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Dirtiest jobs

M

Mark W.

Member
We have all seen the show but I am wondering what some of you have experienced first hand. Mine was probably pressure washing the underside of school busses and then oiling them down.
 
Nastiest for me was repairing a broke driveline under a loaded garbage truck,in July.It smelled great,and the crawlies were falling from above.It was a do it or get fired thing.Hope to never,ever,ever do that again.
 
Fishing a cow out of a 4 foot deep manure pit that was full! Someone had to get the sling under her bell so we could lift her out with the endloader. The stuff was thick enough a person could walk on it but the cow sunk to her belly and was high centered.
 
Digging a 14 ft. auger out from under 2 tons of wet muddy layer litter. With a shovel.Hard to stand up when you get down inside the V-tank. Broke the 3 in. journal with a load in it. But that's when they break most of the time.

A tossup between that was a rotten calf I pulled out of a cow. I think the term is "Gag a maggot off a gut wagon"!!! It builds Charater. I hope. LOL
 
My worst job was cleaning chicken houses when I was a kid. Had to crawl under the racks on the floor scraping the crap off the floor. While the guy with the hose washed it all down.
 
I work in a hospital. One that stands out was back in the late 80s a teenage boy layed down on the train tracks to take his own life.They brought him to us in 6 large black trashbags. A coworker and myself got the job of going through the bags and putting parts with parts " hand with a wrist, ankle with a foot" and so on so that we could begin x-raying him. A bit of jaw and a foot was about all we could readly identify.
 
Mine is cleaning the septic system. The final drain tile drains into the road ditch, but every winter somehow the end of the tar paper tile gets plugged with dirt and if you don't fix it the septic system won't drain and backs up.

But you get that black stuff all over you when you run the tile tape up through there. That smell stays on you for 3 days.
 
One job I always hate is crawling up the silo chute to open the trapdoors as the unloader moves down. Don't know what it is about dry silage but no matter how many showers I take I'll itch for 3 days.

Worst job was tearing apart a flooded house. There's nothing quite like the smell of fiberglas filled with mold and river dirt.
 
Helping a local farmer spread tax-deductable, city of Baltimore dried sewage on his fields.

The stuff, although dried and somewhat burnt, is downright awful. Absolutely stunk up the whole neighborhood. The city recommended we use tractors with cabs, and not to walk in the stuff. Then, it was disked in, and planted over.

Smell's gone now, but I didn't feel too good about spreading it near people's houses.

This is the same stuff people put in their mulch for resale. The people who sell this mixed in mulch get tax reductions, and the unknowing consumer is often found with his hands in the mulch, smelling how "good" it is. Ugh.
 
Setting on a swing board that was lowered dowm into a sewage tank with a rose bud heating an I beam that was the skimmer in a sewage tank so that it could be pulled back up straight. This was in July and was 90 degrees and no shade. I had to keep it red hot and could not take a break until it was back straight enough to work as it should. I stunk so bad that the rest of the crew didn't want me in there trucks. I got to spend the rest of the week in the drivers cab of a gradeall in the heat as well.
It was just before I got married and still living at home. Mom bought different junk to dump in the bath tub to remove the oder from my body. Three tub soak baths a day over a week before my wife to be thought I didn't smell like a fried turd.
 
Salvaging lumber from old houses.

I'd work all week. At the end of the day, you couldn't see me unless I smiled. By Sunday, I quite blowing black stuff out of my nose only to start all over again monday morning.
 

Some of these others sound awfully terrible!

The one on the farm I always hated the worst was digging out the threshing cylinder and/or feeder house on the old JD combine while harvesting milo...

That itchy old gray powder makes me want to scratch, just thinking about it...


HH
 
Many years ago as a banker, I was given the task to "inspect" a truckstop/cafe that had gone out of business.

Truckstop facility was nasty enough, but the cafe kitchen was much worse.

Coolers and meat lockers were left with various meat, cheese, and vegetables inside.

After several days of no electricity and 100<sup>o</sup> temperature outside, y'all can imagine the rest.

What a waste of food.
 
