Recently, Reddit user u/AMGBOI69420 asked the community: "What’s the most fucked-up thing you’ve seen at work?"
Folks revealed some truly horrific and appalling stories they've seen at their workplace, which probably haunt them to this day. They're pretty heavy, and I don't know how they powered through these experiences.
So, here are some of the most traumatizing things people have witnessed at their jobs:
Warning: Some stories include violence, firearms, drug abuse, and death. Please proceed with caution.
1. "I worked with a guy who got part of his finger taken off by an industrial mill. People were supposed to turn it off before cleaning it, but we're talking about a company that didn't even have a safety shower or eyewash station in the lab (safety protocol was not generally followed). I don't know how more people didn't get injured at that place — it was only a matter of time. They sent him to the lab area I worked in while his nubbin had healed enough for him to go back to manual labor."
2. "I'm a nurse who used to work in an oncology unit. One of my patients' family members walked into the wrong room by accident. The patient in that room had passed away and was shrouded, waiting to be transported to the morgue. She threw herself on top of the body weeping, thinking it was her loved one, and that no one had called her. Then, we realized what happened...it was not good."
3. "A guy knew he was getting fired, so he took a shit in the trash can in his cubicle. Nobody knew if he did it there or took it into the bathroom to shit in it, but he did it one way or another. He got called up to HR and was let go, then the people working in his area started complaining about the shit smell. And, sure enough, I found it in his little trash can. I called him to ask about it, and he said it was an old burrito he forgot to throw out…it was not an old burrito he forgot to throw out."
4. "I once saw someone step into a bucket of hot fryer oil — it got into their shoes and everything. It was so bad that when they took the shoe off, it peeled off their skin with it. The person had second- and, I believe, third-degree burns. He never came back to work, but I saw the pictures — it was horrific."
5. "I saw a guy fall 40 floors onto a large pile of cast iron piping as I was walking out for lunch. I didn’t end up eating lunch after witnessing that."
6. "I was a head lifeguard instructor. The worst thing I saw was a 15-year-old boy who dove off the diving board, cracked his head open on the bottom of the pool (blood gushing), and was unconscious. My coworker and I had to do a deep-water spinal rescue (which is basically the hardest rescue at a pool). The kid not only survived, but became a fellow lifeguard himself the next summer."
7. "I'm a paramedic, and a man, woman, and their son worked at the port nearby (the son worked as a medic at the port). The man drove forklifts, the woman spotted the man, and he didn't know she was behind him. He ran her over with his forklift, split her body in half, and her intestines scattered about 20 feet out of her body. The son had to be the first responder — he lost his mind."
8. "I craned an old grain bin that was cemented into the concrete slab it was on. There were pigeons whose feathers and carcasses made a firm floor about two feet deep into the concrete. There were about 15 pigeons who looked like they'd never seen the light of day — they were too fucked up or young to fly. They couldn't get out because the only place to escape was the cap at the top, which was impossible for a bird to fly vertically through without messing up their flight on the roof sheets. I'm guessing they survived off of the grain left inside it, and cannibalized the dead. Most farmers in my experience air out the bins and leave ways for birds to escape before we show up to do work. But, that was probably the nastiest farmyard I've ever been in — there were seven other bins just like it in a row."
9. "This happened during my construction days when I was 18. We were cutting out a trench for something (I'm thinking it was a water line of some sort, and it was fairly deep). It was just a muddy mess, and after about five days straight of rain, everything was water logged. We had just started the workday when we heard a ton of yelling further down the trench. It turned out the shoring that was preventing the trench from collapsing had given out, and buried a man inside up to his shoulders. Luckily, he survived, but he wasn't in a great state. He had broken most of his ribs, as well as both of his legs from the weight of the ground hitting him. The worst part was that while we were digging him out, we noticed just how serene he was. The guy had fully accepted that he was going to die."
10. "I pulled up to work when a dude ran out of the store. He was immediately shot by another dude behind me — he was stealing something, and the other guy just shot him. I called out that day. Another time, I was the only guy on the front-end, and a dude had gone into the bathroom, like, 50 minutes later. So, they sent me to check on him, and I found him slumped over dead. He overdosed and died in our bathroom. I went home immediately after that."
11. "I used to work at a regional coffee shop in the midwest. We had seen a few cockroaches around, and management called in exterminators. On a hunch (something to do with cockroaches' innate love for heat), a guy lifted the espresso machine open and found not one, not two, not three, but a whole-ass colony of cockroaches eco-systeming it up right in the machinery. That was two years into my college job as a barista there, and I had a latte everyday!"
12. "Airline pilot here — I watched a guy die in the Nashville terminal once. He keeled over in his chair waiting for boarding, and EMS was there almost immediately. They did CPR on him for a good 15 minutes, way past when everyone knew he’d died. The part that was haunting was watching it click for his wife that he was gone. Her reaction…I’ll never forget that."
13. "It was November right before Christmas 2011, and my CEO told me to fire a guy so we could make our bonuses for the year. I replied: 'His wife is dying of cancer and has two months at most to live — and he has kids. Just fire me and you'll make your bonus.' Without so much as a blink, he said: 'Well, what would you do?' I responded: 'I can defer some equipment purchases to next year, and that will cover the $300,000 you are looking for.' He said: 'Great, then do that...' He literally didn't care about another human being who was at the lowest of their lows. I'll never forget that. Fuck you, Rich."
14. And: "I worked in an assembly line making skyjacks. A female coworker was cleaning a base with her hand on a tire, and another worker was testing the tires. When she tested the tire, her hand was resting on it, and forced her arm into a one-inch gap in the base. I couldn’t even squeeze my pinky in this gap. She was stuck in this machine for about 45 minutes — arm completely shattered. Everyone was in a panic trying to get her arm out, but they literally had to disassemble the whole thing. The screams still haunt me."
Note: Some stories have been edited for length and/or clarity.