Worst task you've ever been assigned

[speedog]

So what is the worst task you've ever been assigned?

Mine has to be a task from about 39 years ago - I was tasked with digging out the stuck leg of a wood grain elevator, the leg contains the conveyer belt that takes the grain to the top of the elevator.

Now this would be tough for some people because it is an unlit, confined space that is at the lowest point in a grain elevator. But on this occasion there was some extra additional special stuff, unbeknownst to me there was a crust of about 3-4 inches of grain with rotting grain underneath on top of about 8 inches of water. Stepped on to it thinking it was the bottom of the boot (what this area is called) and broke through, now I'm standing more than ankle deep in a mix of dank water and rotting grain in a deep, dark, very dusty and confined space and if you've ever experienced what rotting grain smells like, well keeping g one's cookies down is ne'er impossible.

Nest of all, I had to scoop all that wonderful stuff up which was hoisted above me by a coworker in a 5 gallon bucket with that mess dripping on me before I could proceed with my original assigned task. Only had this happen once but it is most definitely the worst task I've ever been assigned, even worse than going down into a manhole that has hundress of dead and bloated floating mice in it - I'd take dead, bloated mice over rotting grain any day.

[OU812]

Reading Zenops posts.

[Sugarphreak]

...

[Kloubek]

I worked at Zellers in their stock room, putting myself through college - some 20 years ago. We didn't have an on-shift maintenance person or cleaning crew, so any such work that was required was delegated to me, even if it wasn't in my job description.

One day I was told that there was a mess in the men's bathroom. And god, was there ever. Someone had basically taken a few minutes to throw their shit all over the walls, floors, ceiling. This was not a small bathroom too... it was the typical 3-4 stall, multi-sink variety. I spent hours in there trying not to hurl. I told the HR person I was never doing that again. (Though she told me I would if I had to. I quit shortly thereafter)

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While not quite on topic, I felt this would be a good opportunity to share another story that happened around the same time. A courier came to our back door to deliver a package. We had a loading bay so it was several feet off the ground. He figured it would be a nice guy to give us the slip to sign, so he hopped up on top of a barrel we had right by the loading bay.

This barrel was used to house the old cooking oil from the restaurant Zellers had at the time. It was due to be picked up and was virtually full to the brim with old, rancid oil. Well, as you might guess, the lid did a rotation like it was on a pivot, and this courier dropped straight down, rib-high in this oil. We tried to rinse him off with a hose, but he ultimately had to drive away saturated in truly awful smelling sludge. I always wondered if he ended up finishing his shift, or just calling it a day....

[flipstah]

Originally posted by Sugarphreak

I started working for engineering firms here in Calgary when I was just 19... so most of my awful stuff is just office politics.

That must've been difficult, doing AutoCAD by paper, pencil, and a ruler. Slide rules were still a thing, right?

[codetrap]

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[Sugarphreak]

...

[dirtsniffer]

I cleaned the superstore butchers shop at night for a while. Not a fun time, Had to lift garbage cans full of bones and trimmings nose high to get them into the trash chute.

Seems easy compared to you lot

[toastgremlin]

Originally posted by Kloubek
I worked at Zellers in their stock room, putting myself through college - some 20 years ago. We didn't have an on-shift maintenance person or cleaning crew, so any such work that was required was delegated to me, even if it wasn't in my job description.

Hey, I had the same job about ten years ago. Nothing like using a forklift and power loader with nothing resembling licensing or training while your coworkers decided they would rather free-climb the shelves to get stuff down.

The only good part about that job was the cardboard box compressor and even then some asshole put an entire box of spaghetti sauce (in glass jars) through one night so it broke.

Also one of the shift managers got into a fistfight with a shoplifter in the parking lot.

[Mitsu3000gt]

About 15 years ago I worked at RONA, and I was asked to sweep the gravel out of the parking lot, and given a broom & dust pan. An impossible task haha.

If there are any doctors/nurses on here they can probably beat everyone's story with ease

[Swank]

Cleaning out the grease trap at KFC. The yellow, orange, and pink layers of rancid sludge was, to this day, the worst thing I ever smelled

[03ozwhip]

I had to pick up rocks for an entire day.....I'm a welder. Ya it was slow. Not gross or hard, just a really useless waste of a day haha

[Kloubek]

Originally posted by toastgremlin
Hey, I had the same job about ten years ago. Nothing like using a forklift and power loader with nothing resembling licensing or training while your coworkers decided they would rather free-climb the shelves to get stuff down.

