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So the SAT thread had me go look for a testimony of Mike Rowe from the TV show Dirty Jobs testifying about the trade gap in the US. That brought up a quick clip of Mike on the O'Reilly factor talking about his top five worst jobs he's held on the show.




Highlights include being a marital aid for a mare and a stallion (still don't understand why that can't be done the old fashioned way...)
Chicken sexer (Language! that)
and of course Sewage Inspector.

So what's the worst/nastiest job or part of a job you've ever done?

For me personally I had a lovely part of my job while I was in the Marines where I had to scrape pigeon gak off the hangar deck in my squadron. I don't know what the hell pigeon gak is made out of but goddess damn it's harder to clean off stuff then super glue. The other half of that was the removal of the corpses of said pigeons, which regularly got themselves killed by the hangar doors moving parts or other industrial equipment, or in one notable case, one bird died of heat exhaustion in the rafters of the hangar then baked for goddess knows how long before finally making it's way, baked and decayed back to the hangar deck.

The job itself got pretty nasty, on an average day working on helos I got covered in jet fuel, hyde fluid, grease, and whatever the hell else I ended up dealing with chemically but those pigeons were always the disgusting highlight.

I worked at the Illinois State Fair on the night crew for barn cleanup for a summer.

It was literally gakky, and there were a few 12 hours shifts with less than 8 hours before the next one started. If I wasn't 17 years old and desperately saving cash for college, I wouldn't have done it.

When I was in the Air Force, we were stationed at an army post for training. someone clogged up the toilets on the second floor latrine. it needed to be cleaned. so I volunteered and so did another guy and we mopped that gak up. literally.

why volunteer? looks VERY good on a training record to go above and beyond the call of duty. still passed the block with an 89% average.

I cleaned a lot of messy stuff in my time in the service. but hand mopping an overflowing sewage problem was probably the worst.

uh, nevermind.

Cleaning grease traps.
Cleaning air filters (the big ones used in areas with heavy smoking).

Guys... have a sewer drain get backed up in your basement...

The stench was knarly...

Destroyed everything in basement, included the utilities (center heating/air unit and washer/dryer).

Had a paper round when I was about 15. Because the subscriptions varied every day the woman would write down which paper goes to which house. For example, Daily Star goes to No13, and Telegraph to 16, etc. Anyway, after the first week she come to me and says she's got calls from people who've got the wrong paper. "Fair enough" I say, "It won't happen again".

Next week, she says she's had some more calls from people. She's pretty pissed off so she sends her son with me to "show how it's done". Her son and I get to these houses, turns up she's written down the wrong addresses on about 4 papers. Despite the fact that her own son told her she was wrong, she remains adamant that she was in the right and docks me of a whole weeks pay. I tell her to feth it, albeit with a bit more colourful language.

However, if you want to meet supervisors who don't have a spine between them to stand up to rude customers, you could always try Sainsburys...

Personally, its slaughtering turkeys. Nasty filthy, but it makes money.

 KalashnikovMarine wrote:

Highlights include being a marital aid for a mare and a stallion (still don't understand why that can't be done the old fashioned way...)
Chicken sexer

As for the top 2,


Horse breeding is done the old fashioned way, but if the 2 horses arn't acclimated to being together it can result in injury for one or both of them if they don't get along. Stallions and Mares will fight. This is true for alot of large mammels.

Then if you want to breed a mare to stud thats 1,000 miles away its not exactly practical to truck one the whole way and back again.

hence we have AI for just about all large animals, and quite a few small ones. It allows a champion beef bull or racing stud to sire thousands of offspring in a year. Not to mention semen collection and sales can mean big money.



Chicken Sexer. This actually huge for the Egg industry. Eggs, obviously, only come from female chickens and its costs money to raise a chicken to the age where you can tell visually if its male or female. At which point all the money thats been spent raising the males to that age is wasted.

By sexing the chicks at day old you can eliminate the males and save tons of money by not spending it on feeding what will end up being a wasted animal. Modern sexing techniques are only around 90% accurate, but having 90% females and 10% males is far better then having half and half.

Male chicks are either destroyed or sold to meat producers where they end up as pet food most of the time. This is also the fate of spent layers.

Back when I was still scannertech, we once had to scan a weld where the pipe had hit the sewers. Then it had frozen up. We couldn't scan the pipe until it had defrosted (our scanner uses water).

Guess what happens when a 48" pipe with one open end full of frozen sewage thaws? I literally had to wade through gak to get the scanner to the pipe to scan it...
It didn't help that it was raining, and temperature had dropped again...

Loading the dish washer in the kitchen of the Little Chef at a motorway service station. Truly one of the foulest places on earth.

Coca-Cola

Absolute hell hole of a company to work for.

GG

Working at Wendy's.

Either being a TA, or working in a book warehouse. Being a TA required being nice to kids who didn't want to be there. Working in a book warehouse involved getting covered in paper dust.

I'd say working on a pig farm while I lived in Iowa could be a qualifier. While I was in high school, I would work on the local farms on weekends and during summer vacation.
I would spend the day shoveling cement like gak and helping castrating pigs at this one farm and literaly was cured of wanting to eat any pork products for years after.
The farmer would keep the pigs in different pens according to their size to keep the bigger ones from tearing up the smaller ones. One day a 150 lb pig somehow found his way into a pen with the bigger pigs and was killed, stripped down and eaten in a fairly short order.
I've worked with cattle, hayed, planted, and worked quite a few 90 hour weeks on farms, but the pig farm stands out above all.

I worked the 4am-8am shift at target, unloading a truck and stocking shelves.

