Husband and Father.
This wasn’t my job, but…
Remember that blackout the other year, the one that shut down the Eastern seaboard? Yeah, well, my buddy was working his normal (excellent) summer job at an all girls camp. We were all envious of him, spending an entire summer held up with 200 teenage girls in remote Northern Ontario; envious until he returned with his tale.
So the power outage turned everything off, including the toilets. Quickly this became a problem. The problem was solved by the girls using the barn to do their business. Problem solved, right? Not for my good ole buddy. After three days, when the power was finally restored for him, he got to shovel it all out.
I’ve done some gross jobs before, but the way he described having to shovel out, on his own, 200 girls waste which had been rotting in barn for four days… nope. All his other stories of all girls summer camp debauchery could not make up for that.
I’m a veterinary pathologist, so during vet school and my residency I did necropsies on all kinds of animals with all kinds of cool diseases. Some of the animals had been dead for several days, including 2 horses who were so rotten their kidneys were liquefied. Also, there’s nothing quite like the smell of a necrotic squamous cell carcinoma in the stomach of a horse.
I’ve shoveled horseshit, cleaned buses and worked in food service. Food service was by far my least favorite.
These days I’m a newspaper printer. I work in pre-press. The pressmen think I’m kind of a pussy because I have all my fingers.
Had to work my way through college, mostly on spot labor. I earned a reputation for never saying no to a job until this particular one.
Place was called Western Montana Byproducts, which is the windy version for nasty. I’d been to the place in the past looking for cow brains to tan hides with and they sent me around to the loading dock. Someone on the inside tossed out six intact cow heads, followed by an axe, so I knew something about the nature of the work.
They were happy to see me since every one of the folks sent by the job service walked out as soon as they saw the job. It was in the boiler room. A huge steaming cauldron of everything left over from livestock, rendered down to it’s essence. The ceiling was three stories high and various pipes crisscrossed everywhere. They showed me the biggest step ladder I’d ever seen, a bag of rags, a gallon of bright yellow paint and a brush. The idea was to scale the ladder, sluice off the accumulated fat from the tops of the pipes and paint 'em yellow.
Half way through the first day, I was considering swallowing my pride and collecting my time but I needed the money too much. Took about 10 days to finish the job and all these years later I swear, my armpits still look the same color as that paint!
They must have been impressed with my labors because when I was through they offered to keep me on as a truck driver. Much more to my liking I’m thinking.
They sent me on my first job, what they called a recovery. Drive out to a field and load a dead cow to bring back for rendering. Their truck was all set up for this type of work with a dump bed and winch. I hooked the likeliest part of the stinking, maggot infested mass and started winching only to have the thing fall apart. Gave up on the winch idea and started in on it with an axe and saw, throwing it into the truck.
Drove it back to the parking lot and left without a backwards glance.
And the publicity agent asks, “So. . . that was quite remarkable. What’s the name of your act?”
So here’s me, wedging myself down this length of 16" pipe encrusted with god knows what kind of rotten fish excrement, a flashlight gripped in my teeth, a razor, and a rope tied around my ankles so my buddies can pull me out.
The mission: While making a liberty call in some port on the med, a cooling water pump on my ship got fouled with a bunch of rope mixed with copious amounts of rotten sea life. This was quite a large pump, so disassembly wasn’t really an option. Someone had to go in and cut the rope out…
The confined space didn’t bug me. Nor did I worry about that single valve holding off the water, since Chief was up there guarding it.
But that smell…
It might not have been so bad if it was just that nasty rotten sealife smell, even if it were stronger than any I’d ever experienced before. Things took a turn for the worse though, when I threw up and lost the grip on the flashlight, which fell into not only the disgusting rope that is lodged with all manner of disgusting slop, but, as if to spite me, my own vomit.
Even that wouldn’t have been so bad if I’d had a spare hand to hold it with afterwords, a spot it could be wedged so that I could still see what i was doing, or even something not soaked in fetid vileness to wipe it off with. Unfortunately, I had none of those things.
After staring at that damnable flashlight for several minutes(during which i had many hateful thoughts directed at my recruiter), I decided I just wanted to get the hell out of there as fast as I could, shook the worst of the nastyness off of it, and popped it back into my mouth. Fortunately, I managed to finish the job without a repeat incident.
I am literally crying over here. Thank you.