Most dangerous job

POSTED BY: SignyM
UPDATED: Sunday, January 15, 2006 21:41
VIEWED: 5795
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HARDWARE

Friday, January 6, 2006 7:05 PM

Well, to contrast and compare, the most dangerous job according to OSHA is commercial fisherman.I grew up in New England and when a vessel went missing and nothing was ever found, it was assumed they pulled in some leftover from World War 2 or a naval ordnance dumping ground. A mine designed to punch a hole in a battleship or cruiser is going to turn a fishing trawler (and its crew) into toothpicks.

Plus, rarely if ever does the ground open up and swallow a car. The ocean swallows craft of all descriptions with equanimity. Plus, of course, if you happen to lose your footing and fall into the ocean, it won't take long for the ocean to either drown or freeze you.

The ocean can be a dangerous place. Hats off to the Coast Guard.

The more I get to know people the more I like my dogs.

RUE

Friday, January 6, 2006 9:46 PM

My worklife has been pretty tame.

I worked at a gas station and had to make the night deposit - nothing ever happened to me.

I worked in a county hospital lab - never caught anything, not even Hepatitis B which is the most catchable nasty thing around. (It's hard to catch AIDS). And our door was 10' down the hall from emergency psychiatric - every once in a while a patient would wander in making incoherent threats - but nobody ever got hurt.

Nearly everything I know I learned by the grace of others.

SIGNYM

Friday, January 6, 2006 11:05 PM

Hey, just because a soldier doesn't get wounded doesn't mean he wasn't running under a hail of bullets. Nothing ever "happened" to ME either, but you were at risk in your various jobs.

---------------------------------
Please don't think they give a shit.

CITIZEN

Saturday, January 7, 2006 1:20 AM

I've not had many jobs. My first real job before during and after University was working as a Barman. Not too dangerous really, I did get threatened a couple of times by people who were unable to stand up straight, once by a guy who had a poor grasp of English and said:
"I find you, I cut you up, right across your belly."

I'm still here so I'm guessing he got lost.

Now I work for the British MOD. The most dangerous place I've been doing that was Germany.

Pretty dull really.

More insane ramblings by the people who brought you beeeer milkshakes!
Remember, the ice caps aren't melting, the water is being liberated.

RUE

Saturday, January 7, 2006 1:45 AM

Being threatened by people almost too drunk to stand up .... snicker ..... snort .... guffaw ....

Nearly everything I know I learned by the grace of others.

RUXTON

Saturday, January 7, 2006 6:35 AM

There's some frightening and tough job descriptions here about. Diseases, dangerous mind-damaged people, etc. The thought of falling off a tractor while dragging a disk harrow is frightening, to be sure; and anything with law enforcement can be dicey. My hat's off to all you guys, and I for one appreciate the sharing.

Me, the most dangerous and also the hardest job BY FAR I've ever taken on was being a fur trapper in interior Alaska, which I did for three winters. Something goes wrong with your snow machine or you drive across a lake with overflowed, soggy ice when you're 40 miles from help and it's 40 below....

And I've done both of those things. Spent 14 hours out one day at minus 40, and I'm not exaggerating. Plenty of folks still up there can verify that. Another day I got stuck in overflow and it took up all of the daylight to get myself dug out. On the way home that night I got turned around (not lost, mind you), and if it had not been a clear night and I had not been able to tell north from the stars, I'd still be out there. (Which some on this forum would have appreciated, I'm sure.)

LIMINALOSITY

Saturday, January 7, 2006 7:59 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by Ruxton:
Spent 14 hours out one day at minus 40

Whoa Rux, that's some Jack London stuff. -40 is no picnic even without the wind chill, even for a few minutes at a time.

Some of you have had some dangerous jobs, cudos for surviving. This pales by comparison. One summer I had a 3rd shift job at a plastics factory. Molton plastic and hot metal molds combined with sleepyhead operators has its moments, but fortunately I never got more than a blister. It was stinky, it was roaring loud. Some of the machines you had to reach way in to yank the piece out if the mold wasn't operating properly, and the machines were automated, so you had to be pretty quick about it. The motorcycle helmet machine was the worst scary monster, it was huge, fast, deep, and the timing or temp were often a bit off, so sometimes each helmet would be stuck on the mold and had to be yanked off for hours at a time. I was one of the few, the awake, so I got that machine pretty often. It was slow, so there was time and space for dancing and singing at the top of my lungs. Wow, I haven't thought about this in a long time. Wouldn't want to do that job again, but we also made Barrel 'o Monkeys, my favorite, and they gave me that machine whenever I asked for it.
Thanks for sharing guys.

Shiny Trees! Yavanna made Shiny Trees!

RUXTON

Saturday, January 7, 2006 8:31 PM

LIMINALOSITY, your helmet job sounds like running a punch press. Did that for a few terrifying weeks long ago. You had to insert a blank of steel by hand, remove your hands, and hit the pedal. A massive rotating iron wheel then kicked in and drove another massive chunk of iron down against the steel blank and pierced and bent it to shape with one whack. Some guys could not keep coordinated, or awake, and lost fingers. Gives me chills just to think of it now.

LIMINALOSITY

Sunday, January 8, 2006 3:00 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by Ruxton:
...massive rotating iron...with one whack.

Any job where tolerances, coordination and alertness are a part of the equation is challenging, as you, 7% and Signym attest, and it's a different kind of challenge to dance away from the 'one whack' of people who are off center for whatever reason, as DT, Hardware and Cit mention. I never had any bad experiences, lucky me. Part of the fun in life for me is paying attention to discover how to do a thing better, so there was fun of that in it.

Rux - Did you enjoy furtrapping in Alaska? Three years is quite a while to do something in an environment that physically demanding. The furtrapper I know (believe it or not) talks about his deep ambivalence to the lone wolf aspect of it.

The hardest job I've ever had was 5 years working with adoptive parents and severe special needs children in foreign countries. The tangle of law with conflicting perspectives and cumbersome bureaucracies holding the strings on a complex and shifting process, when you are witness to waiting children dying for lack of the care they might have had was by far the hardest thing I've done. And still, I'd do that again.

Shiny Trees! Yavanna made Shiny Trees!

RUXTON

Sunday, January 8, 2006 11:16 PM

LIMINALOSITY:
Actually, I had about zero options where I lived at the time (interior Alaska). My writing (firearms field) was accepted when I did any of it, but payment was slow and poor. The winters were agonizingly long before I began trapping, but once I began, the winters flew by. And there was the possiblity of making a bit of money along the way. Then I sold a piece of land I had in Colorado and used the money to move to town and begin (again) a life of freelance photography, and never went back to trapping. Nor will I, but I still live alone in a remote part of the western U.S. mountains, so there's something that lingers, I suppose.

And I enjoy my ongoing study of the mountain men, who were fur trappers. They were the roughest, toughest SOB's ever to set foot on this planet, and to a small extent I know something of what they went through. In fact my online name comes from an Englishman who rode with Kit Carson's men in the 1840s, and who is my only remaining role model, or hero.

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