Married2Allis

Well-known Member
The summer I was 16, I worked as a handyman for a nursing home. The first week on the job the owner took me down into the old basement and pointed to a huge water tank used for the fire sprinkler system and said "I have a project for you. I want that cleaned, sanded, and painted!" The tank was in the corner beside a laundry dryer vent where the lint had spewed out for years covering the tank and rusting it. There where mice, spiders, and even a small snake living under it! Was hot as H down there. Took me weeks to finish and I hated every minute. Back in those days nobody thought of wearing a respirator or dust mask, so probably a miracle I don't have some lung disease 40 years later.

What is the worst job you ever had to do?
 
Unloading a 40 foot box car with lamp black 40 # bags, used in making recap tires, box car was hit so hard in the train yard paper bags where torn, off pallets, took Me a week to unload by My self on swing shift. Day shift would not do it
Wayne
 
my dad is a plumber and HVAC guy, at one point he had his own business and we went out to an elderly persons house who complained of a slow flushing toilet, all the pipes were in a crawlspace and the only opening was a window so this elderly couple stood no chance of ever looking around in this crawl space.

the pipe right off there toilet was corroded on the upper half and would snag toilet paper on the jagged edges, this would cause it to run over the top of the pipe and dump into there crawlspace, luckily it was in the corner of the crawlspace and made a very deep pond. it was probably 3 foot deep. long story short it wasnt much fun between the human odor and the strong fumes of the pipe cleaner and glue. by the time we came out of the crawlspace we were both half loony from fumes,
 
Helped build center pivot units twice, never
again
First time was cold and windy but you
couldn't wear gloves because you needed to
bolt it together and gloves were in the way.
Then when they rattled it together with an
electric impact it pinched your frozen
fingers about a third of the time. Next time
was to put one up that a storm had taken
down. It was in july/august in the middle of
standing corn. 95-100? and high humidity
also. We worked all morning until about
1:00, then they brought out some pizza to
eat. I only ate 1 piece since it was so hot
but the people that ate more puked it all up
within a half hour. By 2:00 they said to
quit because several people had gone sick.
Never again
 
Cleaning out calf and heifer pens by hand (not really with my hands, I used a fork (;>)), cleaning out gutters before barn cleaners, hauling the manure out to the fields before the snow got too deep. -20F with no cabs on the tractors. Manure spreader (John Deere) would usually break down with a full load. Baling hay with a Case hand poked wire tie baler or for that matter, mowing loose hay away way up in the peak on a 100 degree day. Hand milking 40 cows when the electricity went out. Loading 55g barrels of chemicals from one boxcar on to another so the receiving businesses wouldn't know that we had simply drop shipped. Running the bayonet assault course at Ft Benning in 90 degree wet heat nine times in a row without stopping. Etc. All of theses things were "learning experiences". I learned to look for jobs that didn't require so much physical effort. and was moderately successful. Even farming today is easy.
 
Digging a 3 ft dia. x 5 ft deep hole through hard-pan under a house with 2 ft of crawl space. Had to set a lift pump/collection tank for a toilet in another building. The 4 ft deep, 20 foot long plumbing trench to the foundation was a breeze after digging the hole.
 
On the farm: Shoveling back grain in old wooden granaries that my uncle wanted full to the top of the bins. No ventilation, no masks - dust so thick I couldn't see the other side of the bin.

Off the farm: Working with the drunken sales and management staff of a company; didn't take me long to get tired of those back-stabbing drunks so I moved on.
 
Anything to do with a stinking silo unloader during the winter months! Silo unloaders were the bane of my existence. Specifically the old first generation NH silo unloaders.
 
When I had my welding shop there was a local guy that sold outdoor boilers. There was a year or two where the models had a flaw in the design that caused a crack to form in the upper rear corner of the firebox. They were big enough so the only way to fix them was to crawl into them and work from the inside, grinding off the soot and welding on a patch in a used firebox. YUCK! I did at least a dozen of those. Another was a clean water treatmemt plant job for a good customer of mine. These tanks were 12' diameter and 70' long and had a floor of 1/2" steel plate about 2' off the bottom. The floor had rusted around the drain holes so they needed them cut out and new bungs welded in. The bad part was going in through a 16" pipe, through 4 compartments, and laying on my back under the floor in about 2" of water to overhead weld the bottoms of the bungs because the valve had just enough of a leak to keep it wet.
 
I?ve wanted to farm ever since I was a little shaver. When I was 14 I went to local BTO and asked for work. They told me in order to earn my stripes I had to paint board fence with creosote wood preservative (it was not yet a hazardous-classed substance back in those days). So I did that one hot summer. Must have painted a mile or two of it if you count both sides?. ..then after summer was over I asked if could now ?work on the farm? with the crops and cattle they said no, due to workers comp and other liability issues you had to be at least 18!
 
Back in the 70's I worked at the International Harvester foundry in
Waukesha WI , the conveyors that carried the sand from the molds
that were shaken out kept filling up the basement with sand and had to
shovel sand that collected in this small space back onto the conveyor which
was about 3 feet from floor , all while the conveyor was running creating thick
dust and no fresh air at all , the dust would cake into your skin where ever u
we're sweating . This by far the worst job ever . To this day I have no interest
In any thing with the IH badge. I used to pour steel at 2900 degrees from a
7 ton ladle with open crane and I had travel short distance with the ladle
under cab of crane , if u stuck you shoes out past floor of cab they would catch
on fire. and on most summer days it was well over 100 degree . that foundry
was owned by Tenneco , it's now a pile of rubble with 1 building left where the
crane was . Glad them days over
 
Worst job I ever had was one of the first. I was a janitor at an inner-city Headstart while I was attending college.

