My student job working at La Posada (aka Alpo Sloppo) on the UNM campus. If the football team ever actually managed to win a game they would be rewarded with a huge feast and the result was literally a pile of garbage all over the dishroom of the dining hall. Garbage so thick you had to wade through it and the dishwashing machine breaking down and spewing water everywhere while employees gleefully shouted “Niagra Falls!” and the dishroom manager cussed bluestreak.
The most repulsive job I ever had was in telemarketing. Push-polling and begging impoverished 70 year-old widows for political contributions. Made me want to vomit. I lasted a couple of months.
However my more traditional disgusting employment has included a stint as a maintenance dude at a McDonalds and employment in the wastewater field.
The latter included interceptor station patrols where gas-bloated dead rats ( primed to literally explode if poked too vigorously ) joined mighty man patties on the list of the less charming detritus encountered.
At the former we once had multiple breakdowns of the trash compactor, resulting in huge masses of garbbage bags full of spoiled and discarded food piling on top of each other all week. I’d arrive on the weekend to find the lower bags had all split and meat, rotting in the sun, had attracted flies. The first layer was intact bags - up and over into the dumpster. The second was broken bags - shoveled. The third layer was spoiled, gangrenous smelling meat with what was literally a six inches or more deep and 4 to 6 feet across pool of writhing, healthy maggots. It was maggot lake - a veritable maggot sea!! This too was shoveled. With a face mask on. And occasional breaks to re-gather one’s faculties. Ah, the joys of teenage employment :p.
At the first barn we were ever at, there were a couple of boarders who not only didn’t pay their board for several months, they didn’t clean their horses’ stalls nor pay anyone to do it. Finally, the barn manager who was a friend of mine and my hubby’s, took the horses for nonpayment and moved them to cleaner stalls. The horses were in good health but their stalls…oh my God. They were so bad, so full of maggots, worms and poo in various stages of decay, I thought I was going to be sick for the rest of my life. Barn Manager, my hubby, and another boarder who was on the fire dept. cleaned out their stalls. Thankfully, the fireman had access to full face masks and oxygen, so the job got done but the smell lasted for days. I stayed upwind and took care of the horses.
Nothing too horrendous, but of all the jobs I’ve worked at, being a stock person at the “deep discount store” was worst. The job itself wasn’t so bad but it was the stock crew’s job to clean the bathroom.
Something about paying lower prices for generic food and knickknacks seems to make people want to really trash a bathroom and shit in weird places.
[Moderator Underoos On]Off-topic. The title of this thread is not “What’s the grossest story you ever made up when you were a 13 year old”. Badly written gross out stories belong elsewhere.[/Moderator Underoos On]
Our housemate is an air conditioning and refrigeration tech, and he comes home with some frightening accounts of conditions at pretty much every location of a popular nation-wide fried chicken place.
The constant theme is GREASE EVERYWHERE. He’s at least learned how to “skate” rather than try to walk normally in these places.
Just yesterday, he was replacing the evaporator coil in a walk-in cooler, affectionately called the Chicken Box, as that’s what’s kept in it. Lots and lots of raw chicken pieces. Per his descriptions, conditions in the Chicken Box are terrible. The aluminum fins on the evaporator had rotted away, and for some untold reason, there was rotten chicken in the evaporator. When he and his assistant pulled the evaporator off the ceiling of the cooler, they both got showered in aluminum residue, chicken and moldy water that had been unable to drain away because the drain was clogged with chicken bits. ICK! When he got home last night, he shed his clothes in the garage.
For sheer muck, the abattoir. Especially when a load of diseased old screws came in and I was on the riser, collecting the kidneys - one of them had cystitis so badly that one of her kidneys had completely disintegrated. When I cut into the suet I got about a liter of disease ridden urine directly in the face.
Blinded and coughing, I had to feel for the stop button and “down” pedal along the edge of the riser and descend the two metres without dropping off the edge (no safety rail) before I could go get cleaned up.
I can, through experience, say that being hit in the face with a dead fish is better than being hit in the face with a dead sheep.
But the grossest thing I ever had to do was sit at a reception desk in a medical centre and chat politely to the husband while the doctors sewed his wife up and patched and braced the injuries he’d inflicted on her. They told me later that they had to work fast because he’d said that she’d get another beating if his dinner was late. I quit that afternoon.
Oy. I was going to mention helping with calf births and milking, but you got me beat all to hell. All the calves I delivered were live, and our milking system was set up to put the cups on from the side. I still got baptized many times with cow poop, especially in the winter and spring when they were eating green grass, but other than a few splashes, my face was spared.
If people had any idea how much cow poop flies around milking barns, they’d probably go soy.
Well described. (Especially the shit-cough, a phenomenon that truly has to be seen to be properly appreciated.)
You know the line between normal and disgusting is very blurry in a place where two men can carry on a perfectly normal conversation while one of them has their arm buried shoulder deep in a cow’s ass.
ASDA. God I hated that job soo much. Felt like I had to have a boling hot bath everytime I got home from work just to wash the shame and memories from working there. getting out was the best thing I ever did even though Im not fond of my new job. Any job is better than working at ASDA!
Yep, she had long ago accepted her role as target.
Whatever the NZ equivalent of HIPA is, yea. Patient confidentiality.
That was what got to me - we legally had to let her go back to him (over and over - I nearly threw up while updating her file). I couldn’t stay there and keep my mouth shut and I was legally not allowed to say anything.
Being up to my armpits in fish guts and gonads was much easier to handle. At least we got to joke about the codes for the data charts; Male = 1, Immature = 1, No visible gonad development = 1. NZ’s emergency line is 111, so when we techie girls got back to land and went clubbing again, 111 was a handy code.
Very nice.