Most of us start being asked about our dream jobs from a very young age. Kids are encouraged to become doctors, professional athletes, artists and even the president! But have you ever taken time to consider what your nightmare job would be?
Redditors have recently been discussing difficult professions that the vast majority of people would not want to have. From working at a wastewater treatment facility to cleaning up gruesome crime scenes, we’ve gathered some of the most mentally and physically taxing jobs down below. Be sure to upvote the ones that make you appreciate your own career, and remember to thank the people who do these jobs so that the rest of us don’t have to!
This post may include affiliate links.
I do hospital removals of the deceased, home removals, transport for the medical examiners office, organ donation, to and from the airport , transports of all kinds, even supply anatomical donated cadavers to numerous universities and many are long distance out of state and I have to physically move these individuals myself in most cases so I see lots of stuff that most people cannot handle. I admit that it does have an effect on my psyche though cuz you can’t unsee the horrible things that we encounter and there’s a very high turnover in staff but somebody has to do it. It’s one of those things that people don’t want to acknowledge even though it’s our reality. We will all one day be laying on that cold steel cooling table awaiting transport to our final destinatin and I can only hope that someone like myself that will give me the dignity that I deserve when that time comes just like I do for those who go before me.
I walked into the mortuary in Fulham once to find a dead d00d on the table. That is actually illegal, the room should have been locked. Fortunately I spent my time in medical school dissecting cadavers to learn anatomy so it didn't bother me. Might have been different for somebody else though.
The special agents that review horrific footage of child abuse, CP and other nasty stuff so they can testify in court to put the criminal away.
A family friend works for the military as someone who identifies bodies. As in if a group of soldiers gets blown up or something, all the salvageable body parts get boxed up and sent to her and she matches the hands to arms to torsos etc to make sure each individual can be properly sent home for burial or cremation.
Work in a hospital. I saw the same lady with the same rolling luggage a number of times over the years and thought it was kind of weird. Turns out she was the one who took the newborns who didn't survive to funeral homes/morgues. Now anytime I see rolling luggage at work I wonder if there is a fetus in there.
SANE nurses (Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner) see some of the most awful things imaginable in the ED. I'd think it's even difficult for the volunteer victim advocates who are there with the patients through the whole process. It requires special training and a fortitude I don't possess.
Those guys in India that clean sewer clogs by diving into the sewers with zero protective gear and wearing nothing but shorts.
I have seen the documentary and it is insane.. That is an inhumane job, but they have no other option because caste system in India is so engrained.
It’s not really messed up or not entirely known of but it’s a job people have the wrong impression of and therefore don’t want: Wastewater treatment plant operator. People think I dive around in and work with sewage all day. No, the purpose of these plants is to take in sewage through pumps and disinfect and sterilize it so it can be released into natural water sources where it is then taken up again by a water intake plant that provides your clean tap water. Cleanliness is actually the primary focus at a site like this.
Fact of the matter is I spend most of my 8 hour shift looking at a monitor to make sure all of our pumps are running, the plant is almost entirely autonomic. My laptop with Netflix and even video games when I feel like it is right next to me. Once maybe twice a week I have to go brush what is 99% algae and dirt from channels with running water. In the last hour and a half of my shift I sweep the offices, take out trash, and use high pressure hoses to spray down our equipment around the plant. And not because it’s necessary, but because our boss wants us to look busy in case the mayor unexpectedly drops by.
Easiest job I’ve ever had, and the topper is I’m a city employee. I have the best benefits imaginable, my city matches my retirement, more time off than I know what to do with, and 2 out of 5 nights I’m at work by myself, 3 out of 5 I’m with one other guy who I get along with so no dealing with constant supervision. I wear company owned and laundered pants and shirts, I get a free pair of work boots once a year, I get raises every 6 months to a year. Never saw myself doing a job like this, but with how things are going it’s a job I wouldn’t give up.
There are companies that specialize in cleaning up horrific crime scenes.
