1. Medical students practiced on me, performing genital and rectal exams. I literally just sat there in a medical gown, waiting for the next student to come in.

2. I worked at a tannery, sorting kangaroo scrotums by size—some were destined to become animal feed, while others were turned into coin purses sold to tourists. Kangaroo scrotums smell absolutely foul, and they’re also crawling with ticks.

3. I prepared larvae. I worked for a company that produced natural pest control products and natural animal feed. My job involved preparing larvae for use in natural bird feed. Actually, it was one of my favorite positions at that company.

4. Once, I had to clean up poop smeared all over the men's restroom at the grocery store where I worked when I was 16.

The manager didn't give me any protective gear; he just bluntly said, «You're the only guy on shift today besides me, and *I'm* certainly not going to clean it up.»

5. I rated photos of guys' penises. It started out as a joke, but then guys started sending me $20 apiece to get their photos rated. I evaluated them based on a whole host of criteria and provided feedback. It was incredibly fun, though at a certain point, people started sending me some truly bizarre specimens.

6. Five days a week, I cleaned up vomit in a movie theater restroom. Thanks to the people who do this kind of work, public restrooms don't reek. The workers who perform these duties are severely underappreciated.

7. Once, at a music festival, I got drunk and reached into a urinal. Some rich jerk tossed two separate $100 bills in there just to see who would pick them up. He had no idea that I would have done the exact same thing even if they were $20 bills.

8. Once, at a casino, I found a $500 chip in a urinal. I fished it out with my hotel room key, dropped it into the sink, lathered it up and washed it off, and then went and cashed it in. At first, I thought I was being filmed by a hidden camera.

9. This happened in 2020, right before the pandemic hit. I answered a cleaning ad on Craigslist and went to an elderly man's house. He made me lick every single doorknob in his home, but despite that, I walked away with $3,000. That money really saved me.

10. I used to work in a call center—it was the most humiliating job of my life. I saw firsthand the kind of stress people endure working in call centers. They pay like shit, yet they make you work like a dog.

The only upside to my time at the call center was that it taught me to put more effort into my job search. And that effort certainly paid off.

11. I got paid to bang a sex worker right in front of her disabled client, who enjoyed watching it. After a two-hour session, I’d walk away with $200 in my pocket. I did this once a month for a year. It was 1996, and I was in college, so that was really good money for me.

12. I participated in a study for a lotion designed to make breasts bigger. No joke. For two months, I had to rub this lotion on twice a day, and then go to a clinic once a week so someone could give my breasts a full analysis—not just size, but also the distance between the nipples, the distance from the chin to the nipple, and their circumference. It was so awkward. And you know what? In the end, they told me it was all a placebo. Still, I made $500 and paid my rent. That was back in 2002.

13. Just yesterday, I was clearing out some guy's sewer line and pulled out 150 condoms. At least the dude is playing it safe.

14. My boyfriend—he was 15 at the time—met this creepy old guy. The guy offered him £100 to get into his car and do something dirty. In the end, my boyfriend took the cash and bailed before the guy could do anything. He met up with me and asked me out on a date. We spent our first date using money stolen from an old pervert. That was years ago, and we’re still together.

15. It was my first day working for a moving company in Boston. I was driving under a bridge when, at that exact moment, a guy decided to jump off it and kill himself. I was driving at about 70 miles per hour. He landed right on the front of my truck. I was 18 at the time. That incident still haunts me to this day, even though 20 years have passed.

16. I’m a nurse, so I’ve had to clean up shit, urine, vomit, and other bodily fluids. I’ve been punched in the face, kicked, and verbally abused. I’ve also provided post-mortem care and medical treatment to some truly terrible people—because that’s part of my job. For instance, my patients have included rapists, violent offenders, and so on. People have spat on me, defecated and urinated on me, coughed in my face on purpose, and so on. I do not recommend it.

17. I’ve cleaned up the scenes of suicides. It’s just part of my job. The worst thing about those situations is the smell. In those moments, I just tell myself that I’m getting paid double time because of the nature of the work, and I just keep doing my job.

18. I sold my body to the government and enlisted in the military. Later, I realized that the knee and back pain—along with the anxiety and depression—definitely weren't worth it.

19. I participated in clinical drug trials—partly because I actually needed the medication myself—but I’ll never do it again. Depending on the study, they might provide you with housing—sometimes even a two-story house—and food, usually decent takeout. I have no idea how that particular study affected my body in the long run, but they paid me enough to buy a plane ticket home.

20. When we were kids, my brother told me he’d give me 10 bucks if I downed a shot glass full of soy sauce. 10 out of 10—do not recommend.