The little darlings never put anything in the toilets that should have gone there, and what they did stuff in the toilets they shouldn't have.


Absolutely weirdest job I ever had was for a neighbor who ran a funeral home. He'd pay $15/hr back in 1975 - when that was about seven times the minimum wage! When he needed assistance he'd call and even if it was for just a few minutes he'd always give me at least $20.

I couldn't help him with any "wet work" but when he needed to lift heavy things like coffins in his warehouse (he had the lift and equipment in the funeral home itself to do it by himself) and when someone had passed away at home and there was no suspected foul play he'd employ me to go help him wrap and transport the body to the funeral home. THAT was a job that I dreaded because the family was upset, it usually was not pleasant at all (one woman had died of an ongoing and huge facial tumor and I still can see that burned in my mind 40 years later) and usually when you're seeing someone who has died at home they're in a sad and tragic condition. In another event the departed must have weighed 350 pounds and the two of us had to get her through doors and down a flight of stairs with some dignity in front of he family. Even with a very fancy gurney you can't imagine. And this had to be done in a dark suit (which he did provide for me - he had a bunch of suits that folks donate).

He offered me a position if I went to mortuary school and became a licensed mortician and I just couldn't. I'd probably be a lot better off financially but I can't imagine how you separate your own life from the constant wear and tear of trying to comfort the families; let alone dealing with the embalming and such.

Funny side - before a funeral he'd take the big 'ol Cadillac hearse out because the tires would get a flat spot from sitting and he would run them (and the engine) to smooth it out. Several times while I was still in high-school he'd stop and offer me rides home.
 
Loading possum belly cattle trailers with square bales of hay in the winter. The cattle trailers were still full of frozen manure that made walking hard, you couldn't stand up straight and the bales had to be loaded from the back and carried the length of the trailer. You would shed your coveralls and have crap up and down your legs and numerous twisted ankles from the uneven surface.
 
I've had some nasty jobs as a kid. Dishwasher for a large college that did weddings and that kind of thing - with a washing
machine that leaked all over the place. What a miserable experience that was. It wasn't like a restaurant with an even flow
of work, everybody was served at once, so ALL the dirty dishes from 2-300 people came in all at once in one mad rush for each
course of the meal.

The kitchen was always like a sauna - hot and steamy, especially in the summer.

Due to the leaking machine, the floor would quickly get flooded and slick as a skating rink. You'd go down every now and then
carrying a rack of dirty dishes. So nasty, the garbage all over you was usually worse than the pain. You'd go home just
soaking wet, covered in sweat and food people didn't want to eat - not to mention all the cigarette butts.

I guess it taught me that I didn't want to be a dishwasher all my life.
 
I had a similar experience to blue924. I had a call
to unplug septic tank line. Took a while to find tank,
then found it almost hard and 1/2 full. No access to
crawl space. Cut an access hole then found
crawlspace with years of feces etc on floor. Toilet
paper etc in cone shape up to pipe. The pipe under
the toilet had a 90*bend with c/o but suspension
strap came off on one side and whole waste line
dropped and turned about 45*.what a mess.
Brought in pump truck. Worst job ed will.
 
another job, less disgusting, but harder work, delivering blue seal grain for the local hardware store.

Delivering wasn't too bad. Load the econoline and drive it out to area farms. Eventually I got my license and could do some of the delivering myself.

What killed you though was when they got a delivery in.

Tractor trailer would back up to the loading dock, and a handful of us kids would unload the whole thing - by HAND. To this day I don't understand why we had to do it like that. I guess the owner was too cheap for a pallet jack - or even a hand cart. I was too young to question things like that - I just did what I was told. And what I was told was to take all these bags here - and put them in the warehouse over there... 100 pound bags. Run with it - stack it - run back for the next one.

I'll have to watch my language when I type about how much fun it was in the winter when the sweet feeds were frozen solid.

Those trailers sure do hold a LOT of grain when you're unloading one bag at a time.

ah the things you'll do for minimum wage...
 
There have been so many, let me just pick one that stands out...

I was just out of high school, probably about 17, maybe weighed 100#, first real job at a family owned auto supply/garage/machine shop. Idiots!!! They quickly ran the business into the ground, did terrible work, unqualified, uncaring employees. The owner took in everything that came his way, regardless if we had the equipment or qualifications.

I had to redo a job they had done before I was hired. They had replaced the rear axle U bolts on a city garbage truck. Didn't get them tight, everything sheared and shifted. It came back on a wrecker, out on the gravel driveway, fully loaded, rusted out, dripping whatever was in it, flies, more flies... Did I mention there were flies? Summer time in Texas, 100+, it sat there about a week before I was told I had to fix it because the owners son refused (he's the one that left it loose).

So here I go, no tools big enough to get it done, so go beg, borrow tools... By myself, using cable ratchets, chains, pipes, blocks, jacks... Got it done though, only lost a few pints of blood!!!

