What was the grossest job you ever had?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Sure, you can say babysitting if you want. But feel free to gross us out as much as you can.

I had a job right out of high school working at my old high school, actually. It was tedious labor: taping up old textbooks, doing library inventory and such. But the grossest part was cleaning out the lockers and getting them ready for the next school year. We’re talking left-behind lunches with creepy crawlies galore coming out of whatever nasty rotten chow remained. Nothing else I’ve done compares to the shock of critters tumbling out of filthy lockers.

So, what would you like to contribute? I’m sure many of you can come up with something worse.

2

I was a stable boy at a yak ranch in Montana for a summer, a few years back. Let me tell you, it was absolutely the most disgusting job ever. The goddamned beasts had this coarse and greasy hair that would get matted and tangled like crazy, even when it was brushed every day. Their tumerous skin stank horribly, and some of them appeared to be infected with gas gangrene. They ate a diet of old beanstalks and laundry-lint, which their insane owners apparently thought would be nutritious for them but which simply led to severe digestive problems, causing the creatures to shit diarrhea everywhere. Sometimes I even saw maggots crawling around in their shit, and it was frequently laced with blood and pus. The most disgusting part of the job was the breeding room in the back, though, where the bull-yak would spread his seed to further generations. The owner of the ranch seemed to think the best way to do this would be to tie his wife down in the barn and have the bull penetrate her. Not once in the entire time I was there did the wife show any signs of being pregnant with the yak’s calf, but that only made the rancher more determined to ensure a conception. He’d have me steer the yak’s phallus - which was as thick around as the business end of a baseball bat - into the poor woman’s yawning vaginal crevice, and sit there until the beast was through. Afterwards, it was my job to clean up the yak come from all over the goddamned barn, and let me tell you, there was more of it than you’d think. The stinking stuff coated the walls, the floor, the ceiling, the windowscreens, and even the fucking rafters.

Now I’m a writer. It’s a much better job.

3

That’s incredibly fucking disgusting, Argent Towers. Almost too disgusting to be believed, but I have watched Dirty Jobs and I believe you. (Un)Fortunately, I can’t possibly compete with that.

My job wasn’t disgusting for the most part, but as a barista, I would clean out the floor drains which usually had black globs of spoiled milk solids and whatever else made it to the floor, which is just about everything. It’s was pretty gag-worthy, but it wasn’t yak come, that’s fer damn sure!

4

Word!
(dude… there are therapists for the yak thing…)

I’ve eschewed gross jobs, being grossophobic myself, but mremilyforce worked on a lobstah pier back in the day when “red leg” disease was goin’ round.

You work on the lobster pier, anytime: the lobster catchers bring in thousands of pounds of the beasts every day, and put them in tanks. Owing to natural lobster disgustingness and mortality, some of them die overnight.

Normal times: if you are a peon like mremilyforce, every morning, you go through the tanks and take out the few dead bodies. Sometimes lobsters just die. Maybe from old age. So to keep costs down, you sniff-test the dead ones: ones that aren’t nasty and rotting get sent to the cooker, and cooked lobster bits (while not as lucrative as live lobsters) are worth something. So what you do is pull off the lobster tail and take a sniff. It smells OK? it goes to cook in a huge big pot, afterwards to be flash-frozen. Howevah – It smells like to make you barf? it goes in the trash. Most of them smell OK.

Disease times: there are maybe ten, maybe a hundred, maybe even a thousand times as many dead lobsters as usual. You still have to rip off all their tails and sniff them all. If you or any of your co-workers miss any rotten ones, the cooking pot is all contaminated. Plus the scent makes you all ralph, in unison.

(mremilyforce says he will never, ever eat lobster again, and his experiences as detailed above are 20+ years ago now. I cannot even imagine and am DAMN thankful I don’t have to try.)

Lobstah: It’s like hot dogs, but with special added rotting reek!

Now, I’m a writer…

5

This explains the dream.

6

Wait…the rancher’s wife or the yak’s? :eek:
Dude…there are other options. Being homeless maybe?

I mean I think if I’m ever at a point in my life where I’m dealing with yak seman, I’d just put one of those No Country for Old Men air pistons to my head.

7

You were right the first time. Eventually the woman’s insides were ruptured and she died of internal bleeding. Fortunately for the asshole rancher, she was covered in his insurance policy.

8

I’m assuming that the last line of Argent Towers’s post is a clue to the veracity of his tale . . .

My worst job was cleaning dorms at my college on weekend mornings. Bodily fluid-o-rama! And we didn’t have any sissy hazmat equipment; just detergent, garbage bags, and rubber gloves if we were lucky.

9

The yak n’ wife story was a fantastically revolting piece of writing, at any rate.

10

While I was in high school, I ran a business that among other things cleaned cattle trucks after a run. Nothing like scrubbing down a semi trailer covered in cow shit on a hot summer’s day to make you want to stay in school and make something of yourself.

