I’m not asking about the worst job. I’m asking about the grimmest one. For me it was when in my teenage years I was making candles you would put on a grave. Most of the time is was just filling the form, burn the right shape and passing it forward. But sometimes I had to fill in for a person who was selling these things, and that is where it gets grim. It was decades ago but I still remember one lady who asked what would be the best candle to memorialize her late husband. And she gave me the whole life story of her and her husband. I shit you not, it was the most touching love story I have ever heard. I quit the next day.
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.
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.
cosmonaut
Found the Russian. Do any other cultures use that word instead of astronaut?
Maybe any USSR countries are, just a guess.
Find something better to do.
Probably all eastern block states. I know its true for example for East Germany.
Taikonauts are Chinese. All three words, Cosmo, Astro, Taiko - naut describe the same job; it just depends what agency certified you as to what you get called.
Or maybe it’s about relative protection of cosmonaut suits vs astronaut suits, like they thought, “well maybe not quite as well as an astronaut, but better than a cosmonaut”
On a somewhat related note, Crime Scene Cleaner is such an oddly relaxing, thought a bit gruesome, game.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
Cops who quit because their job is horrible are the only ones who I might consider a good cop.
It’s the ones who relish their power and corruption which I worry the most about.
This is why I hate ACAB. The time it could take for a random good person to realize not only is their profession infested with evil, but then also find a new job and quit, is substantial enough that combined with the churn rate and number of cops, I may be calling millions of good people bastards for no good reason, which may actually make those people tend to disagree with me and my ideas that the police system itself is corrupt. They know they aren’t a bastard and from their perspective I’m just insulting them mindlessly. Someone insulting you for no reason can’t be that wise of a person, or have that good of an argument, they might think.
The system is corrupt. Many of the people are fine. Stop name calling people you’ve never met like children. Lower police funding. Demilitarize them. Restrict their powers. Investigate them more. Make punishments more strict for those with any power at all. But don’t call random people you’ve never met or even heard about bastards.
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
It’s exactly forbthat reason that Revopoint (I shit you not) recommends you catch 'em while they’re asleep. Same for pets.
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.
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
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 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
