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.
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’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.
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!”
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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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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 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 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.
Gotcha. People are so strange. You were very kind to put the spoiler tag.
You’re gonna read it anyway.
Damn straight I hit that spoiler… So glad I don’t regret it.
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.
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.
