What's the most dangerous job have you ever done?

Over the past couple months, there's been a surge in violence (gun shootings, robberies, murders) in my city. Supposedly, much of it is credited to either new people (from New Orleans) or new gangs. It's an extremely interesting story, and lots of people are afraid. Do I try to write about this story, or should i continue to write about stupid, safe things?

wait, forget it. i'm going for life.

Healthcare, specifically the day I cleaned surgical instruments covered in the blood of an HIV+ patient. Note: this isn't very dangerous, but I have mostly worked cushy shit.

skip company having to sifle through all the lovely household dodgy chemicals and garbage. As well as: almost had my head crushed by a reversing truck, almost got skittled by a flying concrete ball (about 6 foot in diameter!), and while stood in the back of a tipper truck the driver forgot i was there and almost drove off down the motorway with me in (someone spotted me just in time and warned the driver)

good times, for £1 per hour too.

Worked behind the bar at an Irish pub in an industrial city in Germany, right next to the train station. Pretty much all the customers were terrifying, but most of all the itinerant Irish folk who travelled Europe working on construction sites and road building. I've worked in a few rough pubs but I've never seen so many all out brawls as I saw there. It was a great fun job as well though.

i work in social housing in ireland, gem. nobody out there will appreciate that post half enough. those are some tough, fisticuff loving fellas.

i've done trawler fishing with a dutch crew, that was pretty tough going.

Yep I was with a Dubliner at the time and had lived in Ireland for a year previous. The crew in Dublin tried to explain about 'knackers' but I never would have grasped it without seeing it myself. They weren't too bad to me, I think they found my Australian accent as incomprehensible as I found theirs. But fuck I was terrified on Sundays, when they started drinking whiskey and baileys at 9am. I remember a couple of times working the early breakfast shift (god love the train station and the shift workers coming in for the earlies) then coming back to work the evening shift, the publican was too scared to cut them off and they would trash the bar and any poor people unfortunate enough to be present within it. Or vomit everywhere on the floor around them and then turn back to the bar and continue drinking.

Hadn't thought about that job for years. Seems like another lifetime.

oh, those fun-loving itinerants, as lovably depicted in such epics as "snatch" and "into the west". can't we all just get along?

almost got skittled by a flying concrete ball (about 6 foot in diameter!),

This is some Indiana Jones shit.

yeah lol. it shot across the wharehouse because the shovel digger (which is a fairly big vehicle with massive wheels) drove over it at an awkward angle and thus the tyre gave the thing a shit load of backspin. Missed me by a few yards but that thing fucking flew and i shat my pants!

also i have no idea why someone is discarding huge concrete ball shaped objects into skips.

I think the worst thing ever happened to me was dropping a 20kg roll of 1 hour photo paper onto my foot. In front of a customer, so I couldnt swear. Owww. I broke my toe.

i wouldn't have guessed that working in a shoe store could be dangerous... but then a few weeks ago a pile of rather heavy men's shoe boxes fell on my head and almost knocked me out.

Crowd control at a college football game.

bike messenger

I was a PA on a grad school film where they had a couple nice big HMI lights shining from the outside into the location so they could still shoot as if it was still daylight. It started raining like mad with some pretty insane winds, and the lights fell over a couple times. So they sent me, a dude who easily weighs less than the poles they were on, much less the lights themselves, to stand in the rain holding on to 20 foot metal poles with high voltage lights on top wearing no gloves for about four hours.

I have no idea how I'm still alive.

i work in social housing in ireland, gem. nobody out there will appreciate that post half enough. those are some tough, fisticuff loving fellas.

Like you're the only person working with tough folk. I used to work with unemployed teenagers and ex-cons in the West of Scotland, two of whom have since been murdered in family feuds, several of whom are no strangers to nights in the cells for glassing random punters in the street, a number of smack addicts and assorted others whose enemies have no qualms about popping in to the centre to sort them out. Still loved the job though.

appreciate that, not saying otherwise at all.

Tossup:

a) Six years as a typesetter in a single-wide trailer with four chain-smokers. Equipment included oldstyle phototypesetters with stenchy developing chemicals, an offset duplicator with stenchy blanket-wash, and a tabletop folding machine that once grabbed my tie and tried to pull me in.

b) Two years in a small print shop doing pretty much everything, including running a different small duplicator. SOP for determining whether the water rollers were wet enough to start printing was to run your finger along it while the press was running. I got careless once, it grabbed me and peeled a large section of my right middle finger.

xpost you don't think "no-one here will appreciate that" seems a bit "ha ha my job's more dangerous than your job, you couldn't possibly understand", especially when you aren't giving concrete examples of WHY it is?

Jesus, Ailsa, take a deep breath. If you're familiar with that environment, then obv you are among the exceptions who will appreciate the stories above. The rest of us pampered pets will just have to imagine them.

Or, y'know, learn about them from movies. I'm sure it's all very romantic.

i almost gotten eaten by a hueg flim processing machine in the dark - it would bend big steel racks in half like no big deal if you put them on there wrong - i misunderstood where it was in its cycle and was feeling around for a spot for a rack when i felt a piece of the machine start to push my arms up so i instinctively dropped to my knees and slipped may arms out at the last second - they totally wouldve been broken in half - still kinda gives me shudders to think abt ten years later

xxxpost

nope.

if i could just pick you out of my throat for a moment-

i just meant that thee's a pretty romanticized idea of irish travellers out there compared to the reality, and that for the most part people don't know how rough they generally are.

it wasn't meant as a comparison against every other groups out there (i'm sure that there are tougher), just that the majority of people mightn't appreciate how difficult they are to deal with from the coverage they get in movies/journalism.

sorry bout that, and maybe calm down a little?

Laurel, I'm quite happy to appreciate others' stories. darraghmac hasn't given a story to appreciate. OK? Which is why I asked him for concrete examples of WHY it is so dangerous - I've done plenty social worky-type jobs with supposedly-rough groups that weren't even remotely dangerous as well.

xpost. fair enough.

Oh, look, I misread your post entirely! Please delete me.

I was gonna say.