Cleaning up a dead relative’s house after they were hoarding.

18 hours on a solar power plant in ~120° F heat replacing burnt up reactors and busbars in the inverters, covered in glycol which is like an antifreeze that is real sticky and somehow smells / tastes sweet (but is still gross af) so all the bugs are attracted to you and crawl all over.

I used to work at a really shitty metal factory as an engineer. I’d have to help get the lines going again after our weekly shutdown, and it was always a 24-30 hour work day, once per week. So 5 am until 5-10 am the next day. Very little for breaks (though they did feed us), almost never any sleep. That drive home after was harrowing. It probably would have been safer if I was drunk

For all my hard work and dedication I got rewarded with fucking nothing because that’s how capitalism works

House removals. 17hr day. 37 degrees celcius. Moved two three bedroom houses.

Used to load shipping containers in the Aussie sun but we’d start early. 32 ton in 25kg bags, 3x week.

Worked as security at a Serbian nightclub. It was not good. Violent, capable coked up Serbs.

I did deliveries for the postal service one summer 20 years ago. They always had you load up with just a little more than you had time to deliver, yet expect you to do it all. This one particular day it was scorching hot, and in addition to the regular small packages I had a fridge, a bike and a couch. All packaged to make them hard to grip. All to be delivered to the door, on the 4th, 5th and 3rd floor respectively. After ringing the doorbell with the bike in a box on the third floor and the Karen chewing me out for not leaving it downstairs by the garage I broke. Our supervisors at the time did call around to make sure people would be home, and check about floors, help to carry, and such. Such a request would’ve been noted on the package slip.

That job served as good motivation to stay in school and get a cushy SWE career.

We spent 2 hours doing CPR on a lady who worked in our hospital, while her husband watched and cried. She was young and the cardiac arrest was unexpected so we tried everything we could. Despite all our efforts we didn’t manage to get her back. CPR is not like it looks in movies and shows, it rarely works and is brutal on the person who’s died. CPR is physically exhausting to perform, generally you rotate so you’re only doing about 1-2 minutes at a time but even with breaks it’s still very hard work. Add on the emotional shock of an unexpected death and supporting a grieving partner, it was a naff day. One of the worst parts is you’ve got to go back on the floor afterwards and carry on like it’s normal.

Worked 33h in a row as a paramedic. Normally not allowed here (24h is a hard limit, 12h standard). Not because I wanted to, not because someone got ill…we simply didn’t make it even close to the depot, for the last 4h simply a major crash happened right in front of us.

We returned to the depot and basically didn’t even have a single wound dressing, no O2, no collars, no blankets,nothing.

And the worst part: The whole time it wasn’t “the usual business” of old folks having a stroke or a fall. We had one mass casualty incident at the beginning of shift, a child in respiratory arrest and similar shit.

I slept for 12h straight after that and still felt like shit.

Shooting weddings is uniquely draining, physically and mentally. 16 hours on your feet carrying weighty kit, putting your body in awkward positions to get the right angle, needing to stay hyper alert so you don’t miss the perfect shot, constantly thinking ahead, all with the added pressure to not fuck things up. I’ve done some really gruelling location work with even longer days but weddings are always the hardest.

I was chasing a bug. Complete showstopper for a new system in which we had invested a lot to be the next big thing. And the responsibility lay with me.

I wrecked my brain on the two weeks towards Christmas trying to get it stable. I tried every trick in the book. I tried some more things after Christmas. Nothing, absolutely nothing made the system any better. I started to get anxiety attacks and breakdowns. I cried at work. Four weeks of bug hunting, and still no idea what actually went wrong.

In the end, it turned out to be a crazy hardware issue, something I could not fix in any way with software. One part for a tenth of a cent changed on each board, and the system ran like a charm.

Boss gave me the rest of the week off to recover.

Simultaneous interpretation. My first time out I did 20-30 minutes and had to lie down immediately afterwards. You’d think that just listening to someone else talk and then just repeating them in another language would be easy, but you have to buffer quite a bit to get the interpretation right, and then talking and listening at the same time is also pretty hard.

Just out of uni I couldn’t get a job in IT so I went and did labouring. It was the lowest money ive ever made and the hardest ive ever worked.

I’d get up at 4:30am get ready and catch the train in. Then wait and hope to get selected for a decent job if I didnt j go home with nothing. One day I got picked to do a plank replacement on a pier. We jumped jin the van and headed out. started at about 6am and finished at 6pm. We had to walkout on these metal beams above the sea and lift these giant rotting wooden beams similar to railroad beams but longer they must have been over 100kg each and carry them to a pile then grab a new beam and carry it out. Each one was a 2 person lift which made it slow and by like hour 6 my strength was giving out on me and by hour 8 my fingers could barely hold on so I kept having to rest the beam on my leg or shoulder. Also I was the only one who spoke English so communicate was hard. At the end of the day the builder the builder asked me to come back and help the next day because i spoke English. I said fuck no.