Best I remember I was knocking down about $80 a week! Oh, the good ol' days!

PS, Right after that he took in a Corvair basket case. Engine dismantled in the trunk.I had never even seen under the hood of a Corvair! It left running, don't know for how long!
 
One last one - cleaning out heating oil tanks - big ones. I did a few of those.

We'd have to drop a heater in to lower the viscosity of the thick oil. Drain it. When that was finally done - take a drill
and a sawzall and cut a person sized hole in the end of the tank.

we'd go in with scrub brushes and a buckets of kerosene. We'd hang a house fan at the cut-out entrance.

I always wondered how we never burst into flames - or died from the fumes. So stupid.

We'd wear the bunny suits and muck boots. But, try as you might, you were going home black, no two ways about it.
 
Baling on days so hot and humid I thought I'd pass out but I never did.

The worst in my opinion is sitting in the office catching up with bookwork on a nice sunny day.
 
I was around 16. There was a chicken ranch that had three rows of laying hens. The cages were covered and about 50 or so long. The owner said he would pay 100.00 dollars to have the poop cleaned out. in the 50's that was a lot of money for a 16 year old. The stuff was almost to the bottom of the cages. A friend and my self decided to do it' and split the money. With shovels and wheel burrows we got it done. Talk about stink. When I got out of school I got a job in a plating shop. There was a sump in the floor about 6 ft deep. The sump collected everything that spilled on the floor. The liquid was pumped out. The only way to remove the sludge was go down and shovel it into buckets and someone pulled the buckets out. At the bottom of the sump, there was a chemical used for degreasing called tryclorethelene (spelling) The fumes were heavy and stayed on the bottom. We had to wrap wet rags around our privet parts to keep them from burning. The stuff is now banned from use. It's a wonder I don't have a terrible disease from being exposed to it. Stan
 

For lack of any jobs available I took a truck driving job for a dead livestock retrieval company. One particularly hot day I ended up covering two territories, because one of the other drivers quit, or took the day off. We would start out in the morning with a fist full of dispatch tickets from calls made late the day before. When ever we made a stop we would radio the dispatcher where we were before we loaded the dead animal on the truck. Then when we were done loading we radioed back stating that we were done, and heading to the next pickup. If the dispatcher had any calls near where you were at they would give you the address, and addresses of any other calls that were in the area you were covering that day. Late in the afternoon I got a call to stop at a farm that had 90+ dead feeder pigs to be picked up. There had been a storm the day before and a bolt of lightening killed everything the farmer had on feeding floors. The dispatcher told me the farmer would be there to help load with a bobcat. When I got to the farm I saw the pile of pigs, and the bobcat, but other than that there wasn't a soul to be found, not even a dog. So I had to load all the pigs by hand, one at a time. I would toss them on the back of the truck stacking them like cordwood. When I had two layers loaded I had to climb up on the truck and toss them towards the front of the truck, then do it all over again. It was a really hot day, and the pigs weighed anywhere from 40lbs. to 80lbs.. I was lucky to have a jug of water along and a hydrant near by to replenish my supply. While I was resting a Schwans truck pulled in to deliver the farmers ice cream. I asked the driver if he wanted to trade trucks, you can guess his answer. I finally got all the pigs loaded and called the dispatcher to tell her I had to go back to the plant because I was fully loaded, and had no room for anything else. Remember I had two territories worth of animals loaded already. She insisted that I made one more stop to pick up a diary cow. I argued with her about this for awhile, but it did no good. I got to the farm, and backed up to the cow to load it. When I opened the rear doors dead pigs started to roll out onto the ground. I went ahead and set up the ramp, hooked the cow up to my cable winch, and pulled the cow on the truck squashing dead pigs and smearing them under the cow. The cow wouldn't stay in the truck, so I had to ask the farmers wife to hold onto to winch handle to keep the cow from sliding out, while I loaded up the ramp, and threw on the pigs that rolled out and shut the doors. I didn't even call the dispatcher. I just headed back to the plant. The dispatcher came out to my truck when I pulled in telling me she had more calls for me, and why didn't I contact her before coming in? I had to show her rather than try telling her. The people that had to unload that mess to butcher the cows and calves weren't too impressed. I told them to take their complaints to the dispatcher, and went home.
 
3 stand out for me:

1) Trinity Industries making big LP tanks. Every one is hydro tested for leaks after all the welding is done. They guy ahead of me on the line drained the water out and rolled it onto a huge burner to cook the remaining water out. I had to roll them off and put plugs in all the bungs and duct tape over the tag and hang it on powdercoat paint line. They came off the burner cherry red on the bottom. I'd burn through a pair of leather welding gloves every day. The shop was 115-120F during the two weeks I did that one summer. Never thought 95f outside would fell pretty good. 2 weeks was all I could do coming home sick and dehydrated every night. Not worth the $10/hr they paid.

2)Local machine shop summer between junior and senior year of HS. Got asked to clean out the sump on a big Blanchard grinder. Went home 2 nights in a row with grinding dust in places where grinding dust ought not be. Nasty, stinky job and the coolant irritated my skin terrible, had a rash to my armpits for a week after that.

