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 for doing what you do. I don’t know how you have the mental strength to do so.
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.
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.
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.
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?
On a somewhat related note, Crime Scene Cleaner is such an oddly relaxing, thought a bit gruesome, game.
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!”
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.
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.
