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.
I attempted to deliver cremated remains once while I was a carrier for USPS. I say “attempted” because you have to have the recipient sign for cremated remains, but they weren’t home…
I’m not sure how I’d describe it, but it’s an odd feeling leaving a “Sorry We Missed You” pink slip for a person versus a package.
I have helped digging a few graves.
I have helped to put my grandma into her coffin. I have dressed my dad for his funeral.
I find doing such things helpful for the peace in my own emotions.
I don’t do autopsies at my current job, but I have been trained to do so in school. Overall, I have not done very many autopsies at all in comparison to many peers in my field. I would not feel comfortable doing one on my own at this point due to lack of experience. I never really saw that many that were particularly sad tbh, but there were several that stood out to me.
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Someone who died of suicide. The autopsy itself wasn’t overly depressing tbh, just fairly routine, but the person had left a suicide note. It was read aloud to us. To hear about all the pain that person was going through and to hear them talk about things about themselves that I knew were untrue really made me almost start crying tbh. They had family members who loved them, but they had felt that they were a burden to their family and killed themselves.
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A teen who died of lymphoma. I can’t remember if they had just turned 18 or they were about to, but it was sad to hear of such an innocent life cut so short in such an unfair way. I have not done autopsies on anyone younger, but I know people who have.
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A woman who died suddenly around Christmastime of a pulmonary embolism. There wasn’t much to the case that got to me, but I remember noting that her nails were painted in a festive red and green. It indicated to me that she had been looking to enjoy the holidays, but that she never ended up getting to experience them with her loved ones. When many people perform an autopsy, there is a distinct emotional separation many of us have from the decedent and a “real” human being, if that makes sense. But little things like that remind you that these were real people with real lives and real emotions and real hopes and dreams.
Honestly, most autopsies I have seen/done were on older/elderly people who either died of natural causes or alcoholism. There was also occasional drug overdose deaths who tended to trend a lot younger. It never made me feel all that bad if someone had died older tbh because they had a chance to live their lives. It’s the younger ones that were always more notable.
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Scottish Police Service. Turns out peeling back the curtain of the worse side of people isn’t conducive to good mental health for me so I got outta there.
Holy shit, we found a good cop
Aaaand they’re gone
Cops who quit because their job is horrible are the only ones who I might consider a good cop.
It’s the ones who relish their power and corruption which I worry the most about.
This is why I hate ACAB. The time it could take for a random good person to realize not only is their profession infested with evil, but then also find a new job and quit, is substantial enough that combined with the churn rate and number of cops, I may be calling millions of good people bastards for no good reason, which may actually make those people tend to disagree with me and my ideas that the police system itself is corrupt. They know they aren’t a bastard and from their perspective I’m just insulting them mindlessly. Someone insulting you for no reason can’t be that wise of a person, or have that good of an argument, they might think.
The system is corrupt. Many of the people are fine. Stop name calling people you’ve never met like children. Lower police funding. Demilitarize them. Restrict their powers. Investigate them more. Make punishments more strict for those with any power at all. But don’t call random people you’ve never met or even heard about bastards.
Lots of family and friends still in the service and doing as good a job as they can but for each good one there is no doubt an asshole.
But I can’t speak for cops in other countries, only experience in Scotland.
It was seeing how awful humans are to each other that really sold it for me, I’d rather live in my bubble, thanks.
Probably doing tech support in a child cancer ward. The kids all just looked exhausted. I tried not to let it get to me - they came to the hospital for help to live, not to die, so I made the choice to be hopeful about their chances.
What is a denor? A quick google didn’t bring anything up
Might be a typo? A donor phlebotomy technician is one who specializes in drawing blood from donors, I guess as opposed to ones who do the lab work.
Nope. Denor was correct. Navy speak. I was a navy corpsman, lab technologist, & denor.
Navy medical term for autopsy assistant.
Autopsy Assistant. It was only the pathologist and myself. While he took the samples of the organs he wanted, I had to extract the brain. Once he was finished, I had to collect everything up, bag it, place it into the abdominal cavity, fill in the chest & head cavities with gauze, sew everything back up, wash all the blood off the body, and then put it back into a body bag. We had nicknames for different types of deaths.
Are you still in the field or did you switch to something else?
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I’m doing something else in the medical field. I was a navy corpsman and I specialized in lab tech & denor. Believe it or not, civilian employers don’t recognize military medical training. I couldn’t even get a job as a phlebotomist after I got out and attended college. Plus, people make more per hour starting at Costco than denors make with experience. I had a few where the NIS were involved. Those were REALLY long days. Those guys didn’t have a sense of humor at all. But then again, most people working in the medical field have a morbid sense of humor.
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I worked two separate jobs doing film photo processing when I was a university student. The first was at a factory that handled a lot of police photography. I saw way more crime scene photos than I needed to.
The second time was in the photo development lab for a high street pharmacy chain. I swear, either people didn’t realise their photos were developed and handled by other people, or some of them really got off on us seeing their weird shit.
I am cautiously curious… Do I want to know more about this weird shit?
It depends on your thresholds. Most of the weird shit was sexual, which I don’t have a moral issue with other than I didn’t consent to be exposed to it.
Spoiler
Unfortunately there were some other types of photos with content that we felt necessary to inform police about. Not explicitly CSAM, but children were involved.
Gotcha. People are so strange. You were very kind to put the spoiler tag.
You’re gonna read it anyway.