3) Installed basement dewatering systems one summer. Long days hauling buckets of busted up concrete, and dirt out of basements and pea gravel and cement back down. The near constant temperature extremes from 65F basement to 90deg+ outside would make you sick. Carrying all that material in buckets would stretch out your arms and compress your spine and legs, seemed like I could touch my knees at night without having to bend down.
 
Grew up on a farm, shoveled many, many loads of manure out of the barn. Pigs were bad but a winter's worth of chicken crap really burned your eyes.

The worst job I ever had was working in a wholesale grocery warehouse loading cases of groceries onto pallets for shipment to individual stores. You would get an order on little sticky strips and then you'd go get two pallets on a pallet jack and run through the warehouse picking the order. It wasn't that it was super hard, any trained monkey could do it. There were a few monkeys too dumb to train though. lol

A few of the problems with the job:

1) I was starting graduate school at the time - full time student. I finished in two years with a 4.0 gpa somehow. I worked 20 hrs a week at the school to pay for my tuition - research assistantship. I was in the National Guard so one weekend a month was away from home. I worked evenings/nights at the grocery hellhole. It was a union shop so the management could keep you there 12 hours until all the orders were picked. We were casual workers so we didn't have any rights, just work your butt off. But we paid union dues for some reason. I worked 35 to 50 hours a week there. Oh, did I mention I got engaged and my wife became pregnant 3 weeks later? When Emily was born was the week I found this job. She stayed home to raise her, I went to work to support my new family.

2) The union workers hated the management and vice versa. The supervisors would walk the floors just looking for some reason to fire a casual worker. You had to watch everything you did. As a casual worker you weren't liked by either side.

3) You were on a time clock for each order. The management had people come in, watch us pick orders and time each movement. That was how they decided how long it would take to pick each order. Having the right pallet jack was paramount to success and resulted in more than a few arguments if a new guy took yours. They screwed down the order picking time whenever they could. We just had to run faster. It was hot on the dry side, hot as hell in the summer time. No air movement or fans.

4) Everyone got hurt at some point. I watched a guy get smashed between the jack and steel bumper posts, broke his lower leg. Another guy got caught between the jack and a rack, his foot pointed the wrong direction. I slipped on some mayo stepping off my jack, hyperextended my knee and popped a piece of cartilage out. Had knee surgery. One more injury and I would have been let go. You got one freebie.

Add this all up and this was the longest and most miserable two years of my life. One semester I could sleep for 3-5 hours before going to class at 8 am and then get another nap for 2-3 hours in the afternoon before going back to work. Worked there 2 years almost to the day and got a real job as soon as I graduated. I give that place the finger every time I drive by it to this day!
 
I've worked at a grain elevator cleaning maggots and wet grain out of the pit, I've shoveled out hog pens. I've cleaned chicken houses out in hot wet and dusty periods, I helped the vet autopsy 3 day dead cows. Just about every nasty job related to agriculture, I've done. But all pale in comparison of working maintenance in a state park. People are the nastiest, most vile critter on the face of this earth. I've yet to have a job that I didn't learn something that didn't benefit me, somehow, later in life. The trick is to be open minded enough to see the education opportunity.
 
(quoted from post at 09:34:06 11/24/15) No one in the military burning off 55 gal drums of human waste with diesel and a stick?

Watched it done many times in Iraq. Thank God I had enough stripes to not have to do it myself! We had our fuel truck drivers do it most of the time (Spec 4s) or rotate through the lowest enlisted. Finally got port-a-jons after a few months in country and contracted some locals to pump them out. But there is a certain smell of fuel and feces burning!
 
Back in the 60's when I was in high school and working on a mink ranch, cleaning out the mink barns with a fork, shovel & a wheel barrow and wheeling it out to a pickup and hauling out to the field and shoveling it off by hand for a dollar an hour. What a nice smell
 
It was also the most fun job I ever had but it had the worst moments. When I was in high school I worked for a couple of years for a store manager who was averse to paying grownups to do repair jobs so I
got to come in at night and do things like replace dozens of fluorescent ballasts while standing on a wobbly 20-foot step ladder (no way he'd spring for renting a scissor lift). The nasty parts were the jobs
where he was averse even to paying me to do the job so he'd get his son to do it for free, and then he'd later have to pay me to un-do the disaster his son had created and re-do the job. I recall for example
having to re-tile a section of the store where his son had laid vinyl tiles in about a quarter-inch bed of black mastic and it was oozing all over the place. I had to pull up all the tiles without breaking any,
scrape off the excess mastic from the floor, wash all the tiles with mineral spirits, and then re-lay them, all before the store opened the next morning.

I've done a lot of far worse tasks (involving fiberglass, sewage pipes, dead animals, etc.) but they were all working for myself so they don't count as "jobs", right?
 
Unloading Box cars of long lumber in the winter at about 0 to 10 degrees, most of it came from the
Pacific north west and was all frozen. Had to use a crow bar to break each and every board
apart..Sure glad I'm old now !!!! Jim in N.M.
 
I have had my number of dirty jobs myself. Most are only short term issues. days, weeks maybe months. rrlund takes the cake as far as I'm concerned. 33 years of milking, every morning, every night. no taking a day off. my hats off to you.
 
Raising chickens, re-roofing a chicken house in 100 degree weather, working as a lab technician/QC inspector/wastewater operator in a rendering plant that also made dog, cat, mink, fox, and ferret food, and cat treats. Liked the work and the co-workers, hated the smell.
 

