What's the grimmest job you ever had?

In my industrial mechanic apprenticeship I had a stay in the maintenance department. In the time had to clean out a several hundred liter tank of spoiled cooling lubricant of a CNC machine. If not maintained properly it becomes a breeding ground for bacteria and fungi and it almost made me puke the first time I broke the surface of the waste at the bottom of the tank after pumping the fluids out. It didn't get much better when I had to shovel out the rest of it.

I will never work in maintenance again.

(Edit because I tried something short because I wasn't able to comment here last time I tried)

When I was deployed to Iraq my platoon ran the post office on the FOB, and one of the jobs we all had was going through packages that other soldiers were mailing home to make sure everything they wanted to send was safe/legal to ship. There were several instances where I had to go through footlockers that belonged to soldiers who were killed (their belongings get mailed back to their family once the family has been properly notified; the shipments are handled differently/tracked differently than regular mail). It always fucked me up to go through someone's stuff, knowing they were now dead. Like, you get this little window into their lives: pictures of their family, CDs of the music they liked, books they were reading, all that shit, but then you see the bookmark in that book where they left off and you realize they're never going to finish it, just little things like that that were hard to process, whether you personally knew that soldier or not.

But then it gets even more fucked up because weeks and sometimes months after they were killed, they're still getting mail from people in the states that sent it way before that person was killed, so now you have stacks of letters and packages and post cards for a dead person that they're never gonna get, and the post cards are filled with "I love you and miss you" etc etc, and it kinda crushes your soul a little bit, because you have to go through it all just like the footlocker and ship it all back to the family.

Probably doing tech support in a child cancer ward. The kids all just looked exhausted. I tried not to let it get to me - they came to the hospital for help to live, not to die, so I made the choice to be hopeful about their chances.

I cleaned out houses before a sale.
Most of the times I was called, the previous owner had died with no next-of-kin who gave enough of a fuck to do it themselves.

So every day, I'd be going through all personal belongings of someone who had died recently, and divided it into 2 categories: worth selling, and trash.
95% of the treasured items the deceased left behind went into the second pile.

We're running into this right now. My family has lost a few members recently, and my mom's gone into Final Prep mode.

Really really.

We kids are constantly discussing this. We can't keep the broken antique sewing machine on which her great aunt made a quilt when she was a baby. We tell her "sure" but we all agree a lot of it is just going away. We have no space for this.

So much of what we keep is just for the sentiment, and that's cool, but has no significant value to someone else if they don't have a connection to it. It will go and make a memory with someone that starts at a thrift store.

As the world gets more consolidated for space and we lose the attics and crawlspaces where we host the treasures we will never use but know they're there, we may have to reduce our baggage.

And that's how I entered my own Final Prep mode decades early (ideally).

I 3D scanned a stillborn baby once. Mother was grieving, she wanted baby pictures but like, as much as possible. So I took a photogrammetry machine to a 5 pound corpse.

That was a long day.

Do you usually scan live babies or something? I've never heard of this type of thing for the living or for the deceased.
- We did occasionally scan children and toddlers as part of a 3D family photo product we offered. Infants usually were a bit too squirmy. In the little statue we'd make it would look like the mother was holding a swaddled bee larva. One of our machines (it was a structured light scanner) had like 50 cameras and did the image capture in one shot. It was actually powered by Raspberry Pi 2s.
  
  We also worked with the cosplay scene in that using our handheld structured light scanner we could get pretty good face and body scans. Instead of doing live castings of hands, faces etc. we could 3D scan the subject and then either print that body part on a 3D printer on which makeup prosthetics etc. could be sculpted, or it could be used to model costume parts in-software.
  
  We had floated the idea of doing death masks. Occasionally for various reasons they cast molds of the deceased, and again we could do this faster and with less mess. And precisely one person also had this idea.
- Presumably, a live baby would move way too much for photogrammetry to be useful.
Can you ask them to wrap up your still born after the procedure like when you have a tooth extracted? Holy crap that is indeed grim.
- In a manner of speaking, I suppose. We performed the scan at a funeral home.

As a result of being a dumb ass teenager the state gave me 50 community service hours. I got assigned to an animal shelter that was being managed by some very deranged people. I witnessed some horrific things that mentally unstable people will do to animals when no one cares.

My job was to pile up the euthanized animals in a pickup and off load them at the landfill. Fucking grim.

