sheeting and papering a roof in 100° weather. I was 14.

Worked 33h in a row as a paramedic. Normally not allowed here (24h is a hard limit, 12h standard). Not because I wanted to, not because someone got ill…we simply didn’t make it even close to the depot, for the last 4h simply a major crash happened right in front of us.

We returned to the depot and basically didn’t even have a single wound dressing, no O2, no collars, no blankets,nothing.

And the worst part: The whole time it wasn’t “the usual business” of old folks having a stroke or a fall. We had one mass casualty incident at the beginning of shift, a child in respiratory arrest and similar shit.

I slept for 12h straight after that and still felt like shit.

Simultaneous interpretation. My first time out I did 20-30 minutes and had to lie down immediately afterwards. You’d think that just listening to someone else talk and then just repeating them in another language would be easy, but you have to buffer quite a bit to get the interpretation right, and then talking and listening at the same time is also pretty hard.

We spent 2 hours doing CPR on a lady who worked in our hospital, while her husband watched and cried. She was young and the cardiac arrest was unexpected so we tried everything we could. Despite all our efforts we didn’t manage to get her back. CPR is not like it looks in movies and shows, it rarely works and is brutal on the person who’s died. CPR is physically exhausting to perform, generally you rotate so you’re only doing about 1-2 minutes at a time but even with breaks it’s still very hard work. Add on the emotional shock of an unexpected death and supporting a grieving partner, it was a naff day. One of the worst parts is you’ve got to go back on the floor afterwards and carry on like it’s normal.

That’s a tough call. I would say the hardest was when I was on the board of a regional charity organization and we caught the CEO embezzling. If you’ve never dealt with something like that before, it’s hard to imagine the river of shit that is coming your way.

This dude, who was paid a decent salary and benefits, very smugly told us that he felt he was more entitled to the money than the people who actually needed it. I’ve never wanted to punch anyone so badly. Firing him was the easy part. Dealing with the criminal investigation and the loss of community trust was the hard part. That was more of an emotionally exhausting year and a half rather than just a day though.

I once worked for 32 hours straight in a print shop to get a project out the door. Print shops (especially then) were fucking insane pressure cookers. The same intensity as an ER only stupid because instead of lives being on the line it was money. A lot of money, but just money. Early 00’s, everything was output on film back then. Had a weird error in an image that was used throughout a catalog. Normally, you could send a working signature through to the press, but the image was in every signature except the cover. I tried every possible trick I knew to get it to work, output film to test it, back to the drawing board. But yeah, 32 hours straight on this one thing. Finished up at around 4am, drove home but just kind of kept driving. Slightly delirious. Parked on top of a ridge off the shoulder and watched the sun come up. Went home and slept for I don’t even know how long.

I ran a drill rig for soil sampling for a few years. One day it was 100F outside and we had to drill inside a drycleaners. They had dryers and steam presses going , so it was a humid 130F inside. We used a remote drill rig which required running 100 lb hydraulic lines from the truck outside. These lines got so hot you couldn’t touch them with a bare hand. So imagine trying to move these heavy as hell lines without them touching bare skin and while having to shift your hands around constantly to avoid burns.

That ties for worst with the day we drilled at a gas station in a farm field in the middle of nowhere where it was -20F not counting the wind chill. The thing about soil sampling for contaminants is you have to wash the drill between holes. At those temperatures everything froze instantly and the machinery kept locking up with ice. It took us 8 hours to do what would normally take 2. And then we got a flat tire driving back…

This is nothing compared to some of the shit in this thread, but I accidentally accepted shifts at three jobs that had me working 24 hours straight. Started loading in for some sort of concert at 4am, then at 9am I went for a shift at a cafe, at 2pm i left for a shift at a grocery store, at 10pm I left to start tearing down the stage I set up in the morning. I was finally done at 4am, 24 hours later. Got home at 5am and as I was washing up all my joints cracked and I had the longest fart ever.

*Accidentally because the stagehand job was on-call and they only called me like once every few months. It was good money, so I accepted it on the spot. WOOPS.

As a consultant, watching ladder-climbing middle-management grind hard-working, honest people into pulp, then get promoted.

I was chasing a bug. Complete showstopper for a new system in which we had invested a lot to be the next big thing. And the responsibility lay with me.

I wrecked my brain on the two weeks towards Christmas trying to get it stable. I tried every trick in the book. I tried some more things after Christmas. Nothing, absolutely nothing made the system any better. I started to get anxiety attacks and breakdowns. I cried at work. Four weeks of bug hunting, and still no idea what actually went wrong.