CPR. back in the early seventies CPR was in its infancy. I was a volunteer firefighter and rescue member. That was before AIDS and most STDs. It was also before any means of protecting yourself from those types of diseases. Like most volunteers I took our service to the community seriously, including when it came time to do CPR. Once the call was three doors down, and I got there first followed by our chief soon after. The arrest was witnessed so I started CPR. When the chief got there he objected, and I told him that we had to do it, so DO IT. I switched from rescue breathing to compressions just after he came in so he had to ventilate. His brother came soon after, and then some others. After awhile each would start to retch and go outside. We brought the guy back, he was around eighty and pretty well known and liked. He was very appreciative despite the cracked ribs. he lived only another six months or so. Another time it was a four year old kid that fell through ice. he is still alive and doing well, but we have to tell him every now and then why he acts so numb sometimes. They don't tell you in CPR class that unless you have a tube in place, that part of the air that you are putting into the patient is going into the stomach, and after a few minutes some is coming back out along with some of what they last ate.
 
Packing trees for Weyerhauser in a "cold room"- Crews would bring in armloads of fir tree seedlings, someone would put them in 3 ply brown paper bags, I would roll the top down and tie it up with string. Temp. in the room was kept at 34?, water spraying around all over the place. Never been so cold in my life. And rolling down the rough brown paper would soon take all the skin off your knuckles, and hands got so sore you had trouble tying the strings. I didn't last long there- after a couple of weeks I decided selling sporting goods at a (WARM)Herter's retail outlet was worth getting 20 cents an hour less.
 
Worst physical jobs: busting concrete with only a sledge hammer and any type of septic tank work.

Worst non-physical: Teaching statistics to adults. They already know it all. I have to remind them if they were so smart, why are they sitting in class. Truly I think worst than kids. Teaching high school for a year was quite an experience too.

Rick
 
When I was young I worked as a mechanic in a large IHC truck shop in Baltimore.The whole city of Baltimores truck fleet were Internationals,all big gas jobs.We got the heavy duty miserable jobs that the city didn't want to do in their shop.Removing and reinstalling trans missions and bogie bushing jobs on garbage packers dripping ooze,maggots and every other disgusting smell you could imagine came from these trucks.Also had to do a clutch job in a IH Metro van for the City once,it was the truck that drove around picking up dead dogs and animals.Had to remove a good inch of matted fur and dried blood to get to the floorboard screws,then pry the floor out.Never smelled anything so bad in my life.Shop was very,very hot in the summer.
 
You're on to something there on the office
work. Kinda like being in school on those
first nice days after a long winter
 
Helping the vet do an embryotomy on a 90 degree day. My spelling might not be right but my smelling sure remembers it after 35 years. To save you looking the term up it is the cutting apart of a dead (in this case calf) animal within the uterus. This one had been dead for 3-5 days. Quite relieved to get that job done, cow was quite relieved as well. I burnt all the clothes I was wearing, including my boots.
 
(quoted from post at 11:57:36 11/24/15) Helping the vet do an embryotomy on a 90 degree day. My spelling might not be right but my smelling sure remembers it after 35 years. To save you looking the term up it is the [b:cde3238ac1]cutting apart of a dead (in this case calf) animal within the uterus[/b:cde3238ac1]. This one had been [b:cde3238ac1]dead for 3-5 days[/b:cde3238ac1]. Quite relieved to get that job done, cow was quite relieved as well. I burnt all the clothes I was wearing, including my boots.
had that job as part of my workload as foreman on a feedlot for 4 years, I must've done at least a 100 of them. The feedlot owner bought hundreds of heiferettes every spring,..many of them turned out to be pregnant.
Vaccination with live IBR nnalert kills lots of unborn calves, the ones that were born alive often died shortly after or remained untrifty

Bad job yes but I got used to the smell.
I did not burnt my clothes either.
 
Before we had indoor bathroom, we had the out house. Every spring we would lean
it foreware and clean the pit out useing a bucket with a rope tied to it. Oh
the smell!
 
The first time I had to make the call not to do CPR.
Then had to tell the family there was nothing we could do
for their Husband/Father.
That day really sucked!

Steve A W
 
"Diving" torpedo tubes of a Diesel-electric submarine while in drydock, 1963. We used a huge high pressure air powered brush to polish the inside of all 10 tubes in the forward torpedo room. The tubes were 21" diameter and 21' long. There was barely enough room for my body and the big brush, I was the skinniest guy in the torpedo gang, so I was "volunteered". The tubes were made of gun bronze, easily sloughing off along with the detritus . The only protection we had was a cheap dust mask. My lungs soon filled with the tiny flakes of bronze and dirt. I coughed up stuff for weeks. Gun Boss gave me a day off for every tube that I dove, most of which I spent coughing and gasping for air. Could not eat, all food tasted terrible.
"Those were the days, my friend..."
 
The summer I was 16 this city kid got a job on a dairy farm. We made small square bales of hay. My job was to take the bales off
the end of the conveyor carry the other end of the HOT mow and stack. The farmers job was to put the bales from the wagon on the
bottom of the conveyor. He could put them on the conveyor much faster than I could move them to the other end of the mow. I
yelled down to him to slow down but with the noise of the conveyor he could not hear me. I finally let a bale go down the back
side of the conveyor. He asked "am I going too fast"? Hell yes.
 
