Sometimes, there are incidents at one's job that make you ponder and reflect as to why you're doing this in the first place. But, whether it's cleaning up a customer's mess or dealing with terrible work conditions, there's at least one time where you have to stop and say, "I'm not paid enough to deal with this stuff."
Warned Posted, Then Promptly Ignored
Shutterstock/Rob Byron
“Working at a Bev-Mo, a west coast liquor store chain, in about 2010, when women would flush their tampons down the toilet even though we had ‘DON’T FLUSH YOUR TAMPONS DOWN THE TOILET’ signs plastered all over the women’s bathroom. Every time it happened, the toilet didn’t just overflow, it looked like a sh-t-filled bomb went off inside the toilet bowl, spraying wet sh-t everywhere, on every surface. Floor to ceiling covered in sh-t water and toilet paper bits.
I don’t know who the f–k you’re going to get to clean that up for eight dollars an hour, but it ain’t gonna be me.”
Out Of Control Classroom
Shutterstock/wavebreakmedia
“Anytime one of my students has a major tantrum (I’m a 3rd grade teacher). We’re talking desk throwing, chair throwing, book throwing, cussing, ripping up my teacher supplies etc. etc. This is not a one time moment, but happens at least once a month, sometimes once a week.
If I’m lucky, I can get him escorted out of my classroom within five minutes. I’m not always lucky. Administration keeps him in the office until he’s calmed down and then he’s brought right back again. Doesn’t receive any extra help or aid because he ‘doesn’t qualify.'”
Summer Camp Nightmare
“I was a camp counselor for a bunk of 7-year-old girls.
There about 15 kids and three counselors to a bunk.
The deal was that two counselors would always be in the bunk and the other would get the evening off and it would rotate.
So one night I’m getting ready for my evening off and I notice that neither of my fellow counselors were anywhere to be seen. I then notice that some of the girls are looking a little….green.
I tried briefly to find my coworkers but to no avail. Then the vomit started. Then the sh-tting started.
That’s right. An attack of norovirus hit my bunk. I had to stay up all night cleaning all manner of vomit and sh-t off of both child and cabin. Alone. No help. Just me and 15 children, who were crying, sick or both.
When my coworkers finally reappeared the next morning, I opened the door, looking like a zombie, covered in disgusting and just screamed.
FYI if everyone asking if they got in trouble, the answer is sort of. They got yelled at but it was a summer camp and the session was over in ten days. So they were just not asked back next summer.”
Hot Summer + Guts = Do Not Want
“When I was working at a zoo long ago, my first year there I was a grounds maintenance. A glorified janitor. I cleaned up after people and animals. It wasn’t so bad a job, I got to be outside a lot, but it was long hours, min. wage, and you’d be pretty beat by the end of the day because some animals make a lot of poop.
But I got used to it. I grew up around farms. I’ve shoveled sh-t, poked dead calves with a stick, y’know, farm life.
One of the things done there was the butchering of animals for feed to other animals. Sometimes a moose would get hit by a truck, or a horse would be put down, and we’d receive it, hang it up on hooks, and get to work. Great food for the big cats and such!
Obviously, not all of the animal can be used, especially if it’s roadkill. The innards and such would get removed and tossed into the ‘gut cooler.’ The gut cooler was a large, outdoor fridge unit where we’d store offal and all that until it became time to send it off to the incinerator. The unit kept everything close to frozen solid, so nothing ever stank or the likes.
Until it broke. In the height of summer. With the contents of several moose, including one moose fetus. For two weeks we were unaware (we don’t get moose that often) while this outdoor steel box baked in the the July sun.
We opened once to toss some stuff in, and it was a disaster. It hissed like opening a slightly flat bottle of pop, and then the smell hit us. You could taste it in the air. It was so warm in there that little waves of heat distorted your vision, and I swear you could see the smell.