The only good part about that job was the cardboard box compressor and even then some asshole put an entire box of spaghetti sauce (in glass jars) through one night so it broke.

Also one of the shift managers got into a fistfight with a shoplifter in the parking lot.

For the last year there, I did some shadowing of our security guy and got into a couple of incidents of my own; one real big one. That's a story for another time.

We were the first Zellers in Canada to get the box compressor as a pilot run. I remember that shiny blue machine well... we were so excited!

As for the forklift, I never drove ours. I only got to play with the electric power jacks; that was about it. But I do remember climbing over the pallet racking to get things. Our storeroom was so packed, climbing through the racking was a daily occurrence.

Oh, and another real shitty aspect of that job is that it was also my job to collect the carts people had left around the mall. However, I had no motorized helper, so it was just me exhaustively pushing a huge lineup of carts up hills. Especially sucked in the winter.....

[LilDrunkenSmurf]

Originally posted by dirtsniffer
I cleaned the superstore butchers shop at night for a while. Not a fun time, Had to lift garbage cans full of bones and trimmings nose high to get them into the trash chute.

Seems easy compared to you lot

I had to do this at Sobey's.

[rage2]

Originally posted by Mitsu3000gt
If there are any doctors/nurses on here they can probably beat everyone's story with ease

Every nurse/tech that I've talked to is so used to cleaning shit coming out of people's asses it's not even a bad job anymore.

[Swank]

My g/f is an ER nurse, she's not allowed to talk about work at the dinner table

[RY213]

Originally posted by codetrap
Cleaning the public washroom at safeway after some old guy exploded shit all over the walls. No idea WTF was wrong with him but there was shit splattered over the two walls beside the toilet at least two feet up the wall, the toilet itself was overflowed and shitty water was leaking under the door into the loading dock area.

Lmao I had the exact same experience working at Safeway.

[AndyL]

Fixing dock levelers at grocery stores... oh and any maintenance at all at a certain rendering plant in Ogden ... had to do an emergency repair one night- just close the door, was getting replaced in am... So I slice through this rubber door - to feed a chain through - maggots start pouring out of the belting... I puked right there...

Really worst - walking into a construction coordination meeting (as it appeared in my email). Very large government project, probably our companies largest single contract in 2-3 years. Spent 2 weeks from notice of meeting until an hour before meeting trying to get the file from the PM. Never got it. Grabbed what was in the computer quote, and ran with it...

Turned out it was a meeting to discuss the million dollars of custom programming and integration to a door I didn't even know we sold - with a full on custom electronics package.

Worst meeting in my life... somehow I survived, nobody caught on that I was f'ing clueless, and totally winging it...

[BerserkerCatSplat]

Once upon a time in high school, I worked for a food packaging place during the summers. One of the primary functions of this plant was to take the 100lb bulk burlap potato bags and repackage them into smaller bags for resale - the 5lb, 10lb, or 20lb bags you see at the grocery store.

That's a pretty normal job, except sometimes there would be something go wrong with a shipment, or the bulk potatoes would be of bad quality (moldy, or in some rarer cases infected with maggots) so instead of rebagging they would be dumped into bins and sent off to be processed into french fries as they would be sterilized and shaped to the point where you couldn't really tell they were once shitty potatoes.

Anyway, one day somebody realized that a bin full of 10lb bags of yellow-flesh potatoes had somehow missed being shipped out and had been hiding behind some decommed equipment in the warehouse. It didn't have maggots, no, those maggots had eaten their fill of potatoes and had become flies. Even just bumping the bin would send up a swarm of annoyed bugs. Sure enough, somebody in the office said "Yep, cut the bags open and dump them into an empty bin for fry processing." The major problems with this operation were:

- The incredible, overwhelming stink of truly rancid potatoes, which you could withstand for only a few seconds at a time
- A swarm of thousands of bugs, angry that you were disturbing their ancestral home
- The post-maggot potatoes were so incredibly rotten that they had, to a large extent, turned into some kind of potato goo. When you lifted a bag to cut it open and dump it into the empty bin, liquefied potato would ooze out of the air holes in the bag and turned the floor into a stinking, slippery mess.

We took turns using an air hose to temporarily scatter the bugs, grab a bag, dump it into the fresh bin, and then hastily retreat from the area while gagging. This went on for a good half hour until somebody in the office decided maaaaybe this wasn't a great idea and elected to just dump the nasty taters in the trash. The whole plant stank for days even after bleaching the floors.

[Rat Fink]

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