Back when I was a kid, I went to work for a guy for a week, supposedly for $70 a week. SOB had me out in his pasture with a
scythe and shovel cutting bull and musk thistle off and digging the roots out. At the end of the week, I asked him for my
paycheck, and he claimed that I had earned $17.50- the pay scale was $70 A MONTH!!! I didn't go back on Monday......
 
Physically, been a lot that weren't pleasant. Cleaning chicken house(every week), mowing hay at 90F, spreading manure at -10F, feeding & watering livestock 24-7-365. No different than any other farm kid. But the worst job mentally was loading a milling machine or screw machine. Put your brain in neutral, put a part in a vise or chuck, push a button, do it again in 4 seconds and watch the clock for 8 hours. Thanks Ed Taylor(my foreman) for seeing that I had some ability and teaching me to set up instead of operating. And I never took a job like that again.
 
Delivering appliances in the winter time, working 10 hour days, and attending college classes in the evening. Often times a Salesman would make a sale on a 25 cubic foot side by side refrigerator, but only if the Delivery guys would take the old one from the kitchen, and put it in the basement, then take the one in the basement, and put in in the garage, then take the old one in the garage, and haul it away. The things we do for money.....
 
When I was a young boy my job was to clean the chicken houses in the summer. Scrapping poo and loading it in the spreader on a 90 degree
day was the worst.
 
Well, I've done all the dairy, pig, and poultry cleaning jobs. But probably the nastiest was a pickle processing plant. Early spring they would ship in pallet box loads of pickles in "refrigerated" rail cars. The cars had chambers in the ends where they dropped a chunk of ice. Fans blew air over the ice and over the load, but only if car was in motion. If the cars got sidetracked they might sit for days in a hot southern rail yard. By the time we got them, they had beards on them. We were expected to sort out the "good" ones. That paled in front of the times we got hot peppers to can. Your hands burned even through rubber gloves. Your mouth and nose and eyes burned as well as the other end. How the ladies who clipped the ends off those things 8 hours a day with a paring knife and hand packed them managed, I don't know. I worked quality control, and I still got my share of burning.
 
I work on a large cattle/ grain/ hog farm and there were many unpleasant jobs. Worst particular job that sticks out was we had lightning strike a big oak killing 32 breed heifers under it. It was on a Friday morning in mid July and we had to wait until Monday for the insurance adjuster to show up. Had to open up everyone of them to see how far along and if the calves were male or female. I don't I will ever forget the smell
 
Summer after graduation...Canning company jobs:

1. picking bug/snake/mouse parts out of green beans on a shaker-table (cured me of eating canned veggies for a good long while)

2. running a corn cutter - you get pretty spattered with corn goo by the end of a 12 hour shift
 
Worked 10 hours in the shop at work. Had a
job at limestone mine in Rogers City, MI,
that could be only worked on on the weekends.
So, that Friday night, after working 10
hours, left in a service truck at 5:00 PM
headed to Rogers City. 4 hour drive in the
service truck. Rained the whole way up there
with temp dropping. By the time we got there
and set up it was 11:00. First list on the
job was get up to third story roof of crusher
building house and start shoveling 18" of
limestone off the roof in the rain and dark.
Turned to snow soon, then was down to 22 F
and I was still shoveling, now chipping and
shoveling at 2 AM on a third story roof, on
the shore of Lake Huron with 30-40 mph winds,
in 2 pairs of wet Carhatts, covered in ice,
and limestone. Got done about 3 AM, the crane
was setting up and got the lifting points all
set up and attached to the crane and all
unhooked, ready to lift. Lifted roof off, and
started tearing crusher apart. Carhartts
still wet, wind was almost worse now, the
crusher building was, I believe 14 stories,
and the Huron wind would hit that and force
it down through the third story outcropping
roof we had removed, a wind tunnel of sorts.
We continued to work on the crusher all that
day, and finally got back to our room to
sleep at 9 PM after dinner and cleaning up.
The next morning, we had to be back at the
mine at 5 AM for more crusher tear down and
craning parts out. This was a 7' cone
crusher, the parts are HUGE! Some pieces were
30-40,000 pounds. Worked all weekend in those
wet Carhartts, 15-20 hour days, in that wind.
Got home Sunday night at around 9 PM, back
to regular shop work Monday. Did that
schedule for about 2 months, with only 1
weekend up north off. Seeing the inner parts
of the world's largest limestone mine was
VERY interesting, I got to see some very
interesting things. Watched the freighters
come in and load up. There is only about 6'
space along the side of the ship and the side
of the dock where they load, and that close,
they are HUGE! And the draft they have is
tremendous, especially when loaded. No wonder
I hate cold though, I could never get warm in
those wet Carhartts.

Ross
 
Me and my dad putting on a slate shingle roof in July. Whole center section of the house. Black slate and nice hot sun!
 
Old mouth to mouth CPR looked heroic, but took cast iron stomach to last very long. EMT for 30 yrs. Still remember the
used beer from my 1st CPR patient. He did not survive.
 
