I’ve had any number of doosies. None as horrible as pulling the legs off of dead cows, but pretty crappy none the less.
One of the more ludicrous jobs I had was the disposal of soda which was past it’s expiration date.
The training? Pretty grueling.
Mike, the guy who would inexplicably show up 2 hours early before work everyday and just sit in his car, was my mentor.
“Do you know how the expiration code works?” He asked me.
“Uh, yeah, pretty sure”. I replied.
“You do”? He asked accusingly.
“I think so. Why? Is it… maybe you should just show me”.
“Well…”, he began, speaking slowly so I could grasp the complexity of the process. “The code’s on the bottom of the can”.
“Uh,huh…”
“You wanna flip it over and read it”.
“O-K, still with ya”.
“Now, fer instance. This one says: 2 - 13 - 94”.
“OK”.
“That means, February… 13th… 1994… That’s expired”.
“Gotcha”. (Note to self: First number’s the month, next number’s the day… How will I EVER remember this code?!)
“Ya dump the expired ones out”
“Well, that makes sense I suppose. What do you use to open the cans”?
“Whattya mean”?
“Is there a machine that crushes em, or what”?
“Ya use yer hand. Just open em. Put em on the grate on the floor. You can open another one while the first ones drainin’. Goes faster that way.”
So that’s what I did. 8 hours a day. 5 days a week.
You wouldn’t believe the blisters and callouses I got on my hands from opening hundreds of cans and bottles of soda a day. And about every tenth can or bottle would spray me. Talk about sticky. By the time I got home I was like Spiderman. I could practically walk up walls using the sheer adhesive quality of my soda-drenched sneakers.
Then there was the job where I drove around picking up medical specimens from various HMO’s to drop off to the testing center. Using my own car of course, with no compensation for gas, despite the 11 hours a day on the road.
Nothing like a trunk full of “specimens” on a hot summer’s day.
As my friends would incessantly tease: “I took shit from everyone”.
I was a supplier for a scap yard that also recycled. Althuogh hired as a buyer, you have to spend the first month like the unloaders. Actually now that I think about it there were a few repugnant duties. But lets go in order.
As an unloader when car pulled in we’d grab there bags of cans and plastic bottles (25% didn’t separate this stuff, but that’s nother story) We’d take these and dump them in a bin in front aof a conveyor belt. (15% of customers would yell at youthinking you’d dumped their stuff before weighting it). The buyer would start the belt which carried the cans to the scale. Our job at this time is to pick up the cans as they go by dumping remaining liquids and throwing out the cans where someone cheated. The smell is horrible and the liquid leaves this slimy goo all over you.
In my college days I answered an ad for “debris removal”, with an outrageous $10/hr rate of pay($4.50 was normal). They bussed us out to a site, gave us gloves and trash bags, and told us a cool story on the way. About 6 months before, a man had hijacked a commuter plane, shot the pilots, and taken it nose first into the ground. They cleaned it up the best they could, but now the property owner’s were complaining of stuff falling out of trees, and various debris on the ground up to mile from the impact site. We got to pick it up, saving teeth, jewlery, or certain green metal bits in special boxes and throwing everything else away. I picked up stuff all day, and found about 20 teeth. Some people with me did find what looked like a diamond in a setting, probably part of a ring. No one found much of the metal (part of an emmission control system?) It wasn’t really very gross at the time, but just creepy. I think it was pretty gross now, though, thinking about all the carnage that was all over the place 6 months before.
They liked to hire underage kids (I was 14) so that they could work us off the clock. Closing time was 10 pm, schedule said 10 pm, worked until 11:30 cleaning up & prepping for the next day. Paycheck said 10 pm.
Textbook Manager. Follet.
“I didn’t want the new edition.” It’s not available in the old one anymore. “I don’t care if it’s out of print, I want 300 copies.” Tough. “Why aren’t there anymore used/new books?”
Did I mention there was a law school? Sure there were a few nice law students, but for the most part they were the biggest wastes of useful anuses I’ve met in my life. One-L’s are worse.
I worked at the Salk Institute in La Jolla. We would blenderize rats & the run them through a machine to examine the pulp. Then it was my job to clean the test tubes of the pulp. Gross.
