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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