Jesus Christ that sounds terrible. I get that community service isn't supposed to be particularly fun, but emotionally scarring people seems very counterproductive to the goal.
- Yeah, it took a while to get over that shit, but I guess it worked because I sure as shit changed my ways.
My job was to pile up the euthanized animals in a pickup and off load them at the landfill. Fucking grim.

Ufff. That's grim, yeah.
This is fucking brutal, man. I can handle some shit, but not dead animals that were killed just because. I think I would have lost my mind.
I struck up a conversation with a guy at a bar one time, turned out he was an animal control officer and the county shelter had just had a bad outbreak of parvovirus. He said he had spent the whole week just euthanizing dogs from sunup to sundown. He looked rough.
- That would suck to have to have done that, sounds like he was at least a empathetic human.
  
  It's horrific to witness that kind of death, or it was for me.

I'm a crisis intervention specialist, which means I'm a counselor who specifically works with suicidal individuals and those undergoing similar crises.

Oh wow. I know we don't know each other but I want to thank you, and other people, doing this job. It's so important.
- Thank you, I appreciate that.
Thank you for doing what you do. I don't know how you have the mental strength to do so.
- It takes a lot of training and a lot of self care. I'm very lucky to work with an employer that does truly emphasize self care and allows us to do that.

Worked as a paramedic around the world for two and a half decades now. Saw a lot of shit.

But the worst one was when I was teamleader of a neonatal critical care transport service. That was....not something I could do for long. There is an amount of dead babies people can see in their lifetime. I ignored my limit and now have to face the consequences.

I worked with an ex-paramedic who alluded to a similar factor in leaving to become a nurse aide.
I worked as a scribe and as an ER tech in a Level 1 peds hospital. I'm not even done with med school and I've already punched that card more times than I care to remember.

I attempted to deliver cremated remains once while I was a carrier for USPS. I say "attempted" because you have to have the recipient sign for cremated remains, but they weren't home...

I'm not sure how I'd describe it, but it's an odd feeling leaving a "Sorry We Missed You" pink slip for a person versus a package.

I worked as a clerk in a Chapter 13 bankruptcy firm as a summer gig during college. The vast majority of my job was reviewing and cataloguing all of the debts that had been accumulated by the debtors of a case. While some of it was the stereotypical "too many credits cards, too many mortgages," the vast, vast majority was people collapsing under the weight of medical debt. Just day after day of going through and seeing how much survival had cost someone.

The worst was when the person died, and the debtor was the significant other who had been supporting their partner in a battle that they lost. Those people hurt my heart the most.

I didn't manage to last the whole summer.

I don't do autopsies at my current job, but I have been trained to do so in school. Overall, I have not done very many autopsies at all in comparison to many peers in my field. I would not feel comfortable doing one on my own at this point due to lack of experience. I never really saw that many that were particularly sad tbh, but there were several that stood out to me.

Someone who died of suicide. The autopsy itself wasn't overly depressing tbh, just fairly routine, but the person had left a suicide note. It was read aloud to us. To hear about all the pain that person was going through and to hear them talk about things about themselves that I knew were untrue really made me almost start crying tbh. They had family members who loved them, but they had felt that they were a burden to their family and killed themselves.
A teen who died of lymphoma. I can't remember if they had just turned 18 or they were about to, but it was sad to hear of such an innocent life cut so short in such an unfair way. I have not done autopsies on anyone younger, but I know people who have.
A woman who died suddenly around Christmastime of a pulmonary embolism. There wasn't much to the case that got to me, but I remember noting that her nails were painted in a festive red and green. It indicated to me that she had been looking to enjoy the holidays, but that she never ended up getting to experience them with her loved ones. When many people perform an autopsy, there is a distinct emotional separation many of us have from the decedent and a "real" human being, if that makes sense. But little things like that remind you that these were real people with real lives and real emotions and real hopes and dreams.

Honestly, most autopsies I have seen/done were on older/elderly people who either died of natural causes or alcoholism. There was also occasional drug overdose deaths who tended to trend a lot younger. It never made me feel all that bad if someone had died older tbh because they had a chance to live their lives. It's the younger ones that were always more notable.

Not me, but one of my best friends founded a company to clean up murder scenes, houses in which someone has died and their corpse rotted away for weeks, accident scenes... that sort of thing. His stomach seems perfectly unaffected by gruesomeness of all kinds, so he figured he'd market that particular ability of his.

His lowest rate is $300 / hr for "simple" cleanups and he's doing very, very well.