Legally, that is. They're hired after law enforcement has investigated.
In Japan, there is so much loneliness amongst the population that there are companies that let you hire a fake family or a fake spouse for a day. Even rent a girlfriend/boyfriend.
I have seen documentaries on this. Renting a mom or grandma seemed to be most popular.
My brother is a last responder, he brings bodies to the medical examiner/funeral homes. Some of the stories he tells make me wonder how that poor kid sleeps at night.
Bluevettes:
I know two people who work at funeral homes and part of their job is to retrieve the bodies. They both have PTSD and some pretty messed up stories.
When my grandma passed and we were discussing all the necessary procedures with the funeral home workers a conversation came up from which I learnt that those in charge of embalming the bodies intentionally get drunk before they start on a body just to help them mentally. I thought that was disrespectful but I can’t blame them.
I work in a chemical preservation plant in an industrial estate. Right next door is a state run industrial laundry that services several regional hospitals, 2-3 semi loads of laundry in and 2-3 semi loads out every day. They employ two women to go thru all the laundry as it comes in to check for removed limbs, fecal matter, jewelry etc. Not too many day's they don't find something.
They have to check the laundry because it could clog/damage the machines.
My uncle did this job for a couple years. He had a good collection of surgical instruments that he found.
I’ve got a friend that processes transports both full cadavers and body parts for medical labs. Like when someone donates their body to science. Not really messed up, someone has to do it but I’ll never forget the day he told my dad he couldn’t stay at our house too long because he had 4 feet in the car. And my dad’s response was, “4 feet of what?”.
I've transported bags of teeth, afterbirth and even a bucket of brains (well, dura mater). Great fun.
My sister had a friend who works in the government. His job is to try and infiltrate fertilizer plants and get to the main control computer. If he makes it all the way to it and it's able to do something that will explode the plant or at least start something that might make it explode he will stop everything just shy of doing it. Then he informs the plant supervisors and Security that they just f****d up really bad. He has succeeded in dozens of plants. Just goes to show how easily an attack could be.
Physical penetration tester. Lots of podcasts available on this one, it is quite an intriguing and sometimes dangerous job.
Corrections. A lot of what we do is either hidden from the public or swept under the rug. Day after day I lock human beings in small cells so that I can accurately count them. They share cells with people and have to s**t in front of them. I watch d**g addicts get told by society that if they just stop doing d***s then they'll stop coming to jail, but the jail is the only structure in their life. I go hands on with crazy people only because I need to protect myself and my partner when they get violent even though they don't know any better. I have to feed food that is labeled "not for human consumption" to people. Yes, people know about our job. No, they don't know that we have some of the highest rates of PTSD, s*icide, substance/alcohol abuse, and divorce.
Sorry if this is a dumb question, but does this mean people in prison are fed food with labels that say, “Not for human consumption?”
Training cadaver dogs, you have to keep human body parts in a freezer with you and defrost them to do tracking sessions and then refreeze until it’s too deteriorated to use so you turn it in and get a new body part. Could be a nose could be a torso.
In my mother's tribe they cremate their bodies. We usually have a ceremony were we dance and sing all night until the sun rises. After wards we take the body to the cemetery that's in our reservation and we cremate them there. There's a specific person who has to prepare the grave and braches/trees for cremation. He's usually the one who sets fire to the body when cremation starts. Afterwards we watch the body burn. Usually by then people are leaving but he has to wait until the body is fully cremated. He says he can see the head fall off the body and that's when he knows the body is almost done burning. When the fire stops and there's only ash and bone. He buries the remains afterwards. Having a job like that, it's understandable why he suffers with alcohol addiction.
At some beef slaughter houses there is a guy that shoots cows in the head with a pneumatic gun all day as they come to him on a big a*s conveyor. I worked at one and the guy that did it there was killing over 2 thousand cows a day, 5 days a week. 5 days of vacation a year.
Collecting samples for breeders. As in livestock basically help the horses and bulls to later use for in vitro.