I made $120~ for that and i was to sore to work so I lost the next 2 days of work which means I basically lost money. My legs, shoulders and arms were so bruised uo from resting the planks on them. The company that I worked for also later ended uo scamming me 3 days of wages and i was to young and naive to fight it. Fuck you allied workforce most dogshit place ive ever worked.

That’s a tough call. I would say the hardest was when I was on the board of a regional charity organization and we caught the CEO embezzling. If you’ve never dealt with something like that before, it’s hard to imagine the river of shit that is coming your way.

This dude, who was paid a decent salary and benefits, very smugly told us that he felt he was more entitled to the money than the people who actually needed it. I’ve never wanted to punch anyone so badly. Firing him was the easy part. Dealing with the criminal investigation and the loss of community trust was the hard part. That was more of an emotionally exhausting year and a half rather than just a day though.

I ran a drill rig for soil sampling for a few years. One day it was 100F outside and we had to drill inside a drycleaners. They had dryers and steam presses going , so it was a humid 130F inside. We used a remote drill rig which required running 100 lb hydraulic lines from the truck outside. These lines got so hot you couldn’t touch them with a bare hand. So imagine trying to move these heavy as hell lines without them touching bare skin and while having to shift your hands around constantly to avoid burns.

That ties for worst with the day we drilled at a gas station in a farm field in the middle of nowhere where it was -20F not counting the wind chill. The thing about soil sampling for contaminants is you have to wash the drill between holes. At those temperatures everything froze instantly and the machinery kept locking up with ice. It took us 8 hours to do what would normally take 2. And then we got a flat tire driving back…

I worked at a bank at the time. We were moving to a new system and running recons against the old system to check the behaviour was the same. I had to run a manual recon of the old system vs the new 4 times per day. There was a lot of focus from management and users on the new system.

The week leading up to Christmas, I was the one person not on holiday yet, and also the most junior person on the project. I found that week so stressful, as I had to run these recons and quickly decide whether each break was real or not before reporting to the users. Despite having worked on that system, I had very little confidence and didn’t have the same intuitive mental model of the system my colleagues had. I had to dig into each break case-by-case, but they seemed much more able to understand what was going on via a few simple queries.

Anyway, I get through the week and left for the holidays on Thursday evening. I’m just grateful that I’ve gotten through it. Then, around 3pm on the Friday, I see a missed call from the tech lead. I log in, and everything’s on fire. I join the incident call, and it turns out that we hadn’t processed a single trade in the new system that whole week. I discover that it was thanks to a config change I’d made several weeks before, that had just made it to production. No-one (neither the users, nor I) had realised! But we missed several hundred million pounds worth of payments in that week as a result.

It was so jarring, having been relieved that I made it to the holiday, then joining the incident call and struggling to work out what to do. I completely dissociated and my mind was blank. I remember being on the call and really passively and calmly walking around my room. I kept thinking “I need to do x, I need to do y” but my mind couldn’t focus and I was just staring at the screen. At some point I just lay in bed with my laptop while on the call.

There had been a total failure of process: my change had been approved by two people, the nonprod environment was configured differently in a way that didn’t expose the bug, the recon failures looked very similar to the false positives, and there were so many false positives that it was impossible to dig into all of them. Meanwhile, we didn’t have basic queries monitoring that trades were flowing in, and the users weren’t paying much attention either, until they realised that it was broken.

Still, I made a lot of mistakes. I should have just escalated that there were breaks instead of trying to figure it out myself. I shouldn’t have been afraid to call the tech lead and bring them out of their holiday. And I shouldn’t have been afraid of the confrontation with the users.

Anyway, that experience really messed me up mentally for a long time. I lost so much confidence and became so much more scared of production (not in a healthy way). It really was not the right environment for me.

I once worked for 32 hours straight in a print shop to get a project out the door. Print shops (especially then) were fucking insane pressure cookers. The same intensity as an ER only stupid because instead of lives being on the line it was money. A lot of money, but just money. Early 00’s, everything was output on film back then. Had a weird error in an image that was used throughout a catalog. Normally, you could send a working signature through to the press, but the image was in every signature except the cover. I tried every possible trick I knew to get it to work, output film to test it, back to the drawing board. But yeah, 32 hours straight on this one thing. Finished up at around 4am, drove home but just kind of kept driving. Slightly delirious. Parked on top of a ridge off the shoulder and watched the sun come up. Went home and slept for I don’t even know how long.