Dirty Jobs

[Barklessdog]

What was the dirtiest job you ever had?

I worked one day as a bus boy at a Sambo's breakfast place. The floors were covered with grease and by the end of the night I had grease all over me. That and they worked you like a dog for low pay. I also worked as a shoe salesman and had to handle fat ladies stinky feet!

My older brother worked in a angel hair factory, which is spun fiber glass people used to hang on Christmas trees. He worked for two weeks and started to develop a cough and started coughing up blood!

What was the dirtiest or worst job you have had?

[ramone57]

clean up guy at a butcher shop.   lots of disgusting stuff but it was fun at the time.

[Lightyear]

At age 15 I was on a remodel crew for a large convenience store chain here in Houston.  These were old inner city stores that we would remove all of the fixtures, coolers, slurppee machines etc and scrub it all down and reset the store.  The first day we were to move an ice cream cooler one of the kids handed all of us a can of Raid - when we pushed the cooler away from the wall, which it had sat against for 20 years, hundreds of roaches swarmed out of it  - hence the Raid.  You don't want me to tell you where we found rats and roaches in these stores - needless to say that I don't eat anything from a convenience store to this day that's not tightly packaged. 

[Dave W]

You shoulda called Marvin Zindler. I'll bet there was slime in the ice machine too.

[Lightyear]

Slime was about the most benign thing we found in the ice machines  

Seriously, 31 one years later and I WILL NOT get a fountain drink at any Kwiky Picky type joint - the memory has stayed with me well

[eb2]

I worked for a large hotel one summer, and one of the things I had to do on occasion was to take stuff down to the trash dumpster.  We would wheel these gigantic containers filled with all sorts of crap and food down on the freight elevator.  The containers were a cross between a wheel barrow and a VW bug.  The freight elevator was coated in this gray slime that smelled of rotting trash, and as you rode down the air would flow up with even more intense rotting trash stench.  The dumpster was a compactor that was like a tractor trailer, and you would wheel the container over, balance it at the edge, and lift it till it tilted in and dumped the stuff.  The stench at that point was horrendous, rivaled only by trash day in August on the lower east side of Manhattan, but far worse.  Religion may be in decline in many places, but more people called out to Jesus there than anywhere else.  Guys would vomit down there from breathing it in.  After dumping you had to let the ooze run out, then get it to tilt back and pull it out of there, all while slipping and sliding on the gray slimy crust.  I did go down a couple of times, and getting that on your work pants was unreal.  The smell was always tinged with the stink of rotting oranges.  I find I seldom eat oranges, but when I do, I remember every trip to that dumpster.

[uwe]

Cleaning out pigsties ... The stench of pig dung kind of clings to you.

[PhilT]

Van driving for a car parts wholesaler. Just the fumes from a van load of car batteries eats through jeans like you wouldn't believe.

[wagdog]

Janitor at a movie theater.  Stuck Jujubes were the least of my worries.  Once those lights go down all bets are off as to what people will do (and leave behind).  Also, the women's bathroom was always way more disgusting than the men's BY FAR!

[pamlicojack]

Worked for a utility company one summer installing underground cable along the highways.  Coming across a soiled diaper or dead animal was never pleasant.  The heat, dust, exhaust, and other employees made for a miserable time.

Although that pales in comparison to my wife's dairy farm.  Whether it was standing knee-deep in manure for hours while milking because a drainpipe is blocked with the carcass of a dead rat, de-horning calves (please don't ask), or doing burial detail in high summer on a cow that's been dead for 5 days, it takes a special type to be a farmer. 

We sold out 10 years ago after being in business for nearly 100 years.  After the initial sadness, none of us has ever looked back.  We still have a small beef herd that is low maintenance and a lot less trouble...