My dad works at a waste water treatment plant. Last week he got covered in raw sewage up to his neck.
My father worked in the sewage department. One of his workmates was inspecting a sewer, slipped and was submerged. When he resurfaced, his methane alarm was going off so he grabbed his air mask and took a big deep breath - except it had filled up while he was under. He was off work for about a year, sick.
There's a whole job that's solely decapitating heads of bodies donated to science so plastic surgeons or surgeons can practice on a real person.
Uh, that picture shows the beginning of augmentation surgery of a certain body part.
People who remove asbestos for a living. You work long hours in hot, cramped environments surrounded by airborne microscopic glass. This area of the asbestos abatement industry is dominated by immigrants because no one else wants to do it. They deserved to be paid more.
Pay them more! PAY THEM MORE. Not sure who I am shouting to.
The janitor who has to clean the video booths in the sex shops in Times Square.
I used to work in such a place and we had to clean them out several times a day. No matter how many things we put in there to encourage cleanliness there would be all kinds of bodily fluids all over the floors, walls, windows etc. Then one day one of my fellow employees wanted to borrow the mop we used to clean her house.
Mortuary affairs unit of the US military.
They go through the personal effects of the deceased to scrub everything illicit before it gets sent back to the family. According to my Army buddy who was in that unit... That typically means removing all history of affairs prior to the spouse seeing anything. Or removing active combat imagery or combat trophies.
Basically they clean everything up to make sure there's no hurt reputations.
Jesus christ COMBAT TROPHIES??? i assume they don't mean medals for service.
I don't know if this qualifies as "messed up" but I worked on cell phone towers for 6 years. Most people are scared of heights and it's very physically demanding. Most people are too scared to do it and don't think about it. However without these hard working people none of our phones would work.
Do you have the 5g now? Or does that only come from COVID vaccines?
Recycling plant. There are sorting machines that work on weight etc but they still need people to stand at the conveyors. Dirty nappies, for example, weigh a very similar amount to glass bottles. As do fish heads. And dildos.
The smell is the same as a rubbish tip and you get *covered* in a fine dust of it. It’s deafeningly loud in there with all the machinery. You get motion sickness from staring at the conveyor belts and then looking at something stationary.
People throw some incredibly f****d up s**t in the recycling. Our bin trucks have cameras to hopefully help catch people doing the wrong thing and after a few shifts there I wished they would implement a punishment - first offence: tour the plant, see how it works; second offence: work a shift.
Pay was good though.
I had a co-worker who was anosmic - no sense of smell at all. He was fun to work with - you could fart right in front of him and he'd heckle you: "Come on, is that all you got?! Put your back into it!"
There are companies that come put caskets back in the ground after hurricanes.
Down on the coast they bury caskets in concrete lined vaults. So when hurricanes/floods come through the coffins don't float away 🙂
I’m a greensperson in the film industry. I’m responsible for building and maintaining the plants and trees on a set.
People at the pound who put down unwanted and unclaimed animals all day, every day. I would k*ll myself.
This is not a thing. I worked in a municipal animal shelter for a medium-sized city, which did at that time euthanize animals, but doing so was not anyone's entire job. When it needed to be done, it was done by either the vet tech (whose main job was giving checkups and medical care to our animals), the manager (who mainly did office work and supervision of the front-desk personnel) or the kennel manager (who did hands-on animal care and supervised the other animal-care personnel). Different shelters do it differently, but people work there because they care about animals; even if there *was* enough euthanasia happening that it could keep someone busy all day, every day--and there is not--it wouldn't make sense to do it that way.
I used to work for an audiologist. I did all the jobs he didn't want to do.
I trimmed the hair from men's ears so that hearing aids would fit snugly again.
I took apart hearing aids and cleaned wax, dead skin and bugs out of them.
I cleaned and sanitized the ears before he started an exam.
Cleaning out foreclosed homes for banks. People were very enthusiastic until they had to clean up rooms of dead animals or had squatters traps nearly give them whatever they stuck on the end of a needle/knife. Toilets literally overfilled like an ice cream cone never helped anyone stay over two weeks. I left after several years.