We all donned rain slicks and secured them with duct tape and proceeded to shovel John Carpenter’s ‘The Thing’ into wheelbarrows and haul it away to the dump out back so we could clean the whole unit out.
I will never forget that smell. I’ve encountered all kinds of rotting things in my life, from swamp lantern to a much too close skunk, backed up sewage, exploding bags of freshly used tampons and diapers (also at the zoo), spoiled pickled fish, and bad durian.
None of that even came close to the horror was was advanced decomposition of four or five feces ridden moose carcasses on a humid day in July.”
That Moment When You Are Fed Up With Being A Barista
“I worked at Starbucks until pretty recently. The situation with Instagram/Buzzfeed/clickbait ‘secret menu’ drinks got so out of control we were half expected to spend time off the clock keeping up with it. Then foreign students started ‘ordering’ just by shoving a picture of some sugary abortion with a Chinese caption in our face. ‘YOU MAKE?’ No, idiot, I no make. Then the official corporate accounts started posting them, but with no recipes/ingredients so people would order whatever unicorn sh-t clusterf–kaccino with nobody on either side of the counter having any idea what the f–k goes in it, until two days later the unpaid intern in Seattle they have on the secret-menu beat would edit the post with some ‘tee hee, this isn’t an official drink!’ bullsh-t. Jeeze, once they regrammed a random picture of edible flowers frozen in ice cubes saying it would be good in iced coffee! WE HAD PEOPLE ASKING FOR IT!!! AND GETTING MAD THAT WE COULDN’T MAKE IT!!
NOPE. Out.”
Game Promotion Squabble
Shutterstock/Lopolo
“I used to work security for a minor-league baseball team, and my moment was when two little old ladies got into a fist fight over a free bobblehead giveaway.”
Jail Cell Clean Up
“Corrections officer for nine years, dude refused to slide out the shank he had in his cell or cuff up and come out so we could have it. He got naked covered himself in sh-t and peed all over the floor. We got our gear on to do cell extraction and went it and got him. 5 of laying on a sh-t covered man with mace in the air and a helmet that makes it hard enough to breathe without the spray. I look over at my buddy while we are trying to control the inmate and he is vomiting inside his helmet, I have snot flowing into my mouth and begin to try and hold back the puke. I can’t describe the smell that was in that cell, just awful. This wasn’t my first incident like this, but it was the worst. Nine months later i had a new job and am glad to be out of there. That was about three years ago now….glad to be out, but I miss my coworkers, a lot of them are great people.”
Please, PLEASE Put That Away, Sir
Shutterstock/Couperfield
“I used to work at Sam’s Club during college.
It was Christmas Eve, and it was almost closing. I worked in the bakery so I was out on the floor putting out the last of the products for the night. While I was focused on the tables, some lady walked up to me holding hands with whom I assumed was her SO because he was full grown. She then asked very angrily: ‘do you have any pumpkin pie left?’
Now…my first thought before I even lifted my head was ‘why is this lady angry?’ So I glanced over and was even more confused and terrified.
The man she was holding hands with seemed to have some sort of mental disorder.. autism? Down syndrome? I don’t know I’m not an expert. But that’s not the scary part, this man had his junk out and he was GOIN TO TOWN on himself. And holy f–king Lord was he hung. I was so f–king confused I didn’t even answer her question, I just blue screened for a second. He looked like he was trying to rip it off. She must have asked me like three times in the moment I was frozen until I finally managed a: ‘over there…’
She stormed off angrily with him still stretching and mangling his enormous member around and I never felt so confused in my life. For like a week I had an engraved image in my head.
My friends love this story. So at least I get a good laugh out of it.”
Someone Sitting In Complete Filth
“So, I work as an EMT.
We got a call for a 5150 GD (meaning the patient couldn’t adequately care for themselves) from a private residence to ER for an elder woman, and when we arrived PD was on scene with the coroner already.
