Ask Lemmy

In my industrial mechanic apprenticeship I had a stay in the maintenance department. In the time had to clean out a several hundred liter tank of spoiled cooling lubricant of a CNC machine. If not maintained properly it becomes a breeding ground for bacteria and fungi and it almost made me puke the first time I broke the surface of the waste at the bottom of the tank after pumping the fluids out. It didn't get much better when I had to shovel out the rest of it.

I will never work in maintenance again.

(Edit because I tried something short because I wasn't able to comment here last time I tried)

Worked security at a hospital, and was responsible for signing corpses over to the funeral homes. One week, there was a car wreck in a nearby small town- a pickup truck flipped and rolled with five or six teenagers in the back. I spent the whole night rolling them out of the freezer and passing them off to various funeral homes.

Not mine, but a friend of my dad's would talk about the time he was an "asshole bagger". He worked in a slaughterhouse, and his job was to cut a circle around the anus and pull up all the bits that might have poop in them and bag them up. He lasted a day.

Not super grim, but I worked in a hot warehouse unpacking cheap clothing from China, repacking it and watching the owners turn around and sell it on Groupon for a huge profit. Sometimes their family members would stop by in brand new Mercedes, BMW and other high-end luxury cars.

The others and myself were all promised better jobs like product photographer, website designer, etc. I only lasted there one week.

I worked as a clerk in a Chapter 13 bankruptcy firm as a summer gig during college. The vast majority of my job was reviewing and cataloguing all of the debts that had been accumulated by the debtors of a case. While some of it was the stereotypical "too many credits cards, too many mortgages," the vast, vast majority was people collapsing under the weight of medical debt. Just day after day of going through and seeing how much survival had cost someone.

The worst was when the person died, and the debtor was the significant other who had been supporting their partner in a battle that they lost. Those people hurt my heart the most.

I didn't manage to last the whole summer.

I cleaned out houses before a sale.
Most of the times I was called, the previous owner had died with no next-of-kin who gave enough of a fuck to do it themselves.

So every day, I'd be going through all personal belongings of someone who had died recently, and divided it into 2 categories: worth selling, and trash.
95% of the treasured items the deceased left behind went into the second pile.

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.

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.

Worked as a paramedic around the world for two and a half decades now. Saw a lot of shit.

But the worst one was when I was teamleader of a neonatal critical care transport service. That was....not something I could do for long. There is an amount of dead babies people can see in their lifetime. I ignored my limit and now have to face the consequences.

Way back in the day, developing photo film in the shop's backstore lab.
The coroner pictures were always... something.
At least the hawking boss would GTFO though, silver linings.
Then again that's not as bad as being actually there and scooping various stuff.

What is a denor? A quick google didn’t bring anything up

I had a gig as a tattoo artist at a comic con. Tattoos are not my thing and didn't seek it as a true job, but I know other people still consider it a pastime, realized I wasn't bad at it, and was able to meet up with people who said they'd put me in the position, plus I had to get some service done. At least fifty people from the area have gone public with how nice things played out with this unbecoming Maylu-Sakurai-cosplaying woman (probably the only time I'll do that cosplay) fulfilling their requests.

I 3D scanned a stillborn baby once. Mother was grieving, she wanted baby pictures but like, as much as possible. So I took a photogrammetry machine to a 5 pound corpse.

That was a long 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 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.

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.