Hardest job/ toughest workout

Read some nasty jobs so far, just thought I’d throw in my $0.02 as well. Here they are in ascending shittyness: 3. Just like the last post, I’ve done some freight loading as well in a Wal-Mart distribution center. Fun stuff. 10 hour days of stacking freight in the back of a 140degree sea-land trailer destined for Alaska. The cutest part was the managers who had roaming loaders who were supposed to assist anyone who had too much freight coming down, but never used them. You’d have two people’s worth of freight coming down the line and they’d be yelling at you to 'Break down the line!" (ie, Hurry up) 2. Did down about 7-8 feet in the ground putting in irrigation pipe for a potato field. For those that don’t know, the ground that far down is packed and hard as shit. Find the old pipe that you have to clear the dirt around. Problem is, the shovels won’t cut through the ground and no one has a pick. So what do we do? Grab this 50lb scrap bar with a sharp end and use that. Imagine a lifting bar with a point at the end, and lifting that on end and slamming it into the ground repeatedly to break it up. 3. All time worst shittiness. Filling in the forms of a ten foot high wall with concrete. Normally they use a sort of crane with a long arm that goes up in the air, then loops back down to dump the concrete into the top of the form ten feet up (you may have seen these at large construction sites, I dunno the name) Anyway, we didn’t have one of those, so we had to get up on wobbly-ass scaffolding, loop the concrete tube over your shoulders (ie, squat bar) and feed the concrete into the form. Meanwhile 3-4 people would on the ground holding the hose as well. The real problem was not that the tube was 4" in diameter, filled with concrete and ridiculously heavy, but that it takes a helluva lot to pump that much thick shit, so the tube was jerking like a bitch from the pressure. So besides just holding onto this damn concrete-filled tube, it also threatened to pull you off the scaffolding at any time as well. Fun stuff. Did I mention it was August and about 105 as well?

Oh, one thing I learned from the UPS experience - the word “fragile” doesn’t mean crap. They might kick the box with a little less force, but most likely not.

Shipyard repair work…not only was there a lot of hauling heavy, irregularly shaped items, but holding a 30 pound sander in front of your body with fully extended arms is quite an isometric workout after 6 hours! That and construction and farming work involving (as an above poster mentioned) digging beyond the topsoil into what amounts to a compressed conglomerate like sandstone.

JasonL - 2000-4000 pounds of mullets? Damn there must have been a lot of Camaros in the region.

Make sure to check out my interview with Jimmy “The Ironbull” Pellechia today. This guy states that all of the hard labor that he has done is one of the reasons why he is so strong.

I didn’t quite understand your post. But if you are talking about them getting rich, not really. During the mullet season(about 2 months), the commercial fisherman can make up to $40,000, but the rest of the year they don’t make too much money. Mullet is bought for the eggs(or row) and the white row(males) is only $.20-.30 a pound while the yellow row(females eggs) is close to a dollar.

JasonL, elegua was talking about the oh-so-stylish mullet hairstyle, not the fish. Ya know, riding in the old Camaro with the mullet flapping in the breeze…

Well I baled hay for 8 hrs. straight once and actually tried to work out when I got home but my arms were cramping. How about holding a 700 lb. boar for the vet to take a blood sample. Then he loses the needle which had to be extra long to get through so much tissue. I held that boar for 10 minutes while he looked for the needle. Some of your stuff sounds worse though.

Sorry, I didn’t get it at first. Anyway that would be a lot of bad hair styles.

Loading hay in 100deg heat for about 4 hours, onto the truck was hard enough but stcking it in the shed was worse.

I used to work night shift in a machine shop and my job was make couplers for rerod. These were used in bridge construction to attach very large pieces of rerod. Anyway, the largest size of couplers weighed about 45lbs when they came of the saw. I had to debur each end, stamp a serial #, dip it in oil and then stack it in a storage tub. I would pick up each coupler 5 times before it was in the tub. I would do that for 11hrs, on a good night I would do about 55/hour. I would then go work out in the morning. Several times I went to the gym, changed, did a warm up set and thought, “not today” and would walk right out. The people at the gym probably thought I was on some sort of HIT. Anyway, that was years ago and now I’m in grad school and if I ever need motivation I simply think back to the past…

On another site we had a peel off concrete-tile insulation. The tiles were 2’x4’ & had 1/2" of concrete on the top & that blue insulation glued on the bottom. The whole roof was 30,000 square ft & there were 3 wings like that on the building. The things were 25 yrs old so about 60% of them were water-logged & weighed ~50lbs I guess. The lighter ones were probably 30. I had to do all that with a couple others guys because we were the slaves. The rest of the time we were pulling off tear-off (the old tar & gravel-sheets of it that weighed a ton) & running around with a wheelbarrow. I wasn’t allowed to touch a broom because I was in pretty good shape.

The most phyiscally and mentally tough was most likely Airborne Arctic Mortar Platoon Leader. We were alway short troops so I would end up carrying a base plate (45#), 81mm tube (44.5#) or bipod (46.5#), five mortar rounds (8 to 12 pounds each),the platoon radio 26#, my arctic equipment (45#), standard infantry gear (35#). Through sub-zero weather, cross county, on snow shoes during 20 hour days.
Sometimes we would be lucky and get to drag/wrestle an artic sled about 400# and some of the gear would be stored in it. If we were really lucky, our company commander would allow us to use one of the company’s two snowcats to move our sheds forward, while we walked.
A good time was had by all. Best of Luck.

Uranium miner ten years in New Mexico 129 degree rock temp. drink 2 six packs o gator ade and a gallon of water in an eight hour shift and never take a leak.loved it!
Also 0311 USMC Viet Nam 20 Mo.

Mexicans do work hard. The hardest working Mexican I ever met was a chica who i met in a bar and brought her back home for tequila. Not kidding. She had to weigh over 200 pounds. She was able to wrestle me onto my bed, pull out my cock, climb up the big pole like a beanstalk, mount me and slide up and down that thing for an ten hour shift. Seven days a week. Now that’s hard work.