FamilySherpa
Trail Wise!
Tangled up in Rhododendron
Posts: 1,791
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Post by FamilySherpa on May 12, 2017 5:16:00 GMT -8
From age 15-19, I worked as a butchers assistant at an old style meat & poultry counter at a small independent grocery store. During the day I mostly took customers orders and packaged them once the butcher was done with the cuts. At the end of the day, i got to break down all the machines and clean them, bleach the countertops, and then spray out the floor. Sundays were the best though, as that was the day I got to clean out the walk in cooler, where whole sides of beef and loins were hung & stored. Not only was it a very very nasty cleaning job, it was frigid in there.
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Post by hikingtiger on May 12, 2017 7:24:06 GMT -8
My first two jobs were the dirtiest, in different respects. Started after my freshman year of high school at the vet clinic where my dad worked. Shovel all the poop from the pens from the night before, hose them down, then go to the inside cages and clean those. The worst were the puppies that had parvo...those got changed several times a day. And then there was the periodic removal of ash from the incinerator...that smell still sticks with me.
Second was the "yard ape" at the local concrete plant. There was always cement or fly ash in the air from the trucks being loaded, so you'd feel coated in it if the wind was right. If it needed to be loaded (blocks, mortar mix, cement, sand, gravel), I did it. 8 shovels of sand was 100 lbs., 10 shovels of gravel was 100 lbs. (we on the generous side...my boss never wanted anyone to feel shorted.) Bigger orders (1000 lbs +) could get loaded with the front-end loader. But the white cemetery sand was too expensive to load other than by hand. People bought that from late April to early June to put on cemetery plots for "Decoration Sunday," so it was a busy time of year on the sand pile. Luckily for me, we closed around noon on Saturday or I could have spent all day down there. One Saturday morning, over about 3 hours, I loaded 4.5 tons of that stuff.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on May 12, 2017 8:35:23 GMT -8
I worked part time at a wholesale nursery. In greenhouses. In Texas. In the summer. Applying fertilizer known as "fish emulsion". Really really foul smelling stuff. Good incentive to continue my education!
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Hungry Jack
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Living and dying in 3/4 time...
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Post by Hungry Jack on May 12, 2017 12:20:41 GMT -8
Christmas tree trimming and de-tasseling corn sounds pretty rough. Anything involving sewer repair, pig farming, and Hazmat suits sounds horrible.
I was a house manager and kitchen steward at my fraternity house, which means that I was the lucky guy who cleaned the kitchen grease trap, unclogged toilets, emptied tons of garbage, and did other sanitation work. Pretty run of the mill stuff.
About 15 years ago, I removed half of a large wood deck that came with our newly bought house. I think the decking must have been treated with arsenic, because I breathed in a bunch of dust (lots of cutting) and felt hungover for several weeks. A month long dose of sulpher seemed to cure it.
Years ago, my useless bitch of a neighbor came crying to me because an animal was incapacitated in her backyard. Her useless husband was nowhere, so I dealt with it. It was a raccoon that had fallen from a neighbor's four story building, and am pretty sure it's back was broken.
I went and got my mallet. One blow, and I would end the poor creature's misery, right? It took about ten. I hated seeing it suffer. Not a dirty job, but one I hope to never to do again.
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Post by atvtuner on May 12, 2017 12:33:16 GMT -8
I had a dirty job in Civil Service once. Never got much dirt on me......... but is was a dirty job.
The most dirt I got on me was on the cleanest job I ever had: Farmer. Once upon a time, when tigers smoked long pipes, I had to fix the decades old hay bailer in the morning, fix the grease gun, fix a hydraulic line on the tractor, and then bail three loads of hay in the 95 degree afternoon. I was covered with petroleum products, sweat, and fine hay dust. I was also due to go housesit a friends apartment over in the swanky side of town that evening and the hot shower and cold beer there (my place was without hot water those days) had me inclined to clean-up after the long drive into town. Decided I'd stop by the complex clubhouse to pick up my friend's newspapers and mail before going up to her apartment. I think I may have frightened some of the nice clean folks in the mailroom. I still miss being a Farmer.
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daveb
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Post by daveb on May 12, 2017 12:39:31 GMT -8
I worked construction in the summer back when I was a teenager. We were suppose to just re-grout between the tiles of a local dairy processor in their cottage cheese room. (About the size of a basketball court with a giant stainless steel troughs that they made the cottage cheese in.). We found a spot with big cracks and had to jack hammer it out. About 2 minutes into it we noticed the concrete falling into a pit, then the smell...it was falling into a big pool of years of old rotten milk and mud. We got the bid to replace the whole floor and I spent the rest of summer in sour milk mud as we excavated the sour stuff in order to bring in new pack dirt for a new concrete slab.
