Foo - Dirty Jobs

I think Dirty Jobs (Discovery Channel) has replaced Myth Busters as my favorite show. Have any of you guys ever had a dirty job?

I'm not quite that manly. The dirtiest job I had was working at Arby's, which wasn't really bad. I just smelled funny when I got home.

In 1974 I worked one day as a dishwasher at Pancho's in Bossier City Louisiana. I was in the middle of a cross country trip and ran out of money.

For a very short time, I worked in a forge, as in the modern version of a black smith's shop. I have no doubt as to how they came to be called "black" smiths. I would come home covered in black filth.

The shower water would run off me black, and in the next morning it would be black again from all my pores cleaning themselves over night. I quit after less than two weeks.

I've seen that show. The autopsy technician looks disgusting, they show a brief clip of him scraping bloody stuff off a metal slab in the opening scene for the show.

I used to do asbestos abatement. I used to consider it personal information because there aren't very many licensed abatement workers, but I'm out of it and I won't be going back, so what the hell.

With abatement you never know quite what you'll be doing. Sometimes you will just be chipping up floortiles, sometimes you might end up in a 3'x3' tunnel with rats and bugs in it 500 yards from the exit scooting along on a board with wheels wearing a flashlight around your head. Other days you might be working outside, that is plastic wrap all around you like a greenhouse, wearing a full body tyvec suit, with a temp of about 120 degrees and 100% humidity because you spray everything with water to keep dust clowds down. Keep in mind that at no point during your 4 hour shift do you have access to water to drink. Can't take the respirator off.

http://www.bayview-environmental.com/photos/crew.jpg
http://www.orrsafety.com/documents/images/asbestos.jpg
http://www.necontracting.com/asbestos%20abatement.jpg

I think Dirty Jobs (Discovery Channel) has replaced Myth Busters as my favorite show.

nah, MythBusters is still better. I've never had a dirty job. Dishwashing was my worst, but it's not that bad.

Yep watch the show. Did you see the one where he worked at the trash dump. He had to get into that machines and sort stuff. YICKY.

I haven't really worked a dirty job. You know your normal fast food places at highschool, but then again it wasn't all that bad. :)

I guess my dirtiest work experience was having to empty out and then clean the bottom of the ball pit, at Chuck-E-Cheese. It hadn't been cleaned out for about nine months and you'd be amazed at the "stuff" kids left in there. This is why I never let my kids go into the ball pit.

It was 1983 and the last time I worked in the restaurant industry.

Both shows are great...My worst job was working for a cattle/hog slaughter house in Rochelle IL. Lasted three weeks. I was sixteen at the time and was the guy that gutted the freshly euthanized animal. Nasty job. But of course if you have ever cleaned manure out a pig sty or cattle yard, baled hayed in the summer or scraped the moldy compress silage out of the bottom of a silo then you must have been a farmer. Farming is FULL of dirty jobs.

I guess my dirtiest work experience was having to empty out and then clean the bottom of the ball pit, at Chuck-E-Cheese. It hadn't been cleaned out for about nine months and you'd be amazed at the "stuff" kids left in there. This is why I never let my kids go into the ball pit.

It was 1983 and the last time I worked in the restaurant industry.

I think we need more details...what kind of cool stuff did you find?! :)

I worked for almost a year at IBP, Inc. flagship hog slaughterhouse in Waterloo, IA (IBP is now owned by Tyson). They killed almost 20,000 per day. Anyway, I started out on the line, but because of my college experience (2 years of manufacturing engineering experience), I was quickly promoted to management at the quality control level where it was my job to not only ensure customer satisfaction, but to identify and quarantine sanitary problems--before the USDA inspectors could get it. Believe it or not, the dirtiest/most unpleasant part of the job was fighting with line supervisors over things I shut down or areas quarantined because of sanitation. I once had a ton of trimings condemned because it was a day old, above 40 degrees farenheit and smelled bad. I took flak for that but my boss would always back us up. As company inspectors, we were pickier and more stringent than the government inspectors.

Powdercoating...I was the guy that had to fill/clean the barrels. I would come home coated in powder....one day I was completely covered in gold powder.

Aluminum foundry. I was a QC inspector, but one week I got "pit duty". The "pit" was a return line for bad castings. This line ran into the furnace. Problem was the furnace also drained slag out into this line.....slag is the nastiest crap ever....it smelled like rancid anus, and looked even worse. Keep in mind even with the furnace off, it was around 140-150degrees inside of that tunnel....we had to wear small oxygen tanks, and if we didn't come up in 30 minutes, a crew came in after us. What we were doing was clearing the slag and any stuck castings.

