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My Three Grodiest Jobs
I’ve always thought that the poor souls in Hell who are forced to wash 
Satan’s notoriously foul rear end surely have the worst job ever. (I’ve forgotten the Biblical citation for the passage in which these ablutions occur. You’ll have to trust me on this.) Even Satan’s most hard-hearted demons — those who are able to oversee, without breaking into tears, those poor souls who are forced to watch an endless loop of Nancy Pelosi’s speeches — feel compassion for the Rear Enders (their official job classification).
Their job is made worse because Satan is literally the boss from Hell. “You missed three dingleberries!” the Evil One would scream in that irritatingly screechy voice of his. “Use some elbow grease, minions!”
I’ve never had a job quite as bad as the Rear Enders, but I’ve had three that come close.
Setting dynamite. On a summer break from college, my job for a Eugene, OR, explosives company was to drag dynamite, crammed into wooden boxes, into a tunnel that was dug into the side of a hill. (The company was blowing up the hill for its gravel.) I didn’t know it when I signed on, but working around dynamite, especially in closed spaces, gives a person a splitting headache. So there I was, a pampered college student on my hands and knees, dragging heavy boxes of dynamite down a cramped tunnel, all the while suffering from a pounding headache. College life never looked so good when school started back up again.
Setting pins in a bowling alley. For a few years in the 1950s, I set pins, usually in the summers, in a small eight-lane bowling alley in Compton, CA. It was loud back there in the pits, hot as the dickens, and physically demanding. In the course of an eight-hour shift, I would lift approximately 8,400 pounds of pins (at 3.5 lbs a pin) to distribute among the chutes in the rack. I would sometimes go home with bruises on my shins, the result of pins ricocheting off the sides of the pit and into my legs.
Digging a slit trench latrine in the Army. While on bivouac in Germany, my buddy, Richard Marino, and I, both Privates, were “volunteered” by our First Sergeant to dig a 20-foot-long trench for a latrine in hard soil. Ditch-digging beneath a hot sun had an influence on me in one important way: I removed ditch-digging from my list of potential careers.
There was one upside to the task: After we had dug the trench, it was mildly entertaining to watch my fellow soldiers — some of whom had laughed while I was digging the ditch — as they squatted precariously on a horizontal pole suspended out over the ditch, their bums on display before the world. You can be sure that I indulged in some sweet schadenfreude as I contemplated that sight. Until it was my turn.
Have you ever had a job that was tougher and more grody than mine? I didn’t think so, namby pambies.
Published in General
Any time you’d like to get a taste (poor word choice, sorry) of the “Rear Enders” occupational specialty, let me know.
Twice a year, it is my privilege to “crutch” or “crotch” the sheep. This is the process of grabbing them and cleaning out between their legs and around their bottoms so that (girls) when their lambs drop they have a good chance of not getting tangled up in wet and sticky mess, and of finding the udder quickly, and (boys) so that their man-parts do not get bound up in extraneous wool and, umm, stuff, and that they stay clean and comfortable.
Since I’m not terribly good at it, and since most of the sheep weigh more than I do, it’s a contest of wills, and I am usually filthy in unspeakable ways by the end of it.
I see you’re already cognizent of at least one important piece of the lingo: “dingleberries.” So you’re on your way, and I foresee great success for you in the field. (See what I did there?)
Fun post.
I think you beat me, She. Be sure to wash your hands afterwards.
The summer before my senior year of high school, I worked with a lawn service company. We mostly did mowing and weeding for rural hospitals, small business, and graveyards. We also did the occasional gravedigging and filling.
One July, I was tasked with another guy to fill in a grave after a funeral service. Because I was only seventeen, I was not allowed to operate heavy machinery like the tractor with a blade and backhoe used to dig and fill in the grave. Once the mourners left, we went into action. The other guy got to ride the tractor and push dirt into the grave with the blade. My job was to hop down into the hole, and with a 70-pound pneumatic tamp, pack the dirt solid, then hop out so he could push the next batch of dirt in (this isn’t me in the picture):
We repeated the process many times until we finally got the classic rounded mound you see on newly filled-in graves. It was hot and muggy (July in North Carolina), and when school started up, I vowed to never get a job involving manual labor again. Well, not that kind of manual labor . . .
Oh, you two poor souls! Are you sure Kent that you weren’t in Grass Valley at the time? I was 16 and my first heart throb was the pin setter, who did his darnedest to teach me to bowl.
Dynamite contains 40% nitroglycerin, which is potent vasodilator (dilation of the vascular system) and is known to cause severe headaches.
I don’t worry about things like that. I’m pretty sure they don’t have Covid-19.
Oh, wait . . . you mean . . .
I’ve had a lot of jobs involving copious quantities of mud, cow manure, etc., but you guys got me beat.