Unloading a railcar full of cement. Those were 96 pound sacks! Had to be done in two days so the railroad didn't charge for extra time the car was sitting idle. It was summer, of course, and there was NO handtruck. Each and every bag was lifted, carried to the door, then stacked on a truck, driven to the lumber yard and unloaded and stacked by hand. This was, next to shoeing two uncooperative draft horses, the hardest physical work I've ever done. kelly
 
The stuff sure cleans things especially when heated.We had a steam heated one big enough to get into. We had to go inside and clean the heating coils with a power wire brush. Like I said it's a wonder I haven't got some bad disease like cancer.
 
The annual rebuild of of floating aerators in a 14 acre waste water pond. Had 14-50 hp aerators. This was done every July and August to
make sure no breakdowns in the winter. The waste water was from a textile mill that used 1.5 million gallons of water every 24 hours. It
also contained all human waste from the mill of just over 400 employees.

We'd disconnect power and all anchor cables from the float and use a flat bottom boat to pull the units to the dam. There we had rigging
to lift the motor and prop off the float. Was nothing unusual to find tampons and such on the props. The props had to be replaced because
of wear. We'd pull one at a time and the others were still running. I was told there was so many air bubble from the aerators running that
a person could not swim in it. Glad I never had to try.

I'll never forget that odor and last job I worked I asked first thing if this plant had waste water system. They didn't so I took the job.
LOL Oh and you should have seen the tomato vines growing around the banks in the summer!!
 
Stan, I forgot about the trichlorethylene days! Worked a place that had a degreaser vat, a huge electric heated container of that nasty stuff. We dipped pallet sized baskets in to clean the processing oil off the parts.

When it got too contaminated, it would have to be pumped out and the sludge shoveled off the bottom. So in I would go, no safety harness, no respirator, just a fan to stir the fumes. No telling how many thousand brain cells I killed in there! A miracle I didn't pass out and die in there, sometimes I even did it on Saturday when they were shut down, there by myself. Stupid!
 
One of my dads customers had a mink farm and rendered livestock for the feed, I still remember the smell of death in the trucks we worked on.
 
I actually enjoyed the Summer I worked in a fish cannery in Kenai, Alaska- 35F and covered in fish guts for 12 hours.

Since I have yet to be assigned a task utterly physically impossible, I think the mental side of the job is what makes it so bad. True, stacking second cutting in the barn the day after baling straw is tough AND disheartening, as is busting your tail to clean up a vehicle, only to watch the owner light up and set their fast food bag in as they get set to leave the shop. Nowadays I may get to bring home a stray neutron or two, but the big gripe is humping it for several hours only to watch equipment fail because some other group failed at their part of the job, or did not even work it because they forgot to check if the parts were in before we locked it out...
 
Every year we would butcher several hundred chickens. Mom would fill the freezer in the house with beef, pork and some chicken. We also had a freezer in the shop that was
exclusively for chicken. The doors on the shop were open most of the time unless there was a storm. So chickens, cats and other critters were in and out all the time. No big deal,
business as usual. It was not uncommon for chickens to go in the shop because they liked the grease and the cool dirt. The chickens would often make a nest in the shop and lay
eggs in it. We would find it later because of the smell of rotten eggs. It was always one of us boys who had to clean the rotten eggs out of the shop. So if we smelled rotten eggs, we
found the nest as soon as possible because we know the smell would only get worse.

Well one day as I was in a hurry to get something from the shop I noticed the smell of a dead chicken. But I was in a hurry so I left it go until the next day when I returned to the shop.
The smell was worse so I took the time to find the dead chicken that I smelled. I couldn?t find it anywhere. As I was scanning possible locations, I notice the freezer plug was not
plugged in. So with out hesitations I opened the freezer door. Don?t know how long it was unplugged but the smell almost knocked me over as I slammed the freezer door shut. I
went into the house and told mom that I had some bad news. But before I could tell mom what it was, she smelled the odor of dead chickens on me and knew.

OK now what do we do with a freezer full of dead rotten chickens? Well we decided to take them out, bury them, clean the freezer and put a box of baking soda in the freezer. Dad
had a plan to put a barrel in the pickup truck and we would grab the dead chickens by hand and put them in the barrel. After that we would bury them out in the field somewhere. As
soon as my brother caught wind of this, he quickly and wisely ran off to the field to work. Which left dad and me to do the dirty work. I was in pretty good shape because I was still in
High School and was out for sports. So I took a deep breath, I grabbed as many chickens as I could, while wearing rubber gloves and run to the barrel in the pickup truck, dumped
them and run off for some fresh air. Seemed to work pretty well for me. But dad on the other hand couldn?t hold his breath as long. He had to take a breath just as he dumped the
chickens in the barrel. He run off too but not for fresh air.

Just for pay back for my brother running off like he did. Dad decided to spread them out in the field where my brother was working and ordered him to plow over them. I remember
my brother shutting the windows on the non-air conditioned cab that hot day just to try to minimize the smell. Never did ask him how that worked out.

