I’m not asking about the worst job. I’m asking about the grimmest one. For me it was when in my teenage years I was making candles you would put on a grave. Most of the time is was just filling the form, burn the right shape and passing it forward. But sometimes I had to fill in for a person who was selling these things, and that is where it gets grim. It was decades ago but I still remember one lady who asked what would be the best candle to memorialize her late husband. And she gave me the whole life story of her and her husband. I shit you not, it was the most touching love story I have ever heard. I quit the next day.
What is a denor? A quick google didn’t bring anything up
Might be a typo? A donor phlebotomy technician is one who specializes in drawing blood from donors, I guess as opposed to ones who do the lab work.
Nope. Denor was correct. Navy speak. I was a navy corpsman, lab technologist, & denor.
Navy medical term for autopsy assistant.
I 3D scanned a stillborn baby once. Mother was grieving, she wanted baby pictures but like, as much as possible. So I took a photogrammetry machine to a 5 pound corpse.
That was a long day.
Do you usually scan live babies or something? I’ve never heard of this type of thing for the living or for the deceased.
We did occasionally scan children and toddlers as part of a 3D family photo product we offered. Infants usually were a bit too squirmy. In the little statue we’d make it would look like the mother was holding a swaddled bee larva. One of our machines (it was a structured light scanner) had like 50 cameras and did the image capture in one shot. It was actually powered by Raspberry Pi 2s.
We also worked with the cosplay scene in that using our handheld structured light scanner we could get pretty good face and body scans. Instead of doing live castings of hands, faces etc. we could 3D scan the subject and then either print that body part on a 3D printer on which makeup prosthetics etc. could be sculpted, or it could be used to model costume parts in-software.
We had floated the idea of doing death masks. Occasionally for various reasons they cast molds of the deceased, and again we could do this faster and with less mess. And precisely one person also had this idea.
Presumably, a live baby would move way too much for photogrammetry to be useful.
It’s exactly forbthat reason that Revopoint (I shit you not) recommends you catch 'em while they’re asleep. Same for pets.
Can you ask them to wrap up your still born after the procedure like when you have a tooth extracted? Holy crap that is indeed grim.
In a manner of speaking, I suppose. We performed the scan at a funeral home.
I don’t do autopsies at my current job, but I have been trained to do so in school. Overall, I have not done very many autopsies at all in comparison to many peers in my field. I never really saw that many that were particularly sad tbh, but there were several that stood out to me.
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Someone who died of suicide. The autopsy itself wasn’t overly depressing tbh, just fairly routine, but the person had left a suicide note. It was read aloud to us. To hear about all the pain that person was going through and to hear them talk about things about themselves that I knew were untrue really made me almost start crying tbh. They had family members who loved them, but they had felt that they were a burden to their family and killed themselves.
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A teen who died of lymphoma. I can’t remember if they had just turned 18 or they were about to, but it was sad to hear of such an innocent life cut so short in such an unfair way. I have not done autopsies on anyone younger, but I know people who have.
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A woman who died suddenly around Christmastime of a pulmonary embolism. There wasn’t much to the case that got to me, but I remember noting that her nails were painted in a festive red and green. It indicated to me that she had been looking to enjoy the holidays, but that she never ended up getting to experience them with her loved ones. When many people perform an autopsy, there is a distinct emotional separation many of us have from the decedent and a “real” human being, if that makes sense. But little things like that remind you that these were real people with real lives and real emotions and real hopes and dreams.
Honestly, most autopsies I have seen/done were on older/elderly people who either died of natural causes or alcoholism. There was also occasional drug overdose deaths who tended to trend a lot younger. It never made me feel all that bad if someone had died older tbh because they had a chance to live their lives. It’s the younger ones that were always more notable.
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Changing literal adult diapers. It was for adults with developmental disabilities.
Also as part of the job, I was punched, spit in the face, slapped, cursed at, and was also sexually assaulted by an older guy on a few occasions (I’m also a male).
Though one of the last times I remember being punched, it was because I was trying to break up a fight between two guys and the one bigger guy threw his punch and it hit me in the chest. The whole time the fist was coming at me, I was expecting it to hurt since he was large. I barely felt it and tried not to laugh as I kept trying to break them up. Not saying that like I’m tough, because I am not and was much smaller than he is, but his punch really was that weak lol
Fun times…
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.
That was someone’s retirement grease!
It was there before me. I bet it’s there after me. Part of me wants to go by and see if it’s still there.
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.
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.
I’m a crisis intervention specialist, which means I’m a counselor who specifically works with suicidal individuals and those undergoing similar crises.
Thank you for doing what you do. I don’t know how you have the mental strength to do so.
It takes a lot of training and a lot of self care. I’m very lucky to work with an employer that does truly emphasize self care and allows us to do that.
Oh wow. I know we don’t know each other but I want to thank you, and other people, doing this job. It’s so important.
Thank you, I appreciate that.
I had a gig as a tattoo artist at a comic con. Tattoos are not my thing and didn’t seek it as a true job, but I know other people still consider it a pastime, realized I wasn’t bad at it, and was able to meet up with people who said they’d put me in the position, plus I had to get some service done. At least fifty people from the area have gone public with how nice things played out with this unbecoming Maylu-Sakurai-cosplaying woman (probably the only time I’ll do that cosplay) fulfilling their requests.
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.
I was very grateful that none of the cadavers we had at my medical school were John/Jane Does, and that we have a memorial service for the cadavers every year and invite the families to express gratitude.
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.
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.
Are you still in the field or did you switch to something else?
I’m doing something else in the medical field. I was a navy corpsman and I specialized in lab tech & denor. Believe it or not, civilian employers don’t recognize military medical training. I couldn’t even get a job as a phlebotomist after I got out and attended college. Plus, people make more per hour starting at Costco than denors make with experience. I had a few where the NIS were involved. Those were REALLY long days. Those guys didn’t have a sense of humor at all. But then again, most people working in the medical field have a morbid sense of humor.
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.
There’s a great German TV show from a few years back about a crime scene cleaner “Tatortreiniger”. It’s more philosophical/funny than gruesome and worth a watch if you don’t mind reading sub-titles. The BBC did an adaptation in English, but I’ve not watched it yet.
On a somewhat related note, Crime Scene Cleaner is such an oddly relaxing, thought a bit gruesome, game.
Does he wear a hazmat suit or something similar?
Yeah he wears heavy biohazard protection, complete with the hood and the respirator and everything. He’s better isolated than a cosmonaut on the job.
cosmonaut
Found the Russian. Do any other cultures use that word instead of astronaut?
Maybe any USSR countries are, just a guess.
Find something better to do.
Or maybe it’s about relative protection of cosmonaut suits vs astronaut suits, like they thought, “well maybe not quite as well as an astronaut, but better than a cosmonaut”
Taikonauts are Chinese. All three words, Cosmo, Astro, Taiko - naut describe the same job; it just depends what agency certified you as to what you get called.
Probably all eastern block states. I know its true for example for East Germany.
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
Way back in the day, developing photo film in the shop’s backstore lab.
The coroner pictures were always… something.
At least the hawking boss would GTFO though, silver linings.
Then again that’s not as bad as being actually there and scooping various stuff.