I’m with you, Stad. In my case, watching my dad work in the oil fields cured me of any desire to join the blue-collar ranks.
I always wondered what happened to you. Just kidding. I was in Compton, CA, at the time you were in Grass Valley.
The really old bowling alley in Comfort, TX, closed a few years back but the setters were universally called pin monkeys.
Tex, I’ve never heard that expression before. Must have been a Texas thang.
Several times I was employed helping to round up, catch, and cage 3,000 chickens. It’s from that experience that my disdain for chickens springs.
Grody to the max! This post could be a Mike Rowe’s Dirty Jobs resume, but it is actually an entry in our Group Writing Series under the March 2020 Group Writing Theme: “Working.” There are plenty of open days, so get busy and work it! Stop by and sign up now.
Interested in Group Writing topics that came before? See the handy compendium of monthly themes. Check out links in the Group Writing Group. You can also join the group to get a notification when a new monthly theme is posted.
“Powder monkeys” typically self – medicated to get past the headaches. They were almost universally heavy drinkers. It was tough work, but most made it to retirement. Which is to say, they typically retired abruptly when they got a couple wires crossed.
Well, it wasn’t grody but man was it boring! I had a student job at the University of CA at Riverside. I sat in a dark room at a very long table over which film was rolled that had been shot at Lawrence Livermore Lab in Berkley. As far as I can recall (give me a break – it was a long, long time ago) I was looking for specific decay patterns of atomic particles. When I saw something specific I had to mark and record the place on the film. During the summer this was eight hours a day, in the dark, trying not to fall asleep. I was paid the grand sum of 1.97 per hour which was minimum wage at the time.
Setting posts and tamping along with long days in the hay field is the best I got. That is like a pair vs. a full house. I fold. Well done!
I’m not sure if mine matches yours, Kent, but as a teenager, I had a job unloading phone books from a semi-trailer, and loading them into cars and trucks for delivery. This was in Tucson in the summer. It was probably 105 degrees in the shade, but that would mean the shade of a nice ramada or mesquite tree with air flow. It was probably 130-140 degrees inside that semi-trailer.
I remember having a Thirstbuster cup, 44 oz., filling it with cold water, and drinking the entire thing in about 15 seconds. Then immediately doing the same thing again.
Fortunately, the job only lasted about a week.
I had one quite unpleasant day as a lawyer. I had to attend an equipment inspection for a serious injury case. The engineers were inspecting a bucket truck. It was in Casa Grande, halfway between Phoenix and Tucson, in the summer. It was about 110 degrees. And the wind — which felt like a giant blow drier — was blowing from the nearby dairy farm. Way, way worse than Tarkin’s foul stench.
I was a tech in a research lab in a biological sciences building. It was pretty biological. The lab I worked in had mouse rooms with somewhere between 5000 and 10,000 mice on the premises, and an offsite mouse colony with another 70,000 or so. The mouse room lights were on a delay timer and shut off after 10 or 15 minutes. The mice were kept in cages that were sort of like bread pans with a grill on top; there was a V shaped recess for mouse chow pellets and a place to stick a water bottle. The cages were on wheeled carts. Sometimes you went in to bring out one or more cages for experiments, sometimes you went in with empty cages and retrieved specific mice (they had ear tags.)
There were always a few escapees running around the room.
Sometimes I was in the mouse room long enough for the lights to go out. The mice would get really active in the dark; the rustling and cheeping would get louder. The smell seemed to get more intense, too.
Every month or so we had to prepare about 100 hyperpituitary mice for experiments. For every mouse you needed you beheaded two others, euphemistically referred to as “donors.” (Actually about 2.1, so that if you botched a collection or implantation you had spares. You had a few extra recipients on hand as well, in case you botched one or some didn’t survive. Almost all did, but you implanted a few extras just in case.)
There was a little guillotine you could use to behead the donors, but scissors worked better. You held the mouse with one hand with the base of its tail between your ring finger and little finger, and took a firm grip on the loose skin at the base of its neck. If you got a proper grip it couldn’t turn its head and bite you. You then put its throat all the way into the open scissors which you held in the other hand, putting the scissors right under the lower jaw. Snip. The kicking little bodies went into one bag, the head needed more processing.
You then used scissors to cut off the top of the skull, flipped the brain back, and picked out the pituitary and put it in some saline solution in a petri dish. Once you had enough, on the the implantation. You sucked two pituitaries and a little bit of saline into a fat needle using an obturator as a plunger.
I think we used phenobarbital to sedate the recipients. Anyhow, you cut open the skin on the recipient’s back, exposed a kidney, picked up the kidney capsule with a pair of forceps, cut a slit in the capsule, and injected the pituitaries with the loaded needle. You then sort of massaged the pituitaries away from the slit which you then cauterized. Mmmm. Burnt kidney. Clip the skin incision shut, and you were done!
