I’m not asking about the worst job. I’m asking about the grimmest one. For me it was when in my teenage years I was making candles you would put on a grave. Most of the time is was just filling the form, burn the right shape and passing it forward. But sometimes I had to fill in for a person who was selling these things, and that is where it gets grim. It was decades ago but I still remember one lady who asked what would be the best candle to memorialize her late husband. And she gave me the whole life story of her and her husband. I shit you not, it was the most touching love story I have ever heard. I quit the next day.
I worked at a company that transcribed handwritten medical forms to digital text when the automated OCR failed. I got assigned to a population of Tricare forms for a while. Tricare is the health care program for active duty US military members. We never saw the actual physical forms, nor the forms in their entirety, just snapshots of one question at a time to protect the patient’s privacy. The fields where they described their mental health symptoms and how relationships with family and friends were going would sometimes make me want to vomit and cry and quit all at once. I got moved to a different assignment and when they wanted to move me back, I left that job.
shit that sounds harsh