In the end, it turned out to be a crazy hardware issue, something I could not fix in any way with software. One part for a tenth of a cent changed on each board, and the system ran like a charm.

Boss gave me the rest of the week off to recover.

I was about 3 months into my career as a software dev, and hated it. Hated the work, hated the company, hated the office. But I really had no other job experience and I knew I had to stick with it in order to get myself to a good financial situation eventually. In retrospect - the company could have been better about training me, but there wasnt really anything wrong with the job. But anyway, I coped with my impotent loathing by scrolling reddit for hours each day when I should have been working.

Which, at about 3 months in, led to a meeting with my boss where he told me that I needed to actually get shit done or I’d be fired.

So, appropriately motivated, I resolved to deliver the next project I worked on on time and under budget. I worked diligently on it for a few weeks, and then just before it was due to be demo’d, I found a critical bug in the software that required major architectural changes in the code. So for several days up to the deadline, I was showing up to the office at 9, working until 3 (am), going home to sleep a little, then back in the office - the whole time, of course, saying “fuck, I hate this. ihatethisihatethisihatethis IHATETHIS!”

The irony being that I had kept this kind of work/sleep schedule many times before doing physical activity or working on personal projects or playing video games, and felt perfectly fine. Tired, worn down… but fine.

The thing that makes hard work actually hard is that you don’t want to do it. When you have the tiniest ounce of giveashit, the work gets a whole lot easier.

Many days, having to carry on while being completely unable and exhausted. Being neurodivergent can be very hard.

18 hours on a solar power plant in ~120° F heat replacing burnt up reactors and busbars in the inverters, covered in glycol which is like an antifreeze that is real sticky and somehow smells / tastes sweet (but is still gross af) so all the bugs are attracted to you and crawl all over.

Shooting weddings is uniquely draining, physically and mentally. 16 hours on your feet carrying weighty kit, putting your body in awkward positions to get the right angle, needing to stay hyper alert so you don’t miss the perfect shot, constantly thinking ahead, all with the added pressure to not fuck things up. I’ve done some really gruelling location work with even longer days but weddings are always the hardest.

Nothing nearly as grueling as a lot of these folks.

I worked as a weather forecaster for several years, specializing in flight weather and our main locations where we had supplies and people to protect. The setup at the time was a little weird in that we did everything for our pilots, but if we wanted to issue weather alerts for the greater locations, we had to go through our mother ship, basically. Which was a bunch of people in an entirely different location who you could only talk to via phone.

So, it’s summer and we’ve been tracking this incoming storm. It looks like the motherload, like we are about to be wiped off the map. We talk with our pilots for days, send out emails to all personnel, cover our bases, etc. However, as the day actually approaches, the models aren’t lining up with the real time data we’re seeing. Everything looks like it’s going to just miss us to the east and our operation will be safe. But the mother ship doesn’t seem to agree, and they’re pushing to send out warnings. Now there are three different levels to weather alerts. Advisory is for smaller stuff or the maybes. Watch is for the we’re expecting this later, be warned. Warnings are things are happening, stop operations and shelter as appropriate.

So… being a very timid young one at this time with a fierce aversion to phone calls and confrontation, I had to call the mother ship and tell them in no uncertain terms, No. The guy that answered the phone on the other side was an older dude and seemed to think he knew everything. I don’t remember exactly what he told me, but it was the equivalent of “shove it, pipsqueak”. He hung up. I waited just a little longer for a new model run and to watch our satellite and wind reports. We simply weren’t going to get hit and we needed to keep operations going, not shut down for no reason. So I called again and the dude is eating obnoxiously loudly on the other side of the line as I explain this. Just smacking all the food in my ear over the phone set. Disgusting and rude. He hangs up on me.

Now I’m shaking like a leaf by this point and starting to get flac from management about needing to get this warning taken away asap. It’s amazing I could dial the number at all with how badly my hands were trembling. I remember ranting at him and he’s still eating and giving me passive aggressive ‘yep, mhm, sure’ type answers as I keep going through all of my reasons. After a long long silent pause, finally he relents and the warning is dismissed.

I left my desk after that and threw up, lol. Confrontation is just the absolute worst. Especially with someone who sees you as lesser. Fuck that guy, though. I was right in the end. Just to the east of our boundaries there were record breaking hail reports, tornadoes, and a deluge of rain. But we only had a warm day.

The end :3

Td;lr Young and super non confrontational me had to stand up multiple times to an old dude who thought he was hot shit. I was right in the end. Everyone clapped.