Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire What crappy no future jobs have you done, to keep food on the table?

Worked in a hog barn while in college. Minimum wage but an apartment was provided. Allowed me to get through college with no debt. 6 am in the nursery and soaked through with sweat. Days when we had a plug in the line draining the pit, was standing in liquid manure almost to my chest reaching over with one hand trying to feel and find what was blocking the outflow pipe opening while my ear was just touching the liquid.

Cleaning out underneath raised nursery floors. Lay on the concrete floor to reach under the decks and remove boards that contained the manure under the pens and not leach/run out into the aisle and you pull your arm out with pig manure all over it and maggots crawling all over your arm.

Fed some pigs in a research trial a feed made from yeast. The manure was the consistency of really thick peanut butter. Scraping those pens daily was a bear. At the end of the trial trying to clean off the little layers that built up over the months was brutal. Dealing with hogs that had been dead days in the summer sun. I could go on. But, I had a great boss. Nothing we did, he hadn't or wouldn't do himself. Loved the job because of my boss and coworkers.

Another job I took when I needed a job was power washing nursery and farrowing rooms in a commercial hog outfit. I would show up around 9pm and go to power washing maybe a dozen crates in a room or 6 nursery pens in a room. Expanded-metal type floors and every speck of manure had to be cleaned off all those metal rods that made up the floors etc. Mind numbing. Would finish up around 2 or 3 in the am. Drive back to where I was paying a guy $100 to sleep on his couch because I didn't have a place to live and couldn't afford an apartment.

Worked for my step-dad on a roofing crew. Reroofing flat roofs in the summer. Chipping, power-brooming, brooming and shoveling all that gravel and material into a wheel barrow and hauling it to the roof's edge and dumping it. Sucked a $s. First day I was on a power broom as a 16 year old, I made the 24 yo fit athletic guy working with me run to the edge of the roof to puke. I just kept on pushing that fricken broom. I do not have fond memories of that job. Most of the employees were bonafide alcoholics. Tougher than hell. I could never figure out how they drank the way they did and still show up the next day and work their butts off in the heat and humidity. Learned right there I was not tough enough to be an alcoholic.