When we went in the stench hit us in a wave of decay and excrement, causing us to turn around immediately and retrieve some N95 masks. The owner of the house was a hoarder and had stacks and piles of nonsense scattered everywhere, but the first thing we saw upon entry was the coroner standing by the couch where a lady lay in rigor mortis, death due probably to OD. This was not a good start to a call.
But she wasn’t our patient, we were there for a psychiatric hold. An officer gestured us through the narrow maze of possessions to a room where an older woman lay swimming in week old filth, urine, feces, everything. She was old, completely altered, and clearly in misery. We had to carry her out on her filthy sheet and in the process my partner and I got smeared with feces all over us. I’m pretty sure there had to have been feces among the trash piled everywhere because the back of my jacket was disgusting by the time we carried her out. It was all around a terrible call, but we got her to the ER and they were very quick to start cleaning her up. It was the first and only time I’ve used the decontamination showers outside the ER before. I really hope they were able to place her at a nursing home or somewhere she’ll actually be taken care of, she was living in a really sh-tty situation.
Yeah, our supervisor let us go home early that shift.”
A Rough Facility
“Teacher who used to teach at a high school that was a facility for students deemed too dangerous for students to be in public schools– either the kids had just been released from prison, were waiting to go to prison, were awaiting trial, or had been suspended for something extremely serious and usually violent.
In the state where I taught, kids can be in high school through the school year where they turn 21, so I actually was teaching a lot of dysfunctional adults who were only a few years younger than me.
The school was poorly-run by some extremely jaded administrators, and they were tired of teachers calling for correctional officers when a student was merely threatening violence rather than being violent. Basically, we couldn’t ask for help until a student had thrown an object or a punch.
We have a huge, HUGE 21 year old student. I’m talking at least 6’5, probably 400 pounds, at the school because he jumped a teacher and put him into a coma for a while. He doesn’t want to be there and takes to smuggling Molly into school, taking it in the bathroom, and leaving whatever class he’s in and roaming the hallways. Our awful assistant principal says that the teachers can’t call the CO’s on him, but we also can’t let him roam the halls. This means when he does this, a teacher has to be following this grown-a__ enormous man who is tripping balls and trying to persuade him to come back to class.
Because of the volatile nature of the students, all classes had two teachers. I’m 5’3, but my co-teacher was 4’10 and pregnant, so I took on the riskier parts of the job. As expected, the huge Molly-taking student is wandering the halls and doing his best hyena impersonation, and I had to try to coax him back to class. As I’m uselessly trying to talk him into coming back, he rips a fire extinguisher off the wall, smashes the window of an adjacent classroom with it, and pulls a shard of glass that has been lodged into his hand out with his teeth.
I really was not being paid enough for that sh-t (but at least he was removed from the school for ‘destruction of property).'”
Not Dishwasher Safe
Shutterstock/andriano.cz
“I used to work at an Applebee’s as a dishwasher. We had a drain in one of the corners of the kitchen, and this drain was hidden by heavy equipment. Food also had a tendency to collect in and around the drain when we sprayed the kitchen at night. One night, while we were cleaning, that section of the kitchen began flooding. I had only been working there a couple months at the time, and I was also the only one small enough to fit under the equipment to get to the drain. As a result, I received the ‘privilege’ of laying in filthy water and old sewage for almost an hour, pulling out handful after handful of rotten food, shattered glass, and broken plates. I smelled like I had slept in a dumpster for almost a week as a result. On the brighter side, my boss realized I wasn’t being paid enough, and had a party pack of Smirnoff Ice waiting for me in the office the next day.”
Shoe Store Annoyances
“I’ve posted this before, but I used to work at a shoe store, we always got extremely sketchy people in there to buy Jordan’s. We were having a 40 percent off sale one time, one particularly sketchy lady told her husband ‘this pair is 40 off, you’re buying one, that means 80 percent off.’ I explained to her multiple times it meant it was 40 percent of the total, but she didn’t get it and kept saying ’40 + 40 is 80.’ Eventually, I said screw it and just told her she might as well buy three pairs, because that’s 120 percent off and we’d be paying HER for the shoes, then walked off as the gears turned in her head trying to comprehend what I said.”