There's a great German TV show from a few years back about a crime scene cleaner "Tatortreiniger". It's more philosophical/funny than gruesome and worth a watch if you don't mind reading sub-titles. The BBC did an adaptation in English, but I've not watched it yet.
On a somewhat related note, Crime Scene Cleaner is such an oddly relaxing, thought a bit gruesome, game.
Does he wear a hazmat suit or something similar?
- Yeah he wears heavy biohazard protection, complete with the hood and the respirator and everything. He's better isolated than a cosmonaut on the job.

Worked security at a hospital, and was responsible for signing corpses over to the funeral homes. One week, there was a car wreck in a nearby small town- a pickup truck flipped and rolled with five or six teenagers in the back. I spent the whole night rolling them out of the freezer and passing them off to various funeral homes.

Hospital security guard. Had to help hold down suicidal mental patients so the nurses could put restraints on them. Had to escort counselors from Child Protective Services when they were collecting babies from the maternity ward, so that angry family members didn't attack them in the parking lot. Had to help wheel bodies down to the loading dock when the mortician came to collect them. Had to stop grieving relatives from trying to rush the ER or operating room when their loved one was on the table.

I quit after walking into the ER one time to see one of my coworker guards getting a wound on his neck examined while the other guard said, "Dude, you just missed the excitement! Lenny just got bit by a crackhead!"

😂

I'm sorry but that ending... I hope Lenny didn't turn into patient alpha

nursing home. seeing two underpaid, coked out CNAs joke around as they stuff into a body bag the naked corpse of a man you were talking to 10 minutes ago really alters your perspective on life.

Itinerant Summer Camp Counselor on Indian Reservations

Do you know what the poorest county in the US is? Neither do I, but at the time, it was Todd County, SD, where the Pine Ridge Reservation meets the Rosebud Reservation. This is raw desert. This is nobody's ancestral lands because nobody would or could live here long-term. This is just where a big section of the Lakota people got shoved.

We would go into a town, and set up our weeklong free program for the local kids. We stayed with locals, or slept on the floor of churches in sleeping bags. We had to bring in all of our own supplies and most of our own food, partly because there was nowhere to buy anything but also because if we ate what the locals had to serve us we got malnourished and depressed –we learned this the hard way, and almost crashed the program two weeks in from burnout, we were so miserable. We would do our best to give the kids some fun, some education, and a good lunch but ultimately they just wandered in and out as they would and other than enforcing "no fighting" in the program areas we were powerless to do anything more.

I live on the West Side of Chicago now, a block away from a permanent homeless camp. I've been homeless myself, briefly, before I got my life turned around. I'm no stranger to urban poverty. But as bad as it is, I would take it over rural poverty any day. At least in the city you can get up and walk away. Resources are underfunded but they're there. Out in the desert, on the rez... all you have is the community, and the community is broke.

Wow. How sad. I never considered the difference between urban and rural poverty... I have some experience with the former but not really the latter. Thank you for the insight.
If I may ask, what food were the locals eating that you had to bring your own?
- Part of it was that we were guests, so the hospitality culture dictated that we were served "celebration" type foods: hotdogs, iceberg salad, frybread. Which is fun but not a long-term diet.
  
  The main thing was the lack of vegetables, especially fresh vegetables. There's nowhere to grow them and nowhere to buy them, and even if you drive off the rez, an hour to Valentine, NE for a real supermarket, the prices are very high.

I did telephone survey research in the 90s for a university which was about urban police presence and basically I had to call mostly poor people of color and write down all the horror stories they had about police beating the shit out of them, and do this as a job every day for weeks.

And I was really good at it (and more shitty telemarketing jobs) because I have a "good radio voice," so people are willing to talk to me. When the survey was over, they asked me to stay on and do more, but I was so burnt out and depressed. I honestly can't tell you any stories from it because I have done a really good job of forgetting all of them by now.

The only upside is that I went from an already decent 60 wpm to a 90+ wpm typing rate with greatly increased accuracy over the course of the work. And with mostly two fingers, baby!

I worked for an industrial auction company where I had to cold call plants that were being closed down or going bankrupt. These guys received dozens of calls a day from people like us while they were dealing with losing their jobs. Trying to buy all the equipment and profit on their ill fortune.

The goal was to be the first to call them before any of the other places. So once I had to break the news to the plant manager they were getting shut down. Sometimes the information was bad and nothing was happening to their plant but they still got tons of calls from vultures looking to pick their bones. It was a shameful job and all for just $32k a year. The owner had 2 rolls Royce phantoms and a private jet.