I enjoyed them all, even the grody ones because I was outside in Jackson Wy. or later Western slope Colorado; Cleaned cattle tits and tails (at least once I learned that I didn’t have to get slapped in the face by a dirty tail, and milked them, set damns, dug a lot of trenches and holes, (no latrines,) and laid pipe etc.bailed hay and stacked it, but finished most jobs on weekends except at the ranch and later when I’d given up an athletic scholarship because I changed to a real school and they just let me earn a tiny bit of money doing dumb stuff. I talked the construction owner to let me work Saturdays. I worked as a bus boy after the construction job. I suppose the only one I hated was locker boy at 14 near home in Denver, my first paid job, but I got to swim free. The only thing I didn’t like was being so inept across the board in almost all of them. It took years to learn that almost all kids that age are inept, probably not as inept as I was, but a lot are lazy. I loved hard physical and heavy work figured it was good for me and I could get more done more quickly than anybody else I worked with. Now I’m paying with bad knees back and such, but it was worth every ache and pain.
Jerry, anyone who works at a manual job in Tucson in the summer has one heck of a tough job. My manual labor jobs were in the much milder climates of Southern California, Western Oregon, and Germany. BTW, I’d rather beg than put on a roof in mid summer in the South. I saw men roofing in Kentucky in mid summer and thanked the gods that I didn’t have to do that.
Mr. Left Coast, that’s what I call an interesting job. You ought to make a post out of your mouse experiences.
Did you ever feel sorry for the pathetic lives and deaths of the little mice?
Walton, I admire you for taking on hard jobs — and somehow enjoying them. I was way too lazy and too much of a pussy to ever enjoy what you enjoyed. I’m a natural-born indoor person. I’ve had some grody jobs, as you see in my post, but I worked at them strictly for the money. I quit the dynamite one after a week or two. It was just too hard. I left behind men who did that for a living. Those were tough men.
What did you finally do for a living?
Apparently this was an after school job my father had. I say apparently because as he once more educated us kids about the arduous ins and outs of pin setting, my mom would always interrupt with, “Are you telling them that story again.”
This reminds me of something I just watched on TV – it’s not my story, First I have to embarrassingly admit that I watch the show Hoarders. So sue me – I’ve been bored while I’ve been sick. Anyway one of the shows I saw recently was about a man who lived in his home with over 1000 rats who ran freely throughout the house. The lived in the furniture, walls, everywhere. He loved his rat friends. I think his house was going to be condemned or something if he didn’t get it cleaned up. His therapist and the cleaning crew (talk about a grody job) called in the SPCA to collect all the rats, examine them to see if they were healthy (waaah?) and get them adopted out. He was allowed to keep one rat that was his favorite.
So here are my questions: how in the world could he pick out one rat among a thousand or more and WHY DIDN’T THEY JUST KILL ALL THE F%@#ING RATS?
Are you sure we could function without a government?
Loading trap. That is, sitting in a hot, dirty cell surrounded by “clay pigeons” that I had to load on a long metal arm before some impatient fool with a shotgun could yell “PULL”. I never got smacked by the thing, but it was close sometimes.
Second, sandblasting metal beams in preparation for painting when the temperature was a humid 90 degrees.
Third, hanging on the outside of a bell tower in a cold March breeze scraping bird dropping off with a metal brush.
All so I could afford tuition so I’d never have to do those things again.
Not bad. Not bad at all.
Those jobs weren’t pleasant, but beat crawling around the jungles of Vietnam or some Hell-hole such as Afghanistan or Iraq. At least, I wasn’t being shot at.
Oh, definitely. Weichei. Growing up on a dairy farm, I spent a lot of time, shoveling, sweeping, spraying and otherwise removing the by-products of bovine digestive processes. We also had a three-stall milking parlor set up, with the cows standing about three feet off the ground while they were being milked. This arrangement meant that if Bossie or Clara …discharged in the middle of the milking process, you would be spattered with hot, fresh cow manure or urine if you didn’t jump out of the way fast enough.
Then there was the time I was in a cow’s uterus up to my shoulders trying to turn a calf that was in breach position. I succeeded. Then we pulled it out and it was not breathing, so my dad told me to try …no joke… mouth to nose resuscitation on the – still bloody- calf. I did. It did not work.
Then there was cleaning out the chicken house. Note: per unit volume, chicken poop is about four times denser than cow poop.
I think I “win”.
You may indeed, Hartmann. You and Mrs. She share the same kind of experiences with farm animal poop. And Mrs. She, too, has had her arms up the wazoo of a farm animal.