A Low Grade Experience
“Working in a low grade salmon processing plant in Alaska with a bunch of runaways, drug addicts, criminals and any other society rejected degenerate you can fathom. 14-18 hours a day and every single day. I could never say I had a bad job up until that point.”
Rainbow Printer Explosion
“Emptying the printer toner disposal cartridge, in the middle of the street. I was supposed to empty it inside this small plastic bag… nobody told me the bloody cartridge was punctured, the moment I flipped the thing trying to ‘pour’ its contents into the bag, plumes of colored dust swept the entire street, half of it’s contents spilled over, like holy sh-t, I’m surprised there wasn’t an air drop from the amount of colored sh-t just going up into the sky, or that nobody called the cops with a chemical hazard complaint, cars that were coming down the road either took a turn or did a complete 180 and headed the other way. I had the foresight to put a mask on before attempting this, but three days later I still had rainbow colored a–cheeks, I had tan-like lines around my mouth, ruined a new white shirt, had to take cold showers for a week (apparently toner powder imprints itself if under heat)… and I still had to dispose of the rest of the toner, I’m not even sure if you’re supposed to just empty those things like that and not recycle them completely. Taking care of printers wasn’t even my job, I was just the only guy at the office back then, and being the gentleman that I’m not, I couldn’t let those dainty girls do it themselves, or wait for someone who knows how to do it, to actually do it. Nooooo, they had to print out that one paper, and there was no other way other than to have me call an airstrike on my location…”
That’s One Way To Have An Epiphany
“We had a project from hell at my last job. We had a ton of people working around the clock. I personally had a five month stretch that I worked over 80 hours a week. That will really start f–king with your head. While driving home one night I had this thought pop into my head, ‘if I just veered off the road and got in a car wreck, I probably wouldn’t have to go to work tomorrow.’ That was my I don’t get paid enough for this sh-t moment. I started looking for a new job shortly after.”
That’s Not How A Computer Works
“Working in IT, I think this any time I’m dealing with someone who is more computer-illiterate than average.
‘I told you to click the Start Menu. Why did you delete that file?'”
Confusing Orders
“I’d left work after a normal shift plus a couple hours of unplanned overtime. I was feeling ill and told my coworkers that on the way out the door. Two hours later, after midnight, I start getting calls to go back in to do a particular procedure. I didn’t hear the phone because I turned my volume down, and it was a good thing because I received a dozen calls in less than an hour. That doesn’t sound that bad, except that the supervisor had JUST been lectured on that we couldn’t work on call because we weren’t paid as such, the supervisor and several of my coworkers were ALSO trained in the same procedure, and it was not something that anyone who is sick/sneezing/vomiting should be anywhere near as it involved the careful documentation of biological evidence (AKA ‘lots of blood’).”
This Wasn’t In The Job Description
“Bomb scare in an elementary school I worked in as a custodian. We lesser beings were told to search for it, teachers got to volunteer. The likelihood of us finding something was slim, but still… I was being paid 22K a year, opening up cabinets and risking being blown up because for whatever f–ked up reason, it was my responsibility.”
Yes, It Was Indeed A Stupid Idea
“Spent a summer at Walmart. My last week they set up a huge tent in the parking lot. I was the only one working out there, and they didn’t provide a cash register. I was supposed to direct customers to take what they wanted through the parking lot into the store to pay, which is really a stupid idea, as you could easily just walk to your car and leave with the merchandise.
One day a big storm blew in. One of those ‘It’s a beautiful day but oh look surprise thunder downpour windstorm’ systems came in real quickly. Wind ripped through the canvas tent walls and started blowing all the clothing around the parking lot, where it would get rained on an ruined. I got on the radio with a ‘Uh, help plz’ to management, and all I got from them was ‘We need you to take care of that.’ So, I quit.”