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Odd rare jobs you've done in your life

Merle Hawggard

Merle Hawggard

5 year old buck +
They have this thread on a truck forum I'm on and I thought I'd start it here too.
I did this back in the 90's to help out a friend after his two way radio tower had been struck by lightning.
I changed out one of the antennas and had to work on all the tower lights. The tower was 300' high, 200' of heavy guage rohn, then 100' lightweight. That was a bit of a headache since I had to adjust the jib pole 200' up every time I scaled it.
That's me in cowboy boots lol.
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Impressive, and to climb it in those boots, yikes! I take it you're not afraid to hang a treestand.
 
I couldn't have done that!

I have commercial fished for catfish. I have trapped full time. I have worked for a bear and lion outfitter out west. I have split cedar rails and cedar shakes. Worked for a horse logger skidding logs with teams of Belgian and Percheron stallions. He was a Seventh Day Adventist - and didn't believe in cutting them. That led to some interesting - and scary episodes. They liked to fight.
 
My first summer job was using a power washer and washing off portable toilets to get them ready to take back out.

In college I worked at one of the big uniform washing/renting places. Paid for my fuel to run back and forth to school and that was about it.
 
Worst actual professional job I ever had was working in an Iron foundry. It was just flat out dangerous. Molten iron at 3,000 degrees will burn a hole straight thru you if it gets on you because the fluids in your body won't cool fast enough. It's also hot enough that if it's spilled on concrete the moisture in the concrete will vaporize and cause the concrete to explode like a bomb! We had 100 to 150 molten ton on hand at all times.... 3,000 degrees is hot enough that it you went to toss an apple into it the apple will never actually touch the metal - the moisture in it simply vaporizes from the heat before it ever actually reaches the molten material. They melted with electricity as well, so the shear amount of power was just crazy. In the summer we had the local utility company ask us to back off because we could cause local brown outs. Ever seen a fuse as big around as a soda can and about as long as your arm? We had cabinets that you had to avoid because it would mess up your cell phone and make the hair on your arm stand up from the magnetic field it created. We had our own sub-station. I almost lost the 4 fingers on my right hand there...after that episode I realized I didn't spend 4 years in college to be actually hurt by my job to that extent. That was the one job I refused to allow my wife to see where I worked. There was actually someone killed a few years after I left!!!
 
roymunson said:
My first summer job was using a power washer and washing off portable toilets to get them ready to take back out.

In college I worked at one of the big uniform washing/renting places. Paid for my fuel to run back and forth to school and that was about it.
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The heights I can do, but the toilet cleaning would have made me fold!

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j-bird said:
Worst actual professional job I ever had was working in an Iron foundry. It was just flat out dangerous. Molten iron at 3,000 degrees will burn a hole straight thru you if it gets on you because the fluids in your body won't cool fast enough. It's also hot enough that if it's spilled on concrete the moisture in the concrete will vaporize and cause the concrete to explode like a bomb! We had 100 to 150 molten ton on hand at all times.... 3,000 degrees is hot enough that it you went to toss an apple into it the apple will never actually touch the metal - the moisture in it simply vaporizes from the heat before it ever actually reaches the molten material. They melted with electricity as well, so the shear amount of power was just crazy. In the summer we had the local utility company ask us to back off because we could cause local brown outs. Ever seen a fuse as big around as a soda can and about as long as your arm? We had cabinets that you had to avoid because it would mess up your cell phone and make the hair on your arm stand up from the magnetic field it created. We had our own sub-station. I almost lost the 4 fingers on my right hand there...after that episode I realized I didn't spend 4 years in college to be actually hurt by my job to that extent. That was the one job I refused to allow my wife to see where I worked. There was actually someone killed a few years after I left!!!
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I've worked at a steel mill for the past 31 years this June, but I don't deal with it till after it's shaped and cooled plus, most of the time, I'm in and climate controlled building. Before that i worked for Foley Mobile Concrete Co as a batcher running an early computer controlled batch plant. I did that about a year building the steel mill i still work at now.

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Nothing to exciting for me. I grew up a farmer, and as a farmer you do some strange, and dangerous things. In college I worked in a food plant, and got to see some disgusting things I dont want to think about. I also worked at a place that builds boats, that was one of my favorite places to work. Then I became an auto mechanic, and went to a ton of schooling, and became a master tech in a dealership, then went to school for engineering, and now I have a cush phone job helping diagnose nightmare problem vehicles over the phone.

Of those jobs, I will have to say it is a toss up of dangerous jobs, between farming, and mechanic. I have seen some scary injuries working on cars from other mechanics. I fortunately havent had any near death experiences. But I have been in the hospital several times, had several surgeries, torn shoulders, stitches, broken fingers, smashed toes, concussion, burns etc...
 
Grew up on a farm, we farmed a lot of ground and had 150 sow farrow to finish along with some cattle. Following the floor sweep around the bins always sucked and was like breathing dirt, climbing up and knocking bridged grain down in the bins was pretty dangerous but fit right in with de-horning steers and dealing with angry sows or breaking up a boar fight. Worse job was cleaning under the raised sow farrowing crates with a scraper...handle wasn't long enough on scraper to push to the sluice so I had to lay on the floor to get it done right, nothing like laying in pig crap and maggots with dried afterbirth hanging down in my face while a sow gave me a golden shower....I do not miss that.
One thing I have found in my life that it seems the less physical work I have had to do the higher my pay has been, when I was a kid shoveling crap getting sunburned daily or freezing in the winter I made around $3.50 an hour, that kid wouldn't even believe how much I make now.
 
Not too odd for me.