I worked in the office of a place that did this. My husband worked in the field. They found some really cool stuff sometimes
Those that worked for that company that recently got found out that their AI product was just a bunch of cheap labour bought in India I believe. Their job was being an AI.
This is a real thing. Mechanical Turks. You can even sign up through Amazon to be a mechanical turk, where you basically do jobs that the computer can't actually do. https://www.mturk.com/worker
My brother-in-law is a commercial diver. Urchins, sea cucumber, gooey ducks that kind of thing.
Occasionally the City where he lives hires him to dive in the s**t pits at the sept plants. It's dry suits, full face masks and you can't see much more than a foot in front of you. Huge money and throws the suit away after it's done.
He says there is a lot of corn down there.
I work with developmentally disabled adults and one of my old companies had two sides of the program: SL (supported living) and CP (community protection). The community protection clients are typically developmentally disabled p*dophiles who have offended but have been deemed mentally unfit for prison. So through our program they get to live in a house and go out and participate in the community. There are strict rigid rules of course, enforced by staff making barely above minimum wage lol.
I drove the short bus for developmentally delayed adults, while I was in college. I actually made decent money at the time $20/hr back in 2005. I quit after a man I was driving s**t in my personal car I was using that day since it was just one person. Then found out he had scabies and only because he had s**t in my car had I not driven my then toddler daughter around who has/had serious skin issues. It was that my daughter could have gotten really sick and nobody informed me he had an infectious disease, that I quit.
I did a project years ago for a guy. The project we built was this weird little building with a giant oven in it. He cremated all the animals that got put to sleep at local shelters and vets.
As long as people are addicted to special breeds and will pay any amount of money to get hold on one, even if mass bred in illegal circumstances, combined with the fact that too many people do not educate themselves about costs, caring for and lifespan of the animal they desire to have, shelters will stay packed. Check your life plans during the time that animal will live. Calculate financial risks. Don't get an animal if you are not 95% sure you can keep it till death. Make a plan if your animal lives longer than you. Get a used animal from a shelter, even horses from kill pens turn regularly out as being perfect partners. If it must be new, buy from breeders who let the animal be born and raised in an loving environment, serving its mental and physical needs and who vet you, if you are responsible enough to take good care. I have an 18 year old lawn ornament taking care of the pasture and a companion to a 28 year old, from a horse rescue. Can recommend, will do again.
I saw a job listing ones to cremate dogs. It said, “Must be able to lift dogs weighing 100 pounds. Must be able to withstand temperature of 100 degrees. Must be able to handle the emotional responsibility of being around dead dogs. $12/hour.”.
Not unknown, but a lot of people don't know what it's like to be a mental health tech. I got stories from the absurd to heart wrenching, everything in between and more.
The one I use to gross people out is about the guy who had to be on 1:1 observation to keep him from eating his own s**t. He would literally run from his staff at inopportune times to do it and thought it was funny if they got in trouble for it. I remember when he first came in I watched as he told the staff about his favorite s**t recipes and how he *fed them to his kids*.
TW (Death, s*icide): I recently read an article on the life of a Locopilot (train driver). The horrors they've had to witness leaves many of them in long term mental health issues. People take their own lives every day on train tracks, throwing themselves in front of approaching trains. Mangled bodies, the smell of death. And people also die by accident on the track. The last person to see them and also drive the machine which takes their life, ripping them apart is the Locopilot. Some Locopilots witness hundreds of such cases during their career.
There's a town near me that has several leather tanneries. It literally smells like s**t. The whole town is permanently permeated by the stench. You can smell it in the streets and inside buildings. I ride the train through it on occasions and you can smell it very strongly from inside the train with all the windows shut. As soon as the train enters the town it smells like someone is taking the rankest s**t ever shat right in the middle of the train car. I shudder to imagine what actually working in the tanning facilities is like.