11

It’s not on the same scale as the yak ranch, but anybody here ever expressed dog anal glands? shudder

12

There’s nothing like a cow with an unborn dead calf that’s a few days ripe. The vet has to cut the calf up and fish it out piece by piece. It’s rotten, slimey, stinks, is disgusting, and everyone is pissed off.

Then there was the time I swam in shit. One morning as I let the cows out of the barn to graze, I see a freshly calved cow going nuts at the far end. At first I couldn’t find the calf. Then peering at the pond full of cow poo behind the barn, I see a pair of nostrils. There was no time to waste. I pulled on my rain pants and coat, buttoned up tight and waded in. The poo almost was up to my armpits by the time I got to the calf, which was blowing bubbles by now. I felt for it’s ears, got a grip and hauled. Pulling up made me sink down, but the calf’s head appeared. Managed to get the calf to shore without going under myself. Went and got some hay to start cleaning the calf off, and let his mum in as she was going to jump the fence. As I’m cleaning one end of the calf, mum is licking the other. After I get the worst off, I pick up the calf and get him in a different paddock. Soon he was standing and trying to feed.

For me, the consistency of the poo was such that it was ooze and very little worked its way through the raingear to blend with the rest of the corruption on my clothes. :stuck_out_tongue:

Then there’s the fun of milking in a herringbone shed. The milker is in a pit with two rows of the wrong end cows pointing in. The common style now has the cups go on between the cow’s rear legs. So the milker is standing under the cow’s tail, has cows either side, and opposite.

Cows fed fresh spring grass produce shit in the same way a firehose provides water. It’s seemingly never ending, almost water like, and (allowing for the pit depth) can travel 1.5 metres; much further if they cough (imagine a shotgun filled with poo instead of lead). I swear that coughing cows have got shit on the ceiling; they have scored hits on the cows opposite too :eek:

You get to learn their body language and know when to step aside. A few cows I trusted, I’d continue to put the cups on them with their poo going over my shoulder. If I was quick, I’d be finished before they were, else there’d be a few drips on my shoulder if I timed my twitch wrong.

I’d get German students for a few months each year; the girls especially would have a hard time. As with the guys, not only would they get a face full, but for the bustier ones the problem was the top of their rubber apron was pushed out so the shit would hose down between their apron and neck :eek: I’d send them home, tell them to check no guys were in, strip off outside and head for the shower. I generally wouldn’t see them for a few hours :slight_smile: The times it happened to me (say yearly), I’d just hose myself off and carry on.

The joys of dairy farming :smack:

13

fap fap fap fap fap fap fap

14

I had a job at a museum years ago. My main task was to go through the basement where they had years and years and years of specimens in varying amounts of alcohol and chemicals. I had to empty the jars out and refill them with 98% alcohol.

The worst? The cats heads. The very worst? A 100 year old dophin fetus. Looked beautiful in the jar but was grossness incorporated when i had to get it out and into a new jar.

15

Hyperbole mixed with (illegal) literary license. Having spent time with Tibetan nomadic pastoralists, i gotta call “yakshit” on your story.

16

I worked for two weeks in a factory that made firebrick and refractory cement. Not nearly as goopy gross as other jobs here (and on Dirty Jobs), but bad enough to make me quit before two weeks were up and go to a lower-paying but healthier job.

1.) Very noisy and dusty factory. When I dropped the shovel I was using, I couldn’t hear it hit the ground. But they gave neither hearing protection jor ear protection. When I ended up sneezing black for a half hour after my first day, I provided my own.

2.) The cement was so fine that it virtually flowed everywhere, including onto my skin. I had to take two baths to get the stuff off.

3.) When we were loading the wet cement into individual packs, the guy doing the loading sat down and used a foot treadle to move cement up with an Archimedes screw contraption. He directed it into the box using a pair of heavy rubber gloves. While doing this, he smoked a cigar. As he finished each box, he’d take out his cigar (still wearing the gloves) and tap his cigar ashes into the box. When he got to the end of his cigar, he dumped the butt into the box. Somebody somewhere has a cigar butt bult into their firewall. Probably several somebodies.

4.) Although I saw people climb into mixing machinery to clean it out, I never saw anybody Tag any of the switches (to keep someone from accidentally turning the machine on while they were in it), even though such tags were available.

5.) On the other hand, I DID see someone turn off a machine while standing in a puddle of water, and give himself a shock.

I fled to a job painting, which paid less, but was a LOT less stressful, dirty, and noisy. Later on that summer I got a job at another factory, shovelling highly explosive nitrocellulose. But they provided all sorts of safety protection.

17

I spent a year once working in a slaughter house running the tongue saw…

18

What a job, but what a payoff. Good on you. Poor little guy.

19

Grossest job: McDonald’s. I had to drain and clean the fryers, scrub baseboards, and deal with rats in the garbage corral…but all that paled beside the horror that was The Ball Pit. Vomit, shit, snot, blood, used bandaids, wads of hair, etc. You could often find enough loose change in there to buy lunch that day, only you wouldn’t have any appetite.

These days the worst I face is a paper cut. I’m never going to meet Mike Rowe. :frowning:

20

Scraping used chewing gum off the underside of school desks in mid-summer.