Nightmare job stories

DANCING WITH THE DEAD

To earn some extra money while studying I worked in an old people's hospital as an Aid. Basically, I was assigned to a ward where it was my duty to clean everything from the kitchen to the toilets, as well as serve hospital food to the toothless old gummers.

Of the five wards, mine held the most terminal cases, unfortunately, as well as the most mad. One old chap, unable to grasp the concept of the modern toilet - having been on the streets for 25 years - insisted on curling one off on the floor of the matron's office every night. When I got to know her, I began to suspect that he may not be as mad as I'd thought.

Then the day came when I was asked to cover for a porter. This normally involved wheeling the dead to the morgue. When someone died the curtains were pulled round the bed and the body wrapped in a shroud by the nurses. This has to happen fairly promptly otherwise the shock of loss can trigger a little epedemic of clog-popping as the other ward residents get themselves in a tiz.

It was up to me to manhandle the body off the bed onto a wheeled trolley. The trolley was covered by a coffin-shaped tent of material with a velcro flap on one side to slide the body in through. The body I had to deal with that day was that of a little old lady about the size of Yoda. Even then, in death, she was suprisingly heavy. So much so that I stumbled while manhandling her from her bed to the trolley. The trolley scooted away from me, shot through the curtain, and I stumbled after it with the corpse in my arms. This immediately set off a whirlwind of panic as the other patients began screaming and fainting, while nurses rushed around trying to ensure that no one died.

THEN, when I finally got the body onto the trolley and to the morgue, rigor mortis had begun to set in. The tightening of the muscles meant that it slowly began to sit up on its stainless steel bench. In order to slide the bench into the freezer I had to put my knee on the legs and lie across the body to push the upper torso back onto the bench. At this point my supervisor turned up to see how I was doing. Having heard reports that I'd been 'dancing round the ward with a corpse' and now finding my sprawled across it in the morgue, I was immediately asked to leave. I have never been so glad to be sacked.

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REHAB DEATH WISH

I worked one summer in a rehabilitation hospital, working in the administration section. The job was great, the hours were standard, and the opportunities for skiving off were something I have been unable to match since.

As part of my job, I had to visit the offices on the wards daily to update the in-patient's charts with any new results of blood tests, x-rays etc. Most of the ward offices were located at the end of the ward, meaning that I would have to walk the length of the ward and past all the patients to get to the files. This was absolutely fine, except in the High Dependency Unit.

There was one patient who had been in a particularly nasty car crash, and was made to sit up in his bed for two hours every day. If I made it to the ward before the bed was titled, he would lie silently staring at the ceiling. However, if I was running late, I would get there while he was sitting, and I could always hear him muttering something over and over under his breath.
After a few days of this, my curiosity got the better of me, and I walked deliberately slowly past his bed. I still feel the horror I felt when I suddenly realised what he was saying, over and over, was "Kill me. Kill me. Kill me..."

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COME AGAIN?

My worst job has got to be working in a mental health care centre last summer. I only managed two shifts. For a start, the house was in Hounslow, a place kind of like one of the outer rings of Saturn in terms of distant from Central London. Hounslow sucks.

Anyway, the job itself: I was shit at it.

My first chore was to take a young woman for a walk in her wheelchair. "You'll have to chat and reassure her that you're there," they told me. She couldn't talk at all and I'm not much good at banter - nevertheless I wheeled her along and managed to come up with some crap to mumble. I don't think she liked me that much because have way through the journey she started to squeak a bit, and then began to cry. "Shit," I thought, hastily backtracking and wheeling the chair around, back in the direction of the home. Unfortunately a wheel hit the curb, I hadn't tied her in properly, and she flew quite dramatically through the air, landing in a bundle on the concrete in front of me.

The second mishap came when I had to get someone into bed. It shouldn't have been difficult, I only had his face to wipe and a pair of pyjamas to put on. I only realised that I hadn't put some of those protective plastic gloves on when he pissed all over my hands.

The second shift was the one that did it. I thought I was settling in on the second one, I really did. The girl in the wheelchair smiled at me, the catastrophe forgotten; the boy who had pissed all over my hands now held one of them as we settled down on the sofa and watched Eastenders on TV and another boy - I don't know what his name was, Roger or whatever - was obviously quite taken with me. "What's your name?" he asked me. "El - lo -ise," he kept repeating, over and over, when I told him.
"El-lo-ise!"
"El-lo-ise!"
"El-lo-ise!"
I'm not quite sure how long it went on for. I was taken up with something else - trying to talk to one of the other residents, I suppose - but he kept going on and on, chanting my name in an ascending crescendo. Eventually, thinking he might actually want something, I looked around.

And there he was - or rather it was - a fully visible dick being wanked off very close to my face as he sang my name.

I didn't know where to look.

Anyway, after that I decided that the job wasn't really for me. A bit too much excitement - more than I could cope with.
To top it all the agency lost my shift timesheets, I couldn't be arsed to go all the way down to Hounslow and get another one filled out, so I never even got paid.