I have helped digging a few graves.

I have helped to put my grandma into her coffin. I have dressed my dad for his funeral.

I find doing such things helpful for the peace in my own emotions.

I did a job developing a multimedia CD that trained doctors. Well, it was more of a marketing tool. For oncology... of the face and genitals. It was easily the most harrowing experience of my career. So many genitalia and tongues with hideous growths and what have you. The people who agreed to be photographed were both brave and very, very unwell.

I was on the tech team, sonI got off quite lightly. The two graphics people spent day after day aligning and processing these photos so that everything was clearly visible. I don't know how they slept at night.

I left after a year. I don't think anyone managed longer than that.

Scottish Police Service. Turns out peeling back the curtain of the worse side of people isn’t conducive to good mental health for me so I got outta there.

Holy shit, we found a good cop
- Lots of family and friends still in the service and doing as good a job as they can but for each good one there is no doubt an asshole.
  
  But I can’t speak for cops in other countries, only experience in Scotland.
  
  It was seeing how awful humans are to each other that really sold it for me, I’d rather live in my bubble, thanks.
- Aaaand they're gone

I worked at a company that transcribed handwritten medical forms to digital text when the automated OCR failed. I got assigned to a population of Tricare forms for a while. Tricare is the health care program for active duty US military members. We never saw the actual physical forms, nor the forms in their entirety, just snapshots of one question at a time to protect the patient's privacy. The fields where they described their mental health symptoms and how relationships with family and friends were going would sometimes make me want to vomit and cry and quit all at once. I got moved to a different assignment and when they wanted to move me back, I left that job.

shit that sounds harsh

When I was younger I was offered a gig to help disassemble an abandoned cottage by hand. Turns out it had burned from the inside when a fire had spread from the fireplace - somebody had went inside to try and keep warm in the winter and ended up burning themselves and the cottage. What adds some spice to the story is the fact that in the past the cottage was a "troll's hut" funfair kinda thing where kids, myself included, went to meet the "forest troll" and do some drawing etc.

Had nightmares about it for quite a while.

The company I work for makes a product which goes into weapons like missiles, planes, jets, helicopters which are used by Israel and realizing that it was probably going to go towards helping kill innocent civilians. I mean technically we are sub sub sub contractors, but they are used explicitly for this project and purpose

My only consolation is that I stopped working on those ones personally after a week of "Make it work but dont change ANYTHING", they constantly fail testing and are sent back for RMA, and the guy they hired to fix them is so criminally incompetent that the company has had to completely revise their hiring proces

Unfortunately with exactly 0 responses to my applications in the last year, I probably won't be jumping ship to somewhere that pays well and doesnt have me as part of the MIC

Not mine, but a friend of my dad's would talk about the time he was an "asshole bagger". He worked in a slaughterhouse, and his job was to cut a circle around the anus and pull up all the bits that might have poop in them and bag them up. He lasted a day.

I mean, I worked for an advertising company (they didn't advertise they were an advertising company until I had already started the job) until they laid me off and at times had tried to figure out ways how to bypass ad blockers for like making social icons not get blocked, and learned a little bit about how ad blockers worked.

Maybe this isn't quite what you had intended but advertising is really aggressive and gross imo.

I worked two separate jobs doing film photo processing when I was a university student. The first was at a factory that handled a lot of police photography. I saw way more crime scene photos than I needed to.

The second time was in the photo development lab for a high street pharmacy chain. I swear, either people didn't realise their photos were developed and handled by other people, or some of them really got off on us seeing their weird shit.

I don't plan on shooting anything weird, but I still don't want anyone looking at my photos! Luckily it's pretty trivial to develop at home, for B&W, at least.
I am cautiously curious... Do I want to know more about this weird shit?
- It depends on your thresholds. Most of the weird shit was sexual, which I don't have a moral issue with other than I didn't consent to be exposed to it.
  
  Spoiler
  
  Unfortunately there were some other types of photos with content that we felt necessary to inform police about. Not explicitly CSAM, but children were involved.
- You're gonna read it anyway.

Caring for the donated cadavers used by a biology department for their pre-med anatomy classes. These were people once, almost always of a John/Jane Doe situation. Very gross and off-putting job, even if you could manage to not wonder about the lives of these former people.

I was very grateful that none of the cadavers we had at my medical school were John/Jane Does, and that we have a memorial service for the cadavers every year and invite the families to express gratitude.