Two months in, I found out I passed the Ohio Bar exam. Two months after that I was laid off.

A garden centre with a morally-ambiguous owner....(they sold pets as well, watching him stamp on one of the hamsters because it bit a kid earlier in the day and the being told to clean that gak up was NOT how i wanted to spend the last 30 minutes of that particular day...). EDIT: note, this was one of the less offensive days on the job...

However, after 3 weeks of working there, i was the most built ive been before or since, the sheer physicality of the job meant i bulked up quick, shame i dont get paid for going to the gym or id be there al the time instead of...well, not going

Well, most of my jobs havent been bad, there where some i hated.
Like at the Mexican restaurant i worked at. It was great, 45 minute lunch breaks i get paid for, i still get discounts from the 5 years later.
But they had this one job, they pawned off on me. Peeling Shrimp. I couldn't use chainmail gloves because i needed dexterity, but the shell would hurt alot.
My job i have now, I hate cleaning the grill, its hot and greasy, But atleast im not the go to guy for mobbing anymore.

Walking door to door signing people on to credit cards just a month after the gfc

 Gitkikka wrote:
Cleaning grease traps.

High five, my fellow grease trap cleaner. It was made worse by the fact the other kitchen workers kept neglecting it when it was there turn, so I had to do it for them.
"Cuddly! Can you do the grease trap?"
"It should have been done on Monday."
"We had toooooo much to do...Plz?"
"IF YOU HAD SO MUCH TO DO THEN WHY DID YOU SIGN OUT SO EARLY?"

I've been pretty lucky I guess you could say. I've held 3 jobs since I turned 15. Was a bagger at a grocery store for a few months, before moving on to Taco Bell, which paid worlds better. I worked at TB until I enlisted in the Air Force at 17, and have been there since. I got my ideal job in the AF, and I've loved it since. Currently setting myself up to move into another career that I'm pretty sure I'll love when I retire from the AF in about 9 years.

Debt collection department. Three and a half years of my life spent threatening random people on the phone.

The gates of heaven are closed to me, I know...

 Gitkikka wrote:
Cleaning grease traps.
Cleaning air filters (the big ones used in areas with heavy smoking).

I know that feeling Bro, Disgusting,
And today i had to drain the entire fryer.

I worked on a paint crew and we had to remove wallpaper, from a smoker's house. The wallpaper wasn't coming off, so we tried a steamer which had terrible side effect. Nicotine was pulling out of the wall and dripping from the ceiling. One of the crew looked up and had it fall into his mouth.

So yeah, raining nicotine.

Man what to choose,
Delivering calves? No.
Burning gak with JP8? No.
The worst job I ever had was counting bodies in the sand box and doing survailence on the, for lack of a better term, death squads doing a lot of the killing and all of the torture in one neighborhood. It was the most frustrating period of my life and exposed to me the most sickening side of humanity.

I think my overall lowest point was convoying up to Baghdad from Kuwait. I can't remember the exact amount of time we had originally budgeted, but every 45 minutes or so a truck would break down, because most people didn't do gak for maintenance.
We had 4 recovery assets. After that it was sit by the side of the road til the mechanics got stuff running. Ended up taking a ridiculous amount of time, which is also when I learned that you aren't tired when you fall asleep behind the wheel, you are tired when you stop caring. I also learned to never let Pierre drive, no matter how much sleep he got, he would fall asleep in less than an hour and try to drive us off a bridge. I'd just doze off and gradually start drifting until the guy behind me would lay on his horn and I'd wake up and go straight again.
We also got lost driving around downtown Baghdad (we weren't supposed to go into Baghdad) for about an hour, in our wonderful plastic doored vehicles. Thank the Gods the insurgency hadn't had time to really kick in yet.

The only time that compared was trying to get our trucks back out of that nonsense. We had to clean the sand off our trucks, inside and out. Had inspectors going around, making sure there was no sand left. We had low pressure salt water spray guns. We were slotted for 3 hours, ended up taking .... I think eleven?
I know it was light when we got there, and light when we left, but there was some dark in between. We had to knock holes in the wheel wells of our trucks so we could get the sand out. Like, with pick axes, hammers, and screw drivers. I had salt deposits in the bottoms of my feet from my boots being soaked in the crap for so long. But still, I didn't almost die a few times that day, so the convoy from hell takes the cake.

Overall though, I can't say the army was my worst job, because as low as the low days were, the highs were amazing.

Cleaning out the grease traps and fryers on a daily basis sucked. Grease traps had to be taken out at least thrice a shift, which often had rotting eggs in it because morning crew was incapable of doing it, and again at the end of the evening shift to clear the way for the cleaner and again after all the crap that was stuck to the grill was cleaned off. Not to mention the messes that were made because the blasted thing was always full and its an awful long walk to get to where it needs to be disposed so... having to mop the floor repeatedly every night sucked too.

Better than some* of the things mentioned, certainly, but still gross.'

*Beats the heck out of cleaning up corpses or getting shot at, certaintly.

Picking up bits of corpse after an aircraft crash.
That sucks big time.

Pumping Gas.

I mean you get some really friggen weird people at 1-2 am. I don't know why they are compelled to come to a gas station.

Fun times...

I've been pretty damn lucky.

Worst job I ever had was working at my father's autoparts store. It was nowhere near as horrible as some of the other stories in this topic. It was just boring because there wasn't much to do. It wasn't a particularly bad job, it's just that everything else I've had has been better.

 Poppabear wrote:
Pumping Gas.

I mean you get some really friggen weird people at 1-2 am. I don't know why they are compelled to come to a gas station.

Fun times...

Because you don't have Walmart in New Zealand?