Best Of

Definitely been some gross places and encountered some odd things, like that time I found a severed hand under a 60 year old VA hospital steam boiler that was either pinched off when setting the boiler or tossed in there by a funny employee on their way to the morgue down the hall (same job site, rode the elevator down to the basement AKA morgue with a guy we called Dr Kevorkian who was eager to show us the freshly amputated leg on his cart), but I worked in a R&D facility for a world renowned college about 6-7 years ago and although I was not working in this particular area, another worker brought me over to the area where they were working on an artificial human nervous system. There were cadaver parts, ranging from just a hand to a full corpse, on various tables doing various maneuvers. The one that still haunts me to this day is a pair of legs severed at the waist, with the toes on one foot twiddling around while the other leg was bending at the knee up and down while the foot remained flat on the table. I could deal with the hands and fingers since I have seen enough Addams Family in my day, but the vision of that leg kicking around without an upper body attached will be burned in my mind forever.

Your 3rd one reminds me of pulling cable in the trays in the unfinished ceiling of the gross anatomy labs. this is where med students dissect corpses to learn anatomy. It was about 50 years old and I was knocking probably 30 years of um…"dust" off of the trays.

Heh. The only job worse than the one I'm at today is the one I'm going to tomorrow. The one I was at yesterday wasn't too bad, though.

In my forty years in the field, this is a list of the three absolute worst places I worked. I would love to hear about yours. 

Pet Manufacturer Rendering Plant Boiler – The entire inside of this plant was covered with a clear gel that was really slippery. I fell twice covering my clothes with the goo and the stench. It was like walking on ice. While reaching up to adjust the steam pressure control, my feet would slide into almost a split. I was so glad they found another boiler company. 

Drug House - We serviced the boilers for an apartment building. The owner called us one Friday evening and asked if we could look at the furnace for one of his rental homes, explaining his normal guy was injured. I informed him we didn’t stock parts for furnaces as we only worked on boilers. He asked if I could still go as they had no heat. When I arrived, I was greeted at the door by a sinister looking man pointing a pistol at me. 

“What you want?’ the man demanded

“Furnace,” I said meekly, and he smiled widely and informed me they were all freezing.

Inside the house was about a half dozen men; guns and drugs littered the coffee table and couch. I was shown the door to the basement. My heart was pounding; I was sure they could hear it. On the way down, I prayed that it would be an easy fix. In the basement was more guns. A pistol was on the washing machine next to the furnace, another on the shelf next to the laundry detergent. The problem was just a dirty flame sensor and after cleaning it, the furnace fired right up. Upstairs, the man in charge asked me for my card and I lied, saying I didn’t have one. I explained I wasn’t the regular furnace guy. There was no way I wanted them to have my contact info.

Funeral home incinerator – I was hired to help a contractor wire and start a burner at a funeral home. They neglected to tell me the burner was attached to an incinerator. The maintenance man regaled me with stories about what happens inside the incinerator. I was having a hard time keeping down the Cheerios I had for breakfast. The floor was covered in ashes that were previously people. I kept apologizing to the ashes for stepping and kneeling on them. 

Ok, your turn. 

The only problem with studies like that — and it's a sort of minor irritation — is that they are, geographically, so coarse. It's inevitable — going finer grained would be very difficult. But it does tend to bias — inevitably, no criticism — towards suburban type areas, and overlook relatively sparsely populated areas (such as where I live!) where LP is wildly expensive, electricity is eye-watering, and so… more oil.

As to system type the emphasis nowadays is on having air conditioning available, so it is quite natural that correspondingly heat pumps will be popular, and forced air is cheap.