They still use s**t to tan leather? I thought we were into chemicals now.
I read about a job a while ago - I think it had something to do with approving or denying inappropriate claims on social media sites. The things normal people would have to see and look at were utterly disgusting and heartbreaking and they weren't given any preparation for it.
Potty jockey ,the guys that pick up clean and deliver portable outhouses.
Any animal slaughter plant has a person or a position where people rotate through in a day that are the kill person. This means slitting the animals throat, putting a bolt in the head etc. there are some plants that have machines that do it now but someone still needs to sit and watch and make sure none get missed.
For all that, it’s still just over minimum wage.
Disagree all you want but I have more respect for people who actually kill the animals that they eat than people who are so detached from reality and don't give a c**p where their food comes from.
I knew a girl who finished her degree in animal sciences and had two job offers:
1. was working with primates at a wildlife refuge
the other was working for the state euthanizing animals.
The second job was a dollar more an hour. She took that one.
Coroner. Every county in the US of A has at least one. And some cities have one or two. Or a few dozen.
My dad was a master flavorist. He made artificial flavors for candy, beverages and lots of other things. He made a LOT of money during his career.
...and on the other side of the street was his wife, the dentist, also making a fortune, after the manner of the bear couple in Ernest & Celestine.
My husband does pest control. It is extremely grueling work. Most people do not last. They run him ragged during the on season. I feel like most people don't realize how hard it is.
I understand. My husband has been in pest control for over 20 years, and now owns his own pest company (I run the office). The stories he’s told me over the years about infestations he’s treated and the conditions in some of the houses he’s done treatments in would make the average person vomit. Not to mention the chemicals and potentially dangerous pests he deals with. He has been bitten by a brown recluse (got to the hospital ASAP and is fine), has also been bitten by a rat (also quickly got to a clinic and treated, plus shots), and routed poisonous snakes and rabid animals. He goes into crawl spaces under houses, where spiders, snakes, and other vermin could be hiding, not to mention mud, asbestos, and other hazardous c**p could be just sitting there in the dark. Definitely not a job for the faint at heart and sensitive of stomach. But without him and his cohorts, the world would be overrun with pests who are the major carriers of deadly diseases. Or who are just, you know, pests we don’t want around us. My hat’s permanently off to him for it.
I worked at on a Turkey farm. There were kill days and cut days. On kill days you were covered in blood and poop. New people would come in look around and walk back out. Didn’t bother me.
The blood collector in the slaughterhouse. i had an upset stomach for a few months just after job-shadowing it.
I work in human dissection for a university, preparing cadaveric specimens for educational use.
Liverpool University switched to prepared specimens (prosections) just after I left. Very disappointing.
Note: this post originally had 72 images. It’s been shortened to the top 50 images based on user votes.
Something I learned when I had cancer: the nurses who delivery chemo to cancer patients are amazing. They manage to stay positive around people who are very ill, some of whom are dying. Patients vomit and have other nasty reactions while getting their dose of poison -- it ain't pretty. The nurses just keep doing their job with an "it will be all right" attitude. All the patients at the center where I was treated were adults. I can't even begin to imagine what it must be like when your patients are children.
There are a few of those same nurses I have met in the last year. They were also volunteers at a totally free to patient/family hospice home. Truly lovely people, that just amaze me to my core how well they handle such devastating times in many people's lives!
Load More Replies...
Something I learned when I had cancer: the nurses who delivery chemo to cancer patients are amazing. They manage to stay positive around people who are very ill, some of whom are dying. Patients vomit and have other nasty reactions while getting their dose of poison -- it ain't pretty. The nurses just keep doing their job with an "it will be all right" attitude. All the patients at the center where I was treated were adults. I can't even begin to imagine what it must be like when your patients are children.
There are a few of those same nurses I have met in the last year. They were also volunteers at a totally free to patient/family hospice home. Truly lovely people, that just amaze me to my core how well they handle such devastating times in many people's lives!
Load More Replies...