The freezer door was left open for months in hopes that it would air out. We also scrubbed and cleaned it with everything we could think of but the smell never went away. We finally
through the freezer out and never used it again. It is my strong recommendation that if this ever happens to you, just bury the whole freezer with its contents and save your self a lot
of grief.
 
done a lot of complicated impossible crazy stuff asfar as mechanicin and repairs of all sorts btdt ...roofing in the summertime heat was 1st thing to come to mind ,,. done home improvement from 1974 until abvout 2008,, truly a young mans business,, mostly done siing and trim and gutters ,,,bujt would take a roof if it came my way and the guys needed work..done a lot of impossible ,, working 50 ft up on church steeples, I reaaly liket the work, til I got a equilibrium problem and started fallng off ladders ,,. all stress related, truly thiose yrs took their toll , andi must say they were extremely hard on me ,, because I kept the farm going at the same time ,, the home improvement biznezwas a vehicle to make money to grow into the farm so that it could providea living .. and we .sure had some tuf work on the farm ,, but shux who s complaining ,, best kinda lifestyle there is ,,many a nite rite after baling a thousand idiot cubes and putting them in the loft ,, my dear wife to be and I would sneak off to the lake for a nice cool swim and take turns washing one another .. awwwh to be 17 again and live those innocent nites and times all over again .. listening to pink Floyd , marshall tucker , and all that southern country rock..i recall more serveral times when we planned a date someplace and went to the lake instead .. heaven on earth
 
Yep, btdt, how about delivering to a house stuffed with garbage to the point you only had paths to get thru. Or the times where you had to take a new refrigerator into a kitchen and had to dodge the "puppy poo". The owners weren't concerned.
Tim in OR
 

When I was in Okinawa in the early 80's we were in the 2nd year of a drought. The barracks I was in got 1 55 gallon drum of water to flush the heads per week. As any Marine knows, Thursday night is Field Day night and the barracks will be cleaned to spotless condition. Good old Cpl. Bret was always in charge of cleaning the head simply because they knew it would be CLEAN when I got done. Didn't matter who got stuck on the detail, no one ever wanted to get in and flush the stupid toilets. The whining and moaning got to the point that I just did it myself. That job was horrible. OTOH, no one ever accused me of ordering someone to do something I wouldn't do myself.


The worst job I ever did? Having to go tell some poor soul their kid(s)/wife/husband was dead. Got to do that lots of times. I'll clean heads instead thank you very much.
 
(quoted from post at 00:12:05 11/25/15) Every year we would butcher several hundred chickens. Mom would fill the freezer in the house with beef, pork and some chicken. We also had a freezer in the shop that was
exclusively for chicken. The doors on the shop were open most of the time unless there was a storm. So chickens, cats and other critters were in and out all the time. No big deal,
business as usual. It was not uncommon for chickens to go in the shop because they liked the grease and the cool dirt. The chickens would often make a nest in the shop and lay
eggs in it. We would find it later because of the smell of rotten eggs. It was always one of us boys who had to clean the rotten eggs out of the shop. So if we smelled rotten eggs, we
found the nest as soon as possible because we know the smell would only get worse.

Well one day as I was in a hurry to get something from the shop I noticed the smell of a dead chicken. But I was in a hurry so I left it go until the next day when I returned to the shop.
The smell was worse so I took the time to find the dead chicken that I smelled. I couldn?t find it anywhere. As I was scanning possible locations, I notice the freezer plug was not
plugged in. So with out hesitations I opened the freezer door. Don?t know how long it was unplugged but the smell almost knocked me over as I slammed the freezer door shut. I
went into the house and told mom that I had some bad news. But before I could tell mom what it was, she smelled the odor of dead chickens on me and knew.

OK now what do we do with a freezer full of dead rotten chickens? Well we decided to take them out, bury them, clean the freezer and put a box of baking soda in the freezer. Dad
had a plan to put a barrel in the pickup truck and we would grab the dead chickens by hand and put them in the barrel. After that we would bury them out in the field somewhere. As
soon as my brother caught wind of this, he quickly and wisely ran off to the field to work. Which left dad and me to do the dirty work. I was in pretty good shape because I was still in
High School and was out for sports. So I took a deep breath, I grabbed as many chickens as I could, while wearing rubber gloves and run to the barrel in the pickup truck, dumped
them and run off for some fresh air. Seemed to work pretty well for me. But dad on the other hand couldn?t hold his breath as long. He had to take a breath just as he dumped the
chickens in the barrel. He run off too but not for fresh air.

Just for pay back for my brother running off like he did. Dad decided to spread them out in the field where my brother was working and ordered him to plow over them. I remember
my brother shutting the windows on the non-air conditioned cab that hot day just to try to minimize the smell. Never did ask him how that worked out.

The freezer door was left open for months in hopes that it would air out. We also scrubbed and cleaned it with everything we could think of but the smell never went away. We finally
through the freezer out and never used it again. It is my strong recommendation that if this ever happens to you, just bury the whole freezer with its contents and save your self a lot
of grief.


When I had the gun shop I had a fridge full of worms, fish bait ya know. The fridge died. I figured that out several days later. I don't care what the chickens smelled like, the worms were worse!
 
Converted dairy barn, 25 feeder pigs, 1 fork, 1 manure spreader. First foot or so, not bad............ from then on went downhill real fast. Clean as a whistle, disinfect, here comes 25 more. I wouldn't eat ham or bacon for years....
 

We sell tractor parts! We have the parts you need to repair your tractor - the right parts. Our low prices and years of research make us your best choice when you need parts. Shop Online Today.

Back
Top