You worked for Follett? That was one of my worst jobs, I was the cashier. I had to hear endless complaints about how much the books cost or how little they were bought back for. It wasn’t disgusting, just annoying and mind numbingly boring.
I know we’re not voting here, but I say that KarlGauss wins.
Mine wasn’t an actual job. I was hired by my uncle once a year to clean out his barn. He had three horses, one mule, and a goat. These animals shit an awful lot over the course of a year, and I got handed a pitchfork, a shovel, a wheelbarrow, and a pair of gloves.
It worked like this: Pick a stall. Begin filling wheelbarrow with horseshit. When full, push wheelbarrow out into field behind barn and dump it.
The tricky part was this: There was still a huge mountain of shit back there from the last couple of years, which had decomposed and had grass growing all over it. Naturally, my uncle wanted this enormous mountain of shit to take up as little space as possible (area-wise). Therefore, I had to pile the shit as high as possible. This is where the planks of lumber come in. I had to construct a narrow little ramp out of two by fours and whatever other scrap wood I could find in the barn and push the wheelbarrow up to the top of Shit Mountain to make a dump (heh-heh).
The best was when it would rain and the boards would get all slippery and I couldn’t make it to the top and the wheelbarrow would flip over and just dump the shit everywhere.
Each stall had about three to four feet worth of shit in them. Five stalls, I think, each about 10 x 12.
I worked in a two story hog confinment building once.Ya know hogs just sht everywhere.Well that means that you have to have plumbing.When the farrowing room is upstairs,Actually the best place for it,those little pigs sometimes escape.Besides there being hog sht everywhere the afterbirth sometimes plugs up the thoughs that the urine and such are supposed to run down.And then the feed gets added to the mix.Hogs are not the tidiest of eaters. And then you know in the summertime there are the flies.Well those flies are pretty promiscuous which means fly larve.Yep maggots.Oh you remember those loose baby pigs? well they will crawl into about every crack and crevice which does not exclude the drain pipe.Well they can’t get out thereby plugging up the works.Usually you don’t notice for a couple of days.The place doesn’t get washed down everyday but when it does it makes a soupy mixture that is supposed to go down the drain.So a backed up drain with a baby pig as the culprit. Now the only way to open the drain is from the first floor standing on a step ladder.And the only method that I could figure out is to dismember the piglet and pull it out. It is a struggle but when it finally comes out you are rewarded with a gushing shower.And then after all that you have to go back upstairs and clean up the farrowing room.Oh did I mention the smell??What smell??
I mucked stalls for a year, and you certainly develop a technique to climbing the manure pile. The job itself wasn’t so bad (we cleaned each stall every day, so it didn’t smell much), except when the mares were in season (mounds of sticky, gooey ammonia).
The worst part in caring for horses, though, is cleaning the sheaths on geldings. One gelding didn’t like the feel of latex gloves on his privates, so I had to clean his barehanded. After about an hour of bending or crouching down, avoiding his attempts to nip me, and poking in all his little crevices, I’d be black to the wrists with smegma. It would then take me about ten minutes of vigourous scrubbing to get it off my hands (and out of my nails). The smell would linger on my hands for days.
I once ate a lovely dinner at a fine restaurant with my hands smelling like crotch rot.
I work at a small grocery store. I put up stock, clean the meat room, wash the floors, and work the register sometimes. Cleaning the meat room is the disgusting part. First I have to rinse all the meat bits, blood, and fat out of the sink. Then I clean the counters, the wrapper, the scale, the knives, and the cutting table. Then, I take the tray off an industrial size meat grinder and clean the bits of hamburger off it. Then I take the apart the feed assemly, which has the screw and blade in it. I take off the outer wheel. I then take out the round piece with the holes that the meat is forced through, and I scrape it off before putting it in the sink. I take out the blade, and unwrap the string of fat that is always tangled on it. Then I take out the screw, which always has a few inches worth of hamburger stuck to it.
I also get to clean a meat saw. It’s a bandsaw with a blade that makes a four foot loop. When the butcher cuts fresh bacon, all the panels and guards are coated with 2 inches of bacon fat that has the consistency of whipped cream. I no longer find this disgusting, just interesting.