I can't even come close to some of you, my worst dirty experience was riding a front facing bagger on a combine that had its own motor, the cooling fan from motor helped to direct all the dust in my face' the neighbors son had a habit of wanting to run the ragweed through too just to get me wound, But his Dad gave him H^$8 when it showed up in the sacks .
 
crawling under a mobile in feb. to repair a water leak. mice had chewed a hole in the hot water line which is located between the floor and the plastic covered insulation. the ground was completely sloppy and the plastic had filled to the point of sagging to ground level. i sliced open the plastic like a surgeon with a scalpel and then, it broke and filled my face with warm rat turd filled water. finished the job, then soaking wet out into a feb. day to strip off clothes, into my truck and home to a hot shower. to this day my son swears that he is claustrophobic.
 
Loading cages of live chickens using a Lewis Mola 2000 "chickenbine". Most of the jobs on the crew was not bad but working on the back where the chickens came out of the machine and went into the cages was not fun. Not only would every one of them have a "movement" in the two foot space they were fly'n by your head, as often as not the head would be messed up and would pick up as much litter as it would birds. Then you would have to work on some of the nasty farms that did not get taken care of very well and the chickenbine would pick up all the "blue birds" in the houses.

Dave
 
Pulling a calf this spring with Dad - I'm pulling on the chain and open my mouth to take a breath, when the cow lets loose and I got a mouthful of fresh manure.

I tried to puke - I tried so much to puke, but couldn't. Still had to save the calf, but when we were done I was rinsing my mouth with water from the cattle trough - anything had to be better than what I just had!
 
anything that has to be greased, such as tractors, sickle mower, bush hogs, baler and so on. I HATE GREASE! and everything on the farm has a million fittings that need grease everyday.
 
Well Billy Shafer and I share the misery of cleaning Chicken Houses but In my professional life I think the most dangerous and life altering job I was ever involved with was as a Carpenter working Refuel and Repair outages at a Nuclear Power Plant and being crewed up with 3 other men to do a job which normally 6 men would do and we had to do it in a much shorter time. The job,building Scaffold for other Crafts to use at the bottom of a Nuclear Reactor Vessel.We had to constantly monitor our Radiation meters and stay off sensitive parts of the Reactor and at the same time build the Scaffold in a proffesional and approved way.It was Hot,Stressful,and Physicaly a challenge for a 60 year old man working with men much younger.I stuck it out for 12 years of that sort of assignments until I retired in 1999.I miss that kind of work and think back to it often.Sort of Twisted of me I guess.JC
 
When my mother was termimally ill, we had lots of part-time help, sitters, Hospice Care, my wife, sister-in-law and 2 sisters in and out all hours of the day and night. Most of these folks were used to 'city' sewage, rather than septic tanks. The house was almost 50 years old and the plumbing had never been touched. Wasn't long before everything was stopped up; crawled under the house (about 18 inches of clearance) and found the clean-out plug. It was almost 50 years worth of tight. There was LOTS of used feminine hygiene products in addition to the other stuff one would expect, when I finally got it open. Had a SERIOUS discussion with them about what was appropriate to flush.......
 
I am retired from the sandblasting business. Occasionally, when business was slow I bid on work at sewage treatment plants.

On the bulletin board in the breakroom, was an article from the Worcester, MA paper. It had pictures and text of a plant worker ready to jump into an aerator with SCUBA gear. An aerator is like a swimming pool but four times as deep. It is the first stage of treatment. The tanks usually have one or two high horsepower, large diameter vertical propellers. It's kinda like making whipped cream.

Anyway, the worker dove to the bottom to retrieve whatever had been dropped in the tank. The reporter asked him how the job went. The diver said great, "They're giving me the rest of the day off."

I kinda inferred from that remark that he had done this a few times before. It was "all in a day's work?
 
I grew up on a dairy farm, (and still help out there when I can), as did many others on this board, so I've done many dirty jobs in my time.

However, one of the dirtiest I've done is pressure washing veal crates after the 20+ week old calves have been shipped. Manure is flying in every direction, and right in your face repeatedly/unpredictably for hours and hours isn't much fun. Your eyes stick shut....You don't dare open your mouth....Lots of fun.

I did this type of work on the side for many years while our children were growing up. My wife was a stay-at-home-mom and money was tight. Once in a while I still take a barn just to bring back the good ol' days!


Glenn F.
 
I worked in the same building (Oleska Building, Morgantown WV) that they welded garbage trucks in. If you want a smell you can never forget, boil some garbage effluent.

Not sure what caused it, but flies and birds could not survive more than a few minutes in this building. We would follow the fly until it dropped dead in mid-air. It would only take a minute or two. Birds lasted about ten minutes. It was a clean production bay that made frequency converters. No harsh chemicals or gases were used that we knew of, but stuff did not live long. We had no pest problems.

