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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Probably all eastern block states. I know its true for example for East Germany.
Find something better to do.
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.
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 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 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 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 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 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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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.
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
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.
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.
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)
