What's the Grossest Thing You Have Seen in Your Career?

About a month a go.. ...(copied my other post)

Well, I delivered my first finger to the ER room today.....

Tow truck driver was dropping off a 599 to our shop and was using his hand to push the car back on the rim and the finger tip got chopped off by the caliper. So, after a mad search for the finger, we ended up sending him to the ER (with his finger being iced in a Starbucks Clear cup) since the bone was exposed and all. Unable to find the tip anywhere, we finally located it inside the glove that he was wearing, but swore he was not wearing at the time.....and I took finger in the glove to the ER since the doctor was quite eager to see it. It is quite funny walking in with a single glove and handing it over to the ER nurse and saying.."someone told me it was in there. I just don't want to look. "

Strange feeling driving 4 miles to the ER with someone elses finger tips. Had all sorts of thoughts, such as
"go to Wendy's"...

 

I can match that - not only have I seen the fearful GOTO in our C++ code, but also a magnificent example of SetJump, LongJump for the trace statements...which effectively meant that you could not tell where a trace statement originated.

Now, for some more tangible grossness...I used to be in the industrial water treatment business. One of our main jobs was to show up at customer's sites once a week and test their boiler & cooling tower water and set up their additive schedules.

One of these boiler customers was an (UNNAMED, and many years past) candy company. They made candy canes like Santa gives you at christmas. Production went on all year (even summer) and the shop was not air-conditioned. The raw candy got made up in big globs of half-melted sugar and flopped out onto metal tables (by hand) by sweating workers. While they did wear hair nets and gloves, not much was done to keep it from rubbing onto their stomachs, forearms, etc...and occasionally a batch got dropped onto the floor. The floor was basically unpainted concrete like a pretty well-worn auto garage that could not afford floor sealer. The product pretty much looked OK after it was dyed and run through the winding machines to make the swirl pattern - but still!!!

I have never permitted a candy cane in my house at Christmas again.

 

I used to have a part time job at a retail store. Some girl/woman managed to leverage herself so that she could take a crap in the silver tin-like tampon box that is next to the toilet. By far the grossest thing I've ever seen. Thank god I didn't have bathroom detail that night.

 

My dad and I currently own a swimming pool business where we take pools destroyed during foreclosures and bring them back up to operating status again. So far we haven't discovered any dead bodies that break apart into soggy sections, I guess we have been lucky. At one jobsite though, I really have to question some of those fly-by-night plumbers out there when they don't finish a sewer line. Envision an open trench with a section of sewer pipe missing, with the contents that flow in sewer pipes still flowing and piled up in the trench. The sewer pipe does not come from one house, but from an apartment complex. The odor? Use your imagination.
Below is a sample of what we come across from time to time. Remember, tarps NEVER make good pool covers.
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It might not be the plumber. I'm a plumber. You would not believe how much damage other construction crews can do...and try to cover up. One new home had plumbing that drained slowly. The auger and the camera ran into something solid. We couldn't tell what it was, so we dug up where the obstruction should have been We couldn't find the pipe. We kept digging and finally found some shards of 3" PVC. It turned out that the utility crew had broken into the pipe with their trencher. They cut their damaged section out...then filled in the hole. How they thought plumbing would work with 66 inches of pipe GONE is beyond me. I also can't imagine how they thought no one would notice...or be able to figure out who did it. I see that kind of thing almost daily.

But hey, it could be the plumber. There are some slob plumbers out there.

 

Man, I got to play this on you Ryan!
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A personal favorite.

'twas a nasty, wintry, gray, rainy, awful December morning in Pittsburgh when I was scheduled to take a gross anatomy lab final. The lab 'practical' came before a 'block' exam of multiple subjects. Like most, I'd been up late studying for the past few nights, and, like everyone else, was feeling the stress of having a 4 hour exam ahead of me.

We begin the lab practical and I'm circulating from station to station. I'd forced myself to eat a good breakfast, despite having to sit in a room reeking of embalming fluid and filled with cadavers that had been reduced to something less than their original form.

Things, though, were okay. Breakfast was staying down, I was circulating.


Until I reached a station that was set up by some bastard who clearly bore a grudge against medical students.

On the gurney was a bisected pelvis with the attached leg.

No big deal, you're thinking. And you'd be right except for two things.

One: this was a female pelvis. And two: the gurney was laying so that one side was against the wall.

However, it wasn't laying against the wall so that the inside of the pelvis faced outward. No. That'd be too simple. Too easy. Too nice.

Whoever decided to set that station up put the leg facing out ... leaving us students to lean across it in order to see what piece of anatomy the tag was pointing to.

And, of course, the tag was buried fairly deeply.

Which meant that every student who visited had to lean across and put his (or her) face just about onto the table inches away from dead petrified muff.

There's nothing like spending 7:30am, tired, with an old dead woman's pubes tickling the tip of your nose.

 

Rows and rows of cubicles. As far as the eye can see.

 

Someone returned $2000 of clothes


Kinda messed up our sales numbers...