I left as soon as economically feasible.

Aaron
 
I've done that. My nephew and I pulled 6 lawn and leaf bags, full of it out of my attic. I was surprised the plaster hadn't fallen in. Used a shovel and a shop vac.

The smell is something you will instantly recognize when you encounter it again.
 
Shovelling grain away from an auger in the top of a wooden bin. No air, no room, just you, grain and dust. Fortunately nobody does it anymore. Never should have then either.
 
J.C. I will always remember that wonderful smell. Really got good in the summer time. I can still recall the smell to this day.
 
I've never had to do much cleaning after people but humans are the nastiest critters on earth. I've done my share of dirty jobs from cleaning the pit under truck scales to shoveling wet soybeans out of an elevator pit. Probably the worst was having a water line break in one of my chicken houses, I had 6 week old birds and it flooded about 80' of the house. I had to carry every bird to a dry spot. After carrying about 2000 wet chickens all you could see was my eyeballs. I was covered in chicken shut. I stunk for a week.
 
I think replacing a clutch in a coal truck that runs over wet haulroads on the jobsite, not very smelly but VERY,VERY dirty.
 
some steel fab work at Union Carbide acetylene plant

30 in plant at work, 20 minutes breather outside...repeat
 
(quoted from post at 14:05:28 05/14/09) Shovelling grain away from an auger in the top of a wooden bin. No air, no room, just you, grain and dust. Fortunately nobody does it anymore. Never should have then either.
Click to expand...

Dad talks about this all the time in the old wood (rectangular) grain bins. The neighbors were smart enough to put 2 or three fill holes on the top... I think this is why he is claustrophobic today.
 
working on oil wells with a cable tool rig. oil stays on cable then runs off and fall on your hard hat then down your neck, wind blows it in your face, glove stay dry for about 1 hr, by noon IM cover with oil. but that oil smells just like green money.
 
This is a great thread.
Dirtiest job is using angle grinders with wire brushes cleaning the rust off the metal in the fresh water voids of the USS Howard W. Gilmore.
Breathing apparatus, 3 1/2' ceilings, slither around in an inch of dry, powdered rust. Hot too so you're sweating.
Did you know that rust will stain your fingernails, eyelids, and other parts for a few days afterwards?
AS 16
 
Pulled an old brick chimney out of my house. Basement, main floor, attic. Still haven't got the house clean.
 
I took a candu reactor fuel channel TSS inspection tool that was fresh from sliding down a fuel channel. Disconnected it from the delivery robot.Wrapped it in plastic and carried it from the reactor vault and placed it on a cart. Then it was taken to decontam and then the rubber parts/seals were replaced.
After 30 minutes in the reactor core the highest quality, radiation resistant rubber deteriates into what looks like old sun exposed car tires.
We ended up bring a couple of "fuel fleas" out with us plus having about 600,000 counts on out plastic suits. The little jerks kept hopping around until we found them and trapped them with duct tape.
 
If you think trying to put them back together is fun.....try being the man who was forced to take them apart. I was a railroad engineer for 27 years. Seeing a life you know is about to end, being powerless to stop it from happening, having no way to escape the aftermath and always.....that THUMP and for an instant, the noises you hear.

They never go away.
 
It was survival in the city & the rent had to be paid. I worked 24 yrs 3rd shift in a downtown hotel, cleaning, parking cars, van runs to airport. Why would a person do this? The coffee was free & supervisors left you alone. Oh yeah, met a LOT of interesting people!
 
Not as bad as some others have listed, but mine was running a cab-less combine...'specially when you hit a patch of smartweed...that purple cloud can hide the head.
Stacking bales on the wagon on a hot day, too... sweaty, chaff all over you.
 
Another cable tool hand I see. Those were the days. Wonder if I could remember again how to splice a cable?

I'd add drilling or working the floor on a drilling rig pulling a wet string in the dead of winter on morning tower wind blow 50 mph at 10 below zero, swabbing oil on a pulling unit, or pulling rods and tubing with a wet string. Working as a hot tar roofer one summer until I bumped a bucket of hot tar on a pipe sticking up through the roof and spilling it on my leg and then the boss came to the hospital and found out I was only 14 years old and said I was too young for his insurance to cover me. Cleaning out pig pens and chicken coops. Rodding sewer drains. Plumbing under a house in the dead of winter after a major leak.

