inn), paid for our meals, and handed us $75 per week for our troubles; I’m absolutely certain no taxes of any kind were taken from those payments. (Not to mention, there were lots of “purty wimmins” out on the old campaign trail.)
Then that last morning, the crew were in Birmingham, on the street in front of Roebuck Mall. The cop came around, told us we were under arrest for standing in the road and blocking traffic and failure to obey a lawful command. Then one of the crew asked, “Why?”. Then the cop said, “…and resisting arrest.”
Any idea, people, what it felt to an 18-year old white boy… to be put in a “prison van”, taken to five different cells in the next few hours? The last cell was in the drunk tank of the “Avenue E Prison”. Yeah, lots of black fellows in there. One of them looked at you and grunted, well, you offered him a cigarette and a light. (We were all wearing “WALLACE” t-shirts and ball caps, you understand.)
I left the campaign shortly after I pled guilty. I had to explain the whole “failure to obey” to the Navy a few months later before the service would accept me.
Crazy in Alabama.
While nowhere near as bad as most of these jobs, my worst job was working in the back of a fast food restaurant. Getting paid $5 an hour to get burned by oil, griddles, toasters, and fry baskets and go home smelling like burgers and fries sucks.
I think that everyone should have to work in a service job at some point in their life just to see how hard it is.
Not only this, but they should have to do it while they are young and before they commit to whatever comes after high school, like education, trade school, the military. Nothing motivates you to think hard about your future like working your ass off for minimum wage.
Some are worse than others. As a teenager I worked at McDonald’s, which was tolerable. But after that I also worked at a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant during breaks from college, which was far worse. A good part of your day was spent handling raw chicken, including popping kidneys out of every thigh piece. Pretty much everything around you was being deep-fried. I washed a lot of dishes there, and between the soap and water exposure, my hands peeled terribly. Dishwashing gloves didn’t help; there was so much spraying going on that water got into the gloves anyway. By the end of each shift, my uniform was saturated with a mix of raw chicken residue, flour, dishwater, and fryer grease.
In both places, you regularly encountered asshole customers who felt entitled to abuse you if the slightest thing went wrong with their dining experience.
This. I think my fast-food work experience has made me a more sympathetic and courteous customer.
You have my sympathy!
Here was another horrible ag-related job I had (I had a lot of them): Detasseling corn. Somehow, they roped my junior high school into providing the Pioneer seed company with near slave labor. We would meet at the school and take a school bus out to the fields, starting at 5:00AM. They would load us into the tractors with the baskets on booms and for 12 hours you would go up and down the fields pulling tassels. I think we got like two water breaks and one short lunch break. 100 degree weather. I made a whopping $1.35/hour the first year (this is mid-80’s when the minimum wage was in the $3 an hour range) and a huge 10 cent per hour raise the second year. I’m not sure if the labor laws still allow 12-14 year old kids to get paid peanuts.
Check it out: https://www.pioneer.com/home/site/about/careers/student-center/summerjobs/detasselers/
They make it sound fun! Does this look like fun?
I worked on the line at GM in Oshawa as my second summer job (my stepfather worked there). It paid extremely well for a summer job, but four months of it was all I could stand. Mostly it was standing in front of slowly-moving cars, sliding a pipe into position underneath each one. The worst thing I did there was reaching in behind the instrument panel to connect somethong on each car (I no linger remember what); my hands and arms ended up scratched and a little bloody. I lasted two days in that position.
My first summer job was labourer for Consumer’s Gas, helping to lay gas lines around Whitby (my dad worked there). I got to coat the pipe joints in black sealant after they had been welded together, and I remember it popping and fizzling on the hot metal.
The weirdest job I’ve ever done was medical test subject. There are a number of companies in the Greater Toronto Area that do generic drug development and testing and contract medical research. I got paid $2700 for taking part in a double-blind test of a drug. We were extensively tested and measured before the drug trial began, and the waivers were mind-boggling. After we ate the sample, which may or may not have contained the drug under test, we gave blood samples for measurement at defined intervals. First it was every hour, then every two hours, then four hours, then less frequently. And yes, we were woken up during the night for this.
Did I mention we were staying at their facility for several nights? The place was like a cross between a medical ward and a youth hostel. We checked in through extensive security (including putting tape over all cameras on any phones or computers we brought), and took up residence in a large room with couches and tables in the middle and alcoves with bunk beds around the outside. There were no windows. We would troop down to the dining area for our carefully-measured meals (which were actually pretty good). The testing staff would get us at the appropriate times and lead us to another room where they took the blood samples.
Apparently there are people who do this on a semi-regular basis. I gather the right studies can pay even better.
The worst job I’ve ever done was telephone tech support. The place was timed down to the second. We had eight seconds between calls. We had to log all bathroom breaks down to the second as well, after calling the ‘floater’ over to take our place. The job put my anxiety levels way up, I went back on the anti-anxiety pills I’d gotten in the hospital after my nervous breakdown during second year, and I lasted two weeks.
<post doorhinged>
I was a normal control in research all through my undergrad years. A friend was in the Department of Clinical Studies. She’d feed me info on high paying, low risk studies. The pay offered was a reflection of their need for volunteers and their level of funding.
So, I did dozens of sleep studies, which paid amazingly well. I’d turn down the multiple blood samples for ten bucks and the warm feeling you helped your fellow man. I did a very high paying study that warned of “mild discomfort”. It involved extreme dehydration. Mild my ass, there was a crash-cart “in case”, but the pay was fantastic.
The absolute best were studies that paid well because of the embarrassment factor. I’m totally fine having my penis looked at by three strangers if the money is right.
A friend did drug research that required him to collect all urine he produced. He would bring his gallon jug with him wherever he went. One night he drank too much at a party. On his way home he tripped on a curb, hitting concrete face-first and crushing his piss jug under himself.
Yeah, this one wins. Shudder