Damn straight I hit that spoiler… So glad I don’t regret it.
I don’t plan on shooting anything weird, but I still don’t want anyone looking at my photos! Luckily it’s pretty trivial to develop at home, for B&W, at least.
Hospital security guard. Had to help hold down suicidal mental patients so the nurses could put restraints on them. Had to escort counselors from Child Protective Services when they were collecting babies from the maternity ward, so that angry family members didn’t attack them in the parking lot. Had to help wheel bodies down to the loading dock when the mortician came to collect them. Had to stop grieving relatives from trying to rush the ER or operating room when their loved one was on the table.
I quit after walking into the ER one time to see one of my coworker guards getting a wound on his neck examined while the other guard said, “Dude, you just missed the excitement! Lenny just got bit by a crackhead!”
😂
I’m sorry but that ending… I hope Lenny didn’t turn into patient alpha
As a result of being a dumb ass teenager the state gave me 50 community service hours. I got assigned to an animal shelter that was being managed by some very deranged people. I witnessed some horrific things that mentally unstable people will do to animals when no one cares.
My job was to pile up the euthanized animals in a pickup and off load them at the landfill. Fucking grim.
I struck up a conversation with a guy at a bar one time, turned out he was an animal control officer and the county shelter had just had a bad outbreak of parvovirus. He said he had spent the whole week just euthanizing dogs from sunup to sundown. He looked rough.
That would suck to have to have done that, sounds like he was at least a empathetic human.
It’s horrific to witness that kind of death, or it was for me.
This is fucking brutal, man. I can handle some shit, but not dead animals that were killed just because. I think I would have lost my mind.
My job was to pile up the euthanized animals in a pickup and off load them at the landfill. Fucking grim.
Ufff. That’s grim, yeah.
Jesus Christ that sounds terrible. I get that community service isn’t supposed to be particularly fun, but emotionally scarring people seems very counterproductive to the goal.
Yeah, it took a while to get over that shit, but I guess it worked because I sure as shit changed my ways.
nursing home. seeing two underpaid, coked out CNAs joke around as they stuff into a body bag the naked corpse of a man you were talking to 10 minutes ago really alters your perspective on life.
I’m a crisis intervention specialist, which means I’m a counselor who specifically works with suicidal individuals and those undergoing similar crises.
Thank you for doing what you do. I don’t know how you have the mental strength to do so.
It takes a lot of training and a lot of self care. I’m very lucky to work with an employer that does truly emphasize self care and allows us to do that.
Oh wow. I know we don’t know each other but I want to thank you, and other people, doing this job. It’s so important.
Thank you, I appreciate that.
Itinerant Summer Camp Counselor on Indian Reservations
Do you know what the poorest county in the US is? Neither do I, but at the time, it was Todd County, SD, where the Pine Ridge Reservation meets the Rosebud Reservation. This is raw desert. This is nobody’s ancestral lands because nobody would or could live here long-term. This is just where a big section of the Lakota people got shoved.
We would go into a town, and set up our weeklong free program for the local kids. We stayed with locals, or slept on the floor of churches in sleeping bags. We had to bring in all of our own supplies and most of our own food, partly because there was nowhere to buy anything but also because if we ate what the locals had to serve us we got malnourished and depressed –we learned this the hard way, and almost crashed the program two weeks in from burnout, we were so miserable. We would do our best to give the kids some fun, some education, and a good lunch but ultimately they just wandered in and out as they would and other than enforcing “no fighting” in the program areas we were powerless to do anything more.
I live on the West Side of Chicago now, a block away from a permanent homeless camp. I’ve been homeless myself, briefly, before I got my life turned around. I’m no stranger to urban poverty. But as bad as it is, I would take it over rural poverty any day. At least in the city you can get up and walk away. Resources are underfunded but they’re there. Out in the desert, on the rez… all you have is the community, and the community is broke.
Wow. How sad. I never considered the difference between urban and rural poverty… I have some experience with the former but not really the latter. Thank you for the insight.
If I may ask, what food were the locals eating that you had to bring your own?
Part of it was that we were guests, so the hospitality culture dictated that we were served “celebration” type foods: hotdogs, iceberg salad, frybread. Which is fun but not a long-term diet.
The main thing was the lack of vegetables, especially fresh vegetables. There’s nowhere to grow them and nowhere to buy them, and even if you drive off the rez, an hour to Valentine, NE for a real supermarket, the prices are very high.
When I was deployed to Iraq my platoon ran the post office on the FOB, and one of the jobs we all had was going through packages that other soldiers were mailing home to make sure everything they wanted to send was safe/legal to ship. There were several instances where I had to go through footlockers that belonged to soldiers who were killed (their belongings get mailed back to their family once the family has been properly notified; the shipments are handled differently/tracked differently than regular mail). It always fucked me up to go through someone’s stuff, knowing they were now dead. Like, you get this little window into their lives: pictures of their family, CDs of the music they liked, books they were reading, all that shit, but then you see the bookmark in that book where they left off and you realize they’re never going to finish it, just little things like that that were hard to process, whether you personally knew that soldier or not.
But then it gets even more fucked up because weeks and sometimes months after they were killed, they’re still getting mail from people in the states that sent it way before that person was killed, so now you have stacks of letters and packages and post cards for a dead person that they’re never gonna get, and the post cards are filled with “I love you and miss you” etc etc, and it kinda crushes your soul a little bit, because you have to go through it all just like the footlocker and ship it all back to the family.