Those are the less than clean jobs. I'll get to the really dirty jobs like chauffering my wife around later.
 
Running a new phone cable to that wall phone in the middle of the back wall where all of the garbage trucks empty in about a 30 bay building, and then it gets compacted and loaded into semis to be hauled to the landfill on a hot summer day, and there were some big rats too, big like racoons. That was pretty bad, and so was doing the same thing at a hog slaughter house down at the stockyards. Ripe? You betcha. Why would they mount phones there, and who's the sick son of a guns that touch the receivers to their ear and mouth?

Mark
 
I dunno... but I think fixing a broken barn cleaner is right up there as one of the worst. Working with fiberglass isulation is also something I hate.

Rod
 
Wikipedia says it fairly well.

They are tiny flecks of used nuclear fuel. U235,U238, plutonium and fission daughters such as iodine, cession, strontium etc.
On contact they often exceed 10,000rem. However due being so small even a good set of eyes can miss them even while using a magnifying glass.
Being so small they dose a very minute are of the body through a plastic suit. And being so small the gamma & beta energy rapidly falls off to a few rem or less at one inch distance. So a plastic suit and clothing hold them far enough away to be of little trouble.
However the fleas are a powerful ionizer and will strip electrons of it's self and surrounding atoms.Now with an extreme static charge these things leap about or piggyback on people, clothing or equipment. With as much random motion or predicibility as a real flea.And about is difficult to see.
So we will know they are in the area but it takes some hunting to track down and catch them.
Of course keeping them off the skin and hair is a challenge when undressing from a plastic suit.
On the outside of the body they are manageable. And the skin, hair, muscle and body fat are good shields for the vital organs from beta and alpha radiation.
However it's not recommended to breath in or ingest any used nuclear fuel no matter how small.Now it's direct contact and can even dissolve and travel in the body through the blood stream. Iodine in particular to the thyroid. Caesium to the bones etc.
Still I would rather tackle a fuel flea rather than work under a garbage truck or, unwrap pieces of a farmer from around a pto shaft

Fuel fleas
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopaedia
Jump to: navigation, search
Fuel fleas are microscopic hot particles of new or spent nuclear fuel. While small, they tend to be intensely radioactive.

The fuel particles, the size about 10 micrometers, are a strong source of beta and gamma radiation and a weaker source of alpha radiation. The disparity between alpha and beta radiation (alpha activity is typically 100-1000 times weaker than beta, so the particle loses much more negative-charged particles than positive-charged ones) leads to buildup of positive electrostatic charge on the particle, causing the particle to "jump" from surface to surface and easily become airborne.

Fuel fleas are typically rich in uranium 238, and contain an abundance of insoluble fission products. Due to their high beta activity, they can be detected by a Geiger counter. Their gamma output can allow analysis of their isotope composition (and therefore their age and origin) by a gamma ray spectrometer.

Fuel fleas, and hot particles in general, are very dangerous when ingested.
 
Why are you messing with stuff like that? Newman's machine produces energy with no polution. no hazardus waste& no heat loss. If you can understand all that fission stuff, How come you can't understand Newman's machine? Answer== because you have never tried. You quote the laws of thermodynamics & say you can't get more out of a system than is put in. Try telling that to a farmer. If you plant 100 bushels of wheat, don't expect more than 100 bushels back.
 
I'm waiting to see Joe's machine "generate" cheap clean power. And put all those silly engineers and scientists out of business.
There hasn't been a machine invented yet. That wasn't used when it was faster,cheaper, easier and more efficient that the alternative.
Why is Joe's machine the exception? It's because Joe's machine is only a device to vacuum cash from well meaning but unaware people.It doesn't "make power".
Get your head out of the sand. You can no more make a magnet push or pull to make a device travel indefinitely. Than you can expect a metal spring to push or pull to make a device travel indefinitely.
So how is joe smarter than Einstein, Ampere Sir Isaac Newton or Faraday etc?
Joe's machine isn't on the market or patented for a reason. Care to guess why, because it doesn't work.
 
I don't know about it smelling that good!
Seemed to remember that crude smell getting everywhere, and hard to easily get rid of.
 
One of the dirtiest jobs I had was when working construction. I had to operate a jack hammer inside of a a manhole that was about 4 feet by 4 feet by 4 feet. Hardly room for the jackhammer and myself.