I had a temp factory job one summer. I ran the lamination press on the glue line making butcher block planks for tractor trailer beds. Hot, messy, fast paced. Wore the same pair of jeans all summer, all covered and crusty with glue.

Next was a feedmill. They had contracts to buy all kinds of reject food. Nuts, chocolate, kid cereal marshmallows, pop tarts, pies, pasta. The wetter stuff went to a partner that would grind and dry it. Didn't like going there because of the smell and huge rats. I would occasionally partake of the fresher stuff, out of date doritos or poptarts. Our one driver told the story of watching one of their workers pick up and eat off the "good" side of a rotten pie.
 
For a few years after college I helped my Dad maintain a 300 acre real estate development (cut grass, patch roads, chainsaw downed trees, etc) while also working weekends operating a carding machine for a textile plant.

The textile factory made HUGE fabrics for paper making machines about the size of a typical gymnasium. The particular carding machine I operated took clumped fibers and teeth on huge carding rolls would straighten the fibers into more of a blanket form. Best I can remember the rolls were about 5' in diameter, about 8' wide, with a minuscule gap between them that allowed a wire band of teeth (almost exactly like a ban saw blade) rolled TIGHTLY around the entire drum to grab, orient, and transfer a thin sheet of straightened fiber.

While the machine had multiple safeties to prevent anyone from getting close to the rollers, operators sometimes would purposely bypass them in order to pull a snag developing in a roll to keep the carding going. There was actually a square guard beam about 4" wide that ran right over the middle of two of the giant rolls and more than once I witnessed a fairly aged operator hop up on that beam to reach a snag near the middle of rollers using a broom stick. If he'd fallen he'd literally been crushed between two MASSIVE rollers a fraction of an inch apart sporting what I bet was a million or so steel small shark-teeth.

Much more fun job was serving as Abrams tank crewman in the USMC reserves... at least when out in the tanks, as we spent 8 boring hours doing maintenance on them for every hour of actual operation. Once you've been around 120mm cannons firing takes a while being away from them to get excited shooting smaller arms. Remember the first time I was standing a distance behind one that fired and was awe struck seeing gravel lift up all around me an inch or so before shaking / settling back to the ground.
 
Worst job was baling hay when i wasn't quite big enough to throw our big bales. Our old baler had problems tieing. Made before kick baler technology. I got stuck riding the baler in the dust pulling every knot and retieing if needed. Very lousy job for a kid with a touch of asthma. Dad got it tieing better when i got a little older and was on the wagon stacking.
 
Merle Hawggard said:
The heights I can do, but the toilet cleaning would have made me fold!

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Simply mind over matter. I've grown up around it. Worst for me was not the crap, it was the puke next the beer garden at these festivals.

That and belly crawling under a mobile home that has been backing up for 2 weeks. then the guy who owns the trailer gets mad for how much it costs... :D
 
Semi-related note to Roymunun's toilet tale... had a friend who was a plumber and he told me that he only turned down a single job in the years he'd been working.

Got a call to a REALLY run-down home and he said the owner met him at the door and said that not only was the toilet not functional but the power was off.

Said as he entered the sweltering home during a South Carolina summer it smelled far worse / stronger than any other job site he'd visited and as the flashlight shone the way to the bathroom he was struck by the number of coffee cans sitting all around the place... and it was when he realized what the coffee cans were being used to hold that he told the owner he was sorry but he just couldn't do the job!
:emoji_poop::emoji_scream:
 
^^^ That's nasty. Reminds me of a similar story. After college I lived at home for a couple years, then decided to fix up a vacant little house that was on my grandparent's farm. Spent a month getting it ready to go, put a new roof on it, etc. It was a nice place to live for two years. At that time my grandma died, so I was able to move down the road to the old farmhouse. We gambled and rented the little house to an old trucker who was kinda on his 2nd chance in life. It went ok for about year, then he got another DUI and eventually stopped paying rent. There was a warrant out for his arrest. Basically the water pressure went out in the house, he continued to use the toilet until it was peaked up pretty well, then he went and checked himself into jail. The house was wrecked once again. But he's not even close to being our worst tenant! Done with the rental game.

In college I had a part-time gig selling my plasma for extra beer money. Sometimes it'd only pay $12, but other times maybe $20!
 
I square bailed a lot of hay growing up and hoed sugar beets in my teens when growing up. I started my working career as a carpenter and then went to a chemical plant and I Just retired this last year after 30 years.
 
scott44 said:
I square bailed a lot of hay growing up and hoed sugar beets in my teens when growing up. I started my working career as a carpenter and then went to a chemical plant and I Just retired this last year after 30 years.
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Congrats on retirement!

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Mortenson said:
Basically the water pressure went out in the house, he continued to use the toilet until it was peaked up pretty well, then he went and checked himself into jail. The house was wrecked once again. But he's not even close to being our worst tenant! Done with the rental game.
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I had to deal with that, but it was with a hoarder relative... AFter the deed was cleaned up, she offered me a pita stuffed with lamb or something weird... I couldn't get out of there fast enough.

If you guys wanna hear stories, I've got stories.
Roaches when we open the cupboard under the sink.
Credit cards in the toilet (Like we're not gonna be able to ID the person based on the name on the card)
Opening porta jon doors at music festivals to have gals sitting there with everything around their ankles (lock the door, man)
Had a girl solicit me once if I was willing to give her a ride on the step of my service truck from the back of the park, to the front... I told her I don't think my wife would like that.
Made the mistake of leaving the pressure valve on pressure after emptying the truck the night before. First portable toilet of the day, i buried the want in the tank and opened the valve... It was like a bomb went off.

There's more...
 
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