21. I worked as a cleaner at a 24-hour truck stop. Never again in my life. Several times a day, I’d suit up in protective gear and a mask, grab a high-pressure hot water hose, and get to work. I will never understand why people love writing messages on public restroom walls using their own feces.

22. I’m a nurse. Here are just a few examples of what I’ve experienced on the job: Cleaning up diarrhea when my glove tore open; having amniotic fluid splash all over my shoes; and emptying a bile drain, only to spill the contents and completely soil my clothes.

A guy with a bowel obstruction started vomiting—and at that moment, his vomit consisted entirely of fecal matter. The puke came gushing out in every direction and somehow even splattered onto the door at the other end of the room. I’ve had to clean up flakes of sloughed-off skin from a patient’s scrotum—a patient who kept peeling dead skin off his penis and placing the pieces on his bedside table.

23. I worked as an EMT for seven and a half dollars an hour. I had to get into physical altercations with junkies, drunks, and people with mental illnesses. We worked shifts lasting anywhere from 48 to 96 hours with almost no sleep. I will never work in EMS again. Far too many people seem to think it’s perfectly acceptable to assault healthcare workers. Just so you know: we’ll kick your ass first, and then we’ll sue you. Yes, we have the right to defend ourselves—even if you’re dying. And we are under no obligation to help you if you sustain even more injuries because you made the stupid decision to attack us.

24. Have you ever wondered where cheap, mass-produced eggs come from? They come from factories. And those factories have to be cleaned every single day. Even considering that we clean the place every single day, it’s impossible to keep up with cleaning absolutely everything. And do you know what happens when broken eggs seep into the floorboards day after day, mixing with water? Well, I do. And I can also tell you exactly what kind of stench fills the air.

25. This happened in the army, during a deployment to Iraq. My buddies all chipped in and pooled together $200 to get me to eat an old, sticky fly strip. I was allowed to wash it down with water. But to win the bet, I had to go at least an hour without puking. I lasted an hour and two minutes. The hardest part about eating it was the incredibly sticky adhesive on the strip—it made actually consuming the thing insanely difficult. I rolled it into small, swallowable balls and washed them down with copious amounts of water. Thanks to this stunt—and other stupid things I did for cash—I didn't have to spend a single dime of my actual paycheck throughout the entire deployment.

26. I used to translate love letters of a rather intimate nature. One woman, who was cheating on her husband, was corresponding with her lover in France. This was back in 1999, before the internet had really caught on—at least in our country. They exchanged letters via regular postal mail.

As far as I could gather, the lady had lived in France for a while. That’s where she met her suitor and started up an affair with him. She had a basic grasp of French, but she still needed some assistance. You know how it goes: people can often converse quite comfortably in a foreign language, but the prospect of tackling a lengthy written text completely intimidates them. At the time, I was around twenty years old, while my client was in her forties. So, you can probably imagine just how cringeworthy the whole situation was. Sometimes she would bring in a letter and ask me to read it aloud to her, translating it on the fly.

As for the juicy details, I barely remember any of them. Mostly, it went something like this: «Remember when we did such-and-such? All I dream about is doing it all over again.» All in all, the whole thing felt just like that song Dylan wrote for Haley in the TV show *Modern Family*—only in French.

27. It was winter, and I was picking up various temporary odd jobs. One day, I got called in to help a crew of excavators locate a damaged sewer line.

The sewer pipes in this part of town—Orangeburg, South Carolina—were over a hundred years old, and most of them were made of wood. One of the sections had collapsed, creating a small sinkhole that subsequently clogged up and filled with semi-frozen sewage sludge. Because of the pipes' age, there were no existing blueprints for the sewer system. So, while a heavy-equipment operator handled the digging, someone had to climb down into the sinkhole and probe around with a shovel. Guess who got sent in to wade through the muck?

A septic truck arrived on the scene and tried to pump out the wastewater, but it could barely keep up with the inflow. When you’re a guy working temp jobs, you face intense pressure—even if it’s not applied directly. You’re essentially forced to take on whatever work comes your way. And if you turn down too many jobs, the boss simply stops calling you, and you’re left without any money. So, I agreed to do it. I’d been warned about the conditions beforehand, so I layered up with several layers of clothing, then stepped into a pair of garbage bags—pulling them up past my crotch—and wrapped them tight with duct tape to keep from getting filthy.

In the end, I spent only about 20—maybe 25—minutes down in that hole. But that was long enough to catch hypothermia. The tape didn't hold up very well, and at one point, I sank even deeper—right up to my waist. Two guys had to help me climb out. At three in the morning, standing on the side of the road—soaking wet and in minus 25-degree weather—I stripped down to my underwear, stuffed my shit-stained clothes into a garbage bag, and slowly made my way home. For the next three days, I couldn't seem to get warm.