Ask Lemmy

I did a job developing a multimedia CD that trained doctors. Well, it was more of a marketing tool. For oncology... of the face and genitals. It was easily the most harrowing experience of my career. So many genitalia and tongues with hideous growths and what have you. The people who agreed to be photographed were both brave and very, very unwell.

I was on the tech team, sonI got off quite lightly. The two graphics people spent day after day aligning and processing these photos so that everything was clearly visible. I don't know how they slept at night.

I left after a year. I don't think anyone managed longer than that.

The company I work for makes a product which goes into weapons like missiles, planes, jets, helicopters which are used by Israel and realizing that it was probably going to go towards helping kill innocent civilians. I mean technically we are sub sub sub contractors, but they are used explicitly for this project and purpose

My only consolation is that I stopped working on those ones personally after a week of "Make it work but dont change ANYTHING", they constantly fail testing and are sent back for RMA, and the guy they hired to fix them is so criminally incompetent that the company has had to completely revise their hiring proces

Unfortunately with exactly 0 responses to my applications in the last year, I probably won't be jumping ship to somewhere that pays well and doesnt have me as part of the MIC

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.

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.

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 mean, I worked for an advertising company (they didn't advertise they were an advertising company until I had already started the job) until they laid me off and at times had tried to figure out ways how to bypass ad blockers for like making social icons not get blocked, and learned a little bit about how ad blockers worked.

Maybe this isn't quite what you had intended but advertising is really aggressive and gross imo.

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 worked at a company that transcribed handwritten medical forms to digital text when the automated OCR failed. I got assigned to a population of Tricare forms for a while. Tricare is the health care program for active duty US military members. We never saw the actual physical forms, nor the forms in their entirety, just snapshots of one question at a time to protect the patient's privacy. The fields where they described their mental health symptoms and how relationships with family and friends were going would sometimes make me want to vomit and cry and quit all at once. I got moved to a different assignment and when they wanted to move me back, I left that job.

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 did telephone survey research in the 90s for a university which was about urban police presence and basically I had to call mostly poor people of color and write down all the horror stories they had about police beating the shit out of them, and do this as a job every day for weeks.

And I was really good at it (and more shitty telemarketing jobs) because I have a "good radio voice," so people are willing to talk to me. When the survey was over, they asked me to stay on and do more, but I was so burnt out and depressed. I honestly can't tell you any stories from it because I have done a really good job of forgetting all of them by now.

The only upside is that I went from an already decent 60 wpm to a 90+ wpm typing rate with greatly increased accuracy over the course of the work. And with mostly two fingers, baby!

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.

I'm a crisis intervention specialist, which means I'm a counselor who specifically works with suicidal individuals and those undergoing similar crises.

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 worked for an industrial auction company where I had to cold call plants that were being closed down or going bankrupt. These guys received dozens of calls a day from people like us while they were dealing with losing their jobs. Trying to buy all the equipment and profit on their ill fortune.

The goal was to be the first to call them before any of the other places. So once I had to break the news to the plant manager they were getting shut down. Sometimes the information was bad and nothing was happening to their plant but they still got tons of calls from vultures looking to pick their bones. It was a shameful job and all for just $32k a year. The owner had 2 rolls Royce phantoms and a private jet.

Caring for the donated cadavers used by a biology department for their pre-med anatomy classes. These were people once, almost always of a John/Jane Doe situation. Very gross and off-putting job, even if you could manage to not wonder about the lives of these former people.

When I was younger I was offered a gig to help disassemble an abandoned cottage by hand. Turns out it had burned from the inside when a fire had spread from the fireplace - somebody had went inside to try and keep warm in the winter and ended up burning themselves and the cottage. What adds some spice to the story is the fact that in the past the cottage was a "troll's hut" funfair kinda thing where kids, myself included, went to meet the "forest troll" and do some drawing etc.

Had nightmares about it for quite a while.

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.

Food service at a retirement home.

Cleaning a fryer wayyyy after it should have been cleaned. Needed a coat hanger to fish out the blockages in the valve. The grease trap had no joke 6 inches of congeled grease over the top of it. Had to get a serving spoon and scoop out a place to dump the grease.

Did that way too many times.

Not the worst it could have been in the slightest but never miss it.

Not me, but one of my best friends founded a company to clean up murder scenes, houses in which someone has died and their corpse rotted away for weeks, accident scenes... that sort of thing. His stomach seems perfectly unaffected by gruesomeness of all kinds, so he figured he'd market that particular ability of his.

His lowest rate is $300 / hr for "simple" cleanups and he's doing very, very well.

It wasn't the employment itself that was grim, but a specific job on it that was creepy as fuck. When I was installing for a WISP we had a job at a mortuary. Place was old as shit and we (I say we but I was the only fucker down there) had to go under the building in just this dirt crawlspace to run cable. I swear I thought I'd end up crawling over skeletons, it looked like something out of a horror movie down there.