Second dirtiest job was working at our local grainery and being a "hand" as we unloaded grain trucks to be stored in a silo and eventually shipped out by rail. 16 hour days during harvest season covered in dust, pollen and anything else that kept me in on a constant verge of an asthma attack.
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Post by Hikin Mike on May 12, 2017 17:45:18 GMT -8
As an electrician, some jobs were dirtier than others. Yep. I worked as an (industrial) electrician for about 6 months. Crawling around in hot, dirty attics was "fun". When I heard there was an opening for my old job (electronic tech), I jumped on it.
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Post by JRinGeorgia on May 13, 2017 3:31:42 GMT -8
Busboy in college. Cleaning up tables and dealing with dirty dishes wasn't so bad, but this restaurant featured a big salad bar and I had to break it down every night. The salad bar was like a giant open-top freezer with a cover that had holes for the food containers to slide into, and all the 3-bean salad and pickled beets and so forth would end up dripping juice down past the cover and into the lower freezer where it would form large frozen stalactites of an oily/vinegary goo that I had to chop down and clean out by hand. There was no drain plug in the bottom, I had to pour a lot of hot water in and then sop it up and haul it out.
I used to wear contact lenses back then and when I got home I had to scrub my hands with Lava soap for half an hour before I could touch my eyeballs.
I couldn't eat from a salad bar for more than a year after leaving that job.
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Post by cgaphiker on May 13, 2017 3:55:05 GMT -8
Every job I had was a dirty job. Auto body repair and painting, gas stations, a coal mine. A short stint with a logger, and a sawmill. Finally in a production machine shop. Every one of them were dirty.
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Post by crazyheaven on May 13, 2017 4:26:22 GMT -8
My direst job was a warehouse moving boxes. Covered everyday with layers of dust and dirt.
Second one had to be McDonald's. The smell stuck to my clothes. Meat grease sucked. The mufflin cutter always sprayed by muffin particles all over me. Once someone purposely missed the toilet in the bathroom out of spite for the manager. The manager came to me first and told me to do or I was fired. I asked if he wanted me to leave now or work until the end of my shift. He tried it on a few more employees before finally going to do it himself. The job was part time and paid minimal wage with no benefits. The thought of being fired bothered noone.
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gabby
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Post by gabby on May 15, 2017 8:39:22 GMT -8
Cleaning up code by novice programmers comes to mind, though being tasked with modifying "machine generated" code is even worse. Most software-generated stuff is quite a bit worse. I worked with countless GUI generation packages in my life as an "interface programmer", and most recommend simply saving the metafiles from the build and making changes from that by importing and, finally, regenning the entire thing from scratch using the software package, but *stuff happens* - like changing software generation packages on the same job and "lost metas/lost documentation trail" disasters. Trust me, you don't want to know. It's a dirty, dirty job.
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Post by hikerjer on May 15, 2017 11:07:15 GMT -8
I spent several summers while in college loading hay bales onto flatbed trucks. It was hot, dusty, dirty and hard, but I actually really enjoyed it. The dirtiest job I had was installing fiberglass insulation in attic roofs. Seems like I could never get rid of the itch from the loose fibers regardless of much time I spent in the shower.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on May 15, 2017 12:10:12 GMT -8
I spent several summers while in college loading hay bales onto flatbed trucks. It was hot, dusty, dirty and hard, but I actually really enjoyed it. The dirtiest job I had was installing fiberglass insulation in attic roofs. Seems like I could never get rid of the itch from the loose fibers regardless of much time I spent in the shower. Same here...had both jobs....hauling hay and installing insulation.....I also had a job chopping pork shoulders into barbecue
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johnnyray
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Argle-Bargle, Jiggery-Pokery, and Applesauce
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Post by johnnyray on May 15, 2017 16:02:44 GMT -8
Fresh out of HS I worked for Service Master cleaning up after fires, worst job ever, could not get that smell out of my nose until I quit after about 2 months. Franchise operator was a fanatical born again christian who would would not stop witnessing to me and demanding I...sorry enough of that but job sucked beyond belief.
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Post by cgaphiker on May 17, 2017 5:47:23 GMT -8
I spent several summers while in college loading hay bales onto flatbed trucks. It was hot, dusty, dirty and hard, but I actually really enjoyed it. The dirtiest job I had was installing fiberglass insulation in attic roofs. Seems like I could never get rid of the itch from the loose fibers regardless of much time I spent in the shower. I worked with fiberglass so much when I did body work that it doesn't bother me at all.
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