Way back in the day, developing photo film in the shop's backstore lab.
The coroner pictures were always... something.
At least the hawking boss would GTFO though, silver linings.
Then again that's not as bad as being actually there and scooping various stuff.

Food service at a retirement home.

Cleaning a fryer wayyyy after it should have been cleaned. Needed a coat hanger to fish out the blockages in the valve. The grease trap had no joke 6 inches of congeled grease over the top of it. Had to get a serving spoon and scoop out a place to dump the grease.

Did that way too many times.

Not the worst it could have been in the slightest but never miss it.

That was someone's retirement grease!
- It was there before me. I bet it's there after me. Part of me wants to go by and see if it's still there.

It wasn't the employment itself that was grim, but a specific job on it that was creepy as fuck. When I was installing for a WISP we had a job at a mortuary. Place was old as shit and we (I say we but I was the only fucker down there) had to go under the building in just this dirt crawlspace to run cable. I swear I thought I'd end up crawling over skeletons, it looked like something out of a horror movie down there.

My wife was recently mostly in charge of opening up a new branch library in town in a former funeral home (see my thread in c/pics!) and it has not bothered her at all. Not even the fact that they had basically strip everything in the basement to get the smell of embalming fluid out of the walls.

I don't believe in anything supernatural, but that's still creepy.

That said, it's now a beautiful and welcoming space for the community.
- it's now a beautiful and welcoming space for the community
  
  Including the ones you can't see!

Autopsy Assistant. It was only the pathologist and myself. While he took the samples of the organs he wanted, I had to extract the brain. Once he was finished, I had to collect everything up, bag it, place it into the abdominal cavity, fill in the chest & head cavities with gauze, sew everything back up, wash all the blood off the body, and then put it back into a body bag. We had nicknames for different types of deaths.

Are you still in the field or did you switch to something else?
- I'm doing something else in the medical field. I was a navy corpsman and I specialized in lab tech & denor. Believe it or not, civilian employers don't recognize military medical training. I couldn't even get a job as a phlebotomist after I got out and attended college. Plus, people make more per hour starting at Costco than denors make with experience. I had a few where the NIS were involved. Those were REALLY long days. Those guys didn't have a sense of humor at all. But then again, most people working in the medical field have a morbid sense of humor.
- I'm doing something else in the medical field. I was a navy corpsman and I specialized in lab tech & denor. Believe it or not, civilian employers don't recognize military medical training. I couldn't even get a job as a phlebotomist after I got out and attended college. Plus, people make more per hour starting at Costco than denors make with experience

Not super grim, but I worked in a hot warehouse unpacking cheap clothing from China, repacking it and watching the owners turn around and sell it on Groupon for a huge profit. Sometimes their family members would stop by in brand new Mercedes, BMW and other high-end luxury cars.

The others and myself were all promised better jobs like product photographer, website designer, etc. I only lasted there one week.

Changing literal adult diapers. It was for adults with developmental disabilities.

Also as part of the job, I was punched, spit in the face, slapped, cursed at, and was also sexually assaulted by an older guy on a few occasions (I’m also a male).

Though one of the last times I remember being punched, it was because I was trying to break up a fight between two guys and the one bigger guy threw his punch and it hit me in the chest. The whole time the fist was coming at me, I was expecting it to hurt since he was large. I barely felt it and tried not to laugh as I kept trying to break them up. Not saying that like I’m tough, because I am not and was much smaller than he is, but his punch really was that weak lol

Fun times…

What is a denor? A quick google didn’t bring anything up

Navy medical term for autopsy assistant.
Might be a typo? A donor phlebotomy technician is one who specializes in drawing blood from donors, I guess as opposed to ones who do the lab work.
- Nope. Denor was correct. Navy speak. I was a navy corpsman, lab technologist, & denor.

I'm doing something else in the medical field. I was a navy corpsman and I specialized in lab tech & denor. Believe it or not, civilian employers don't recognize military medical training. I couldn't even get a job as a phlebotomist after I got out and attended college. Plus, people make more per hour starting at Costco than denors make with experience.

I had a gig as a tattoo artist at a comic con. Tattoos are not my thing and didn't seek it as a true job, but I know other people still consider it a pastime, realized I wasn't bad at it, and was able to meet up with people who said they'd put me in the position, plus I had to get some service done. At least fifty people from the area have gone public with how nice things played out with this unbecoming Maylu-Sakurai-cosplaying woman (probably the only time I'll do that cosplay) fulfilling their requests.