I think we need more details...what kind of cool stuff did you find?! :)

I was trying to not be too graphic, but what I meant was that the kids pretty well use the ball pit as a toilet.:eek:

It was nasty (puking emoticon)

When I was in grade school my brother and I were "hired" to be rats in a grain bin. This old farmer paid us like $1 per hour. He had us climb up the ladder on the outside of the bin and then drop through a hole to the inside and onto the top of the pile of grain. The grain was nearly touching the top.

The grain was being augered out the bottom and our job was to crawl into the tiny space between the roof of the bin and the pile and push the sides into the center to be fed out by the auger. It was pitch dark in there and the grain dust was unbareable. Besides there had to be tons of toxins since the grain was treated with insecticides.

We did that for two solid days with no masks or anything. I remember after the first day, I complained to my parents how bad my lungs hurt. I don't think anybody really cared because they made us do it again the next day. I'll never forget how badly my chest ached, it has never felt like that in my life, before or since and I am 37 yrs old.

Back then, they used kids to do all sorts of dirty jobs and nobody gave a crap. As a side note, my uncle died in a grain bin just like i described. They speculated that the fumes may have contributed to his death.

http://www.utextension.utk.edu/fieldCrops/stored_grain/storedgrain_images/Overfilled%20Bin.jpg
http://www.nsc.org/necas/graphics/grain_bin.jpg

My dirty job list

Janitor at a large church in Cleveland Hgts OH
Dishwasher
Salmon buthcher on floating processor in Alaska (had to clean the bilge once, dirtiest chore ever!)
landscaper
And now I work in a warehouse. it can be very dirty at times

By the end of the day, you are absolutely COVERED in thick grease/rust/dirt/mud, etc

Same thing goes for abatement work. You end up filthy at the end of the day. The good thing is that you have to shower off before you leave containment. You go home wearing clean cloths and smelling nice. The downside is that the water heaters rarely work, so usually the water is about 50 degrees.

http://www.abatement.com/images/asbestos/teleshower.jpg

I love that show, never got into Mythbusters though. I'm a contractor. Gutting some old houses can get pretty dirty, so can roofing , especially stripping off and old roof in August.

Taking daily baths with Go-Jo can really ruin your skin. I remember one time when I was in the chain locker (where the anchor chain is stored on the boat) greasing the chain...I got SO full of marine-grade blue lithium grease that I had to take a shower with Castrol Super-Clean to get it all off. I actually had to duct-tape the jewels to keep them from getting burned by the Super-Clean.

Wouldn't it burn to remove said duct tape? I'm hurting just thinking about it.

The second dirtiest job I had was working as a CNA when I was in nursing school. Changing diapers on incontinent Alzheimer's patients was not pleasant.


+1. Dirtiest job for me. Nursing home, NA. Worst, most underappreciated, underpaid job EVER.

My dirty job was at a junkyard. Ripping apart cars. Damn that job was dirty. Slipping around in mud, covered in gasoline, oil, grease, blood, sweat, glass, and metal shards.

I worked for Carson and Barnes Circus once many many many years ago. My job was to follow an elephant around with a shovel! Actually, I was one of the elephant wranglers, responsible to feed, bathe and shovel after. We had one older cow elephant that could sneak up behind you. Elephants can move totally silently, by the way because of the spongey structure of their feet. This cow elephant also had a sense of humor....she'd either stick her trunk in your crotch to make you jump from behind or she'd douse you with water out of her trunk.....or both!

Well - a regular part of my job is boiler maintainance. About every 2 months I get the privlege of opening the boilers up and punching the soot and coke out of the tubes with a machine that resembles a plumber's snake. Then when you get that part done, you squeeze through the door of the boiler and shovel all the ashes out. That's usually anywhere between 8 - 10 wheelbarrow loads. After that, you inspect the firebrick inside the boiler. If any are broken, you replace them. Two times a year, I take all the brick out of the floor, take a little lock pick and dig the soot out of the grates under the brick. Needless to say, it is DIRTY !!! And it's hot as well, because even in the summer, I wear coveralls so I don't get my car all cruddy on the inside. I also grind scrap wood into sawdust (to fuel the boiler). And, my boss has 500 head of beef cattle as a sideline business. So once in a great while I get to wade in cow crap. He mostly keeps me away from the farming, though. LIFE IS GOOD !!!

Body Recovery?
Working as an Aircraft Firefighter, picking up burned corpses. The smell sticks with you.
Also working as an EMT in a rural environment along a freeway, what a mix of calls and nasty stuff.
Steven

I work in a warehouse built in 1952.

Some of the ledges havent been cleaned since it was built.