I had to work on my knees. Even with ear plugs the pneumatic hammer was deafening. Dust masks didn't help much as the air was so thick with cement dust stirred up by the exhaust air. Such a confined space I seem to remember of bits and pieces of cement acting about like a sand blaster to my face and body. It was tough enough I told my wife enough was enough and when a farming opportunity came along I took it.

The smelliest was cleaning out a car wash pit. Man did those things ever get ripe.
 
How do you feel qualified to judge something that you know nothing about. Did you ever test Joe's energy machine? Are you calling all those 30 - 40 people that have tested it along with Joe and I lyiers? I will try to briefly explain how I see it. A farmer uses his tractor to plant 100 # of wheat. Seed + soil + sunshine + air + rain = lets say 500 # of wheat. Production efficiency = 500% Joe seeds a high voltage (milliamps of current) into a very large and long copper conductor coil which creates a very strong magnetic field, which couples to the magnetic field of the permanent magnet rotor causing the rotor to turn and produce horsepower. Breaking the imput voltage causes the field to collapse (EMF)putting more back into the batteries to keep them charged. Horsepower out can be measured ( around 10 HP to run the water pump he has connected to the rotor shaft) with an imput of 40 watts. YOU figure out the production % . Comparing it to your fizzle physics is like grinding up the wheat & making a lot of dust( hazardous waste) & never getting as much flour back as the wheat you started with.
 
I have no money involved. I am just trying to help him get a patent. Why not issue the patent and let the marketplace decide if it works or not? Joe's machine is like a newborn baby. We have no idea what it will develop into yet. If it doesn't work, Why did big oil offer him millions of $$$$? He told them to go to hades knowing if they bought him out , the common people would never see it.
 
That reminds me of cutting a piece of concret floor in the tool room at our fire station. We had to cut a piece out for a drain or something (I'm after forgetting now)... but we were using a cutoff saw with a concrete blade. We tried using an exhaust fan to force the dust out first but that didn't work, ot to mention the spalls coming off in our faces... so being firemen, at the fire station, we each grabbed a Scot Pack off the truck and went back to work. At least with a tight mask it wasn't too bad with the on demand air.

Rod
 
You are getting alone well with the comedy act for performances at colleges and universities.
A few more zingers like those and you can retire in style after a few years of work.
 
[i:654c4848f0]Crackpotus americanus[/i:654c4848f0] Joe Newman will never get a patent for his device, because the US Patent Office has an official policy that they do not issue patents for perpetual motion machines. So any time and/or money you're putting into that effort is wasted.

As for "big oil" offering Newman any money for anything he has to offer, that's almost as hilarious as the idea that he would turn them down. The only thing the "common people" have that interests Crackpot Joe is their money, and I'm sure the oil companies' money is just as good as anyone else's.
 
You keep quoting your outdated textbooks that say it can't, won't , doesn't work but I have yet to see any proof from you that it doesn't. Remember a man that says he knows it all is right. You can't teach him anything anymore. I am glad you enjoy the comedy! So do I.
 
Mine would have to be my current job...Waste water treatment plant operator. Theres not much worse than human waste day in and day out. It can get pretty bad at times.
 
Spray painting the inside of 18in steel irrigation pipes about 16years ago. For some strange reason, I can still remember the colour. Parchment.
 

Just curious Teddy, since I havent actually seen anything about this other machine you are mentioning, so I cant comment on if it works or not.

But you use the analogy of 100# of wheat planted gets you 500# of wheat grown. While this is true, you also mention how it takes nutrients from the soil, sunlight, water, etc. to make that 100# produce 500#.

Based on the other discussions here, it sounds like this machine is supposed to give you more work out than you put energy in? If thats the case, the wheat analogy doesnt really stick.

Not trying to stir things up here, just more curious than anything else...

Sorry for steering off topic from the Dirty Jobs....they all seem pretty nasty.
 
Somethings never change so it isn't outdated.
Joe crackpot's magnetic motor explanation is no different than saying he has a "super pump" than can drain 1000 gallons of gasoline from a 100 gallon tank.
Produce these 30 or is it 40 people who can prove joe's magnet motor works.
If this thing makes more power than what it uses. It needs no more than a boost from a battery to get going. Then it could run with all batteries disconnected. A capacitor at most to keep it running.
Plain and simple, people have been taken in and swindled by "con men" since the dawn of recorded time. Some things never change.
Joe is a lying & swindling thief.
 
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