Mexstan

I have just made an off topic post elsewhere and that got me thinking. ( Yeah, I know dangerous ground) Over the course of many years I have done some work that I really did not enjoy. Bet that many of you have had the same experience and some of us probably would enjoy reading about them. I have too many to post at the moment but will start this off with two stories that come to mind.

1) The story that got me started on this happened the first week I started a new job in Swaziland. Our Cat D4 lost a track in a flooded rice field. My job was to put that track back. Try jacking a D4 in soft mud a few feet deep. It is impossible to stay clean. Tools get covered with mud and get super slippery. Dropped tools get lost. Jacks keep on sinking even with a large base. When we did finally get it jacked up the jacks still sank slowly so we had to work fast. In short, that was NOT a fun job.

2) Many years ago I took a scuba diving course. Shortly after that the local professional diver asked me to work with him part time. One of the first jobs I did with him was to check the fresh water pumps for a nearby pulp and paper mill. There were six pumps located on a big river nine miles upstream from the mill. I don't remember the capacity of each pump, but the water line from that pump station to the mill was about 3.5 feet in diameter. My job was to swim into the pump house intake and stick my head right IN TO the intake of each pump and check the impellers for damage. Remember, the controls for these pumps were nine miles away! Even tho the switches in the control station had huge labels on them, and I had personally pulled the fuses in the pump house, I was very nervous. Actually, I was nervous just to pull the fuses because if memory serves me correctly, they were 550 or 600 volt motors. Sure was glad to surface after that job.

IA_James

Was a maintenance mechanic at a hog plant. Had to rebuild the restrainer used to get the hogs to hold still while they hit them with the stunner, had the stuff the comes out of the south half of a north bound hog dripping all over me, down my neck and so on.

Hoss

Gee....and I thought I had it bad when I worked at a grocery story for a little while during high school.

kandgo

Crawling under a loaded semi cattle trailer to jack it up to change out a tire and the south stuff of a north cow dripping down all over!! Goodluck,,,Rick

Mostwanted

Dude! That has got to be the worst.

apache

Well, being I work in the sewage treatment field, We often would have to enter wet wells, one in particular was 30' deep and had a 8" gravity line into it about 15' up from the bottom. The addition of Ferric chloride would eat the stainless steel cables attached to the pumps on the bottom so in order to pull the pumps we would have top do a confined space entry at night during low flows. Needless to say goin down 30' feet into a operating sewage well with a FULL 8" line pouring on you while you replace cables was unpleasant at best. Yes we wore special suits and air packs, but still you came out soaked with dookie like they say, one mans poop, is another mans soup

Forrest Nearing

worked for a guy at a 4x4 shop who also did roll cages and exhaust for hot rods...

he had this really bad habit of bidding jobs without LOOKING at what he was bidding!

so this guy w/ a '69 Mustang comes in and wants a set of long tube headers installed and an exhaust system built... no problem, right?

this thing had a 390 in it which shares the same external dimensions as a 428... FE motors are friggin' TANKS... this thing was HUGE and early mustangs have HUGE shock towers... everything that could go wrong on this thing did go wrong...

broken header bolts that were broken off in the head and milled flat by whoever "rebuilt" the engine

sagging motor mounts that when it was all said and done allowed the top header bolts to REST ON THE SHOCK TOWERS...

steering linkage that had to come out to feed the driver's side header up that lost TWO balljoints upon disassembly...

etc. etc. etc.

I was either working on that car or on a parts run to get stuff for that car for THREE DAYS! I think he bid the guy $400...

after a few more of those, I walked out...

Forrest

Scotty

I worked on a chicken farm for two days. Every summer when I was in school.
We would 'take care of the chickens for market'. 200 per day.

The worst part was dipping the birds one at a time in hot water and then holding them against a brush that spun to take the feathers off.
The smell of wet feathers still makes my gut churn.

The birds were dead...when I did the plukken.

I also shovelled and mixed concrete by hand pouring basement floors for houses...for a big 3 dollars per hour...from sun up to sun down.

Chucken bales was the best job.

BigBlue

I don't know if my job is my worst, but it's definately my hardest. Cleaning carpets. Pay is great (bout $20/hr). Work is hard and long (minimum 12 hours a day). Best part of it is that every night, the boss has a 12 pack of ice cold beer waiting for us.

Crimedog

C'mon Scotty, it ain't that un Co O o L
I got to do that almost every day for about 2 weeks, only we plucked them by hand on our little hobby-farm-type-thing.

So far worst job was working at Burgetr King, just me and the manager at nights and 1/2 the time she was drunk! You could see the bottle of vodka in her office It was funny at first, but got annoying really quick. Lasted about a month. Now I just bounce around on a lawn mower all day and carry a trimmer around (I'm actually a millionaire but my Doc told me to get outside and get some excersize )

Haulin_in_Dixie

Thats easy, three engines and a head removal in four months in the winter, outside and raining most of the time.

CaughtinmyGrill

Not as bad as some of yours but I worked my way through school by framing in the Arizona summers. Get to the job by 4:00 a.m. so that you could finish by 1:00 in the afternoon, if you weren't behind. We once left a meat thermometer out on a roof we were sheathing, It hit 160* in a 1/2 hour. We averaged 10 gallons of water consumed per person per day.

You quickly learned to bring a hand towel to throw over your saw which also got to be 160* if you left it in the sun.

herb

i left home at the ripe age of thirteen and hitchhiked to California. Got a job mopping tar on a flat roof in the bright Ca sun.
being thirteen and knowing it all ,even after several of the "oldtimers" on the crew advised me against it, i took off my shirt to get a tan.
come lunch time i went accross the street to a gas station to use the rest room and looked at my back in the mirror. i had blisters on my back the size of eggs in a frying pan !
never even went back for my mornings pay check

crobtex

Unloading box cars in East LA in the summer time. Hot , humid, smoggy and didn't pay much. That's just one of the worst..............I've had a few doozies.

RustyJC

First college summer job - sandblasting drill pipe for Tuboscope in Midland, TX. I'd come off my shift as black as the ace of spades. At least I was working midnight to 8:00 AM 7 nights a week, so the temperatures were below 100 degF.

Second college summer job - welder's helper on a pipeline construction crew laying a 20" line from Coyanosa to Odessa, TX - right through the sandhills with daytime temperatures of 110+ degF. 5 gallons of drinking water a day, minimum.

Third and fourth college summer jobs - pipeliner for Exxon. Digging bellholes to repair leaks in crude oil pipelines in the rocks around Iraan, TX in 100+ degF temperatures. Jump into a bellhole full of crude oil up to my neck to install a rubber plug, steel scab and u-bolts.

As bad as these jobs were, the hog plant and sewer plant jobs have them beat by a mile!

Rusty