Roofing in August

I did lots of policy writing, and SOP writing with a medical insurance company. I was often forced to do phone customer service as an “additional duties as needed” work task.

On this particular day, I was doing phone support for medicaid customers, during the covid pandemic. I talked to one gentleman that had an approval to get injections in his joints for pain. (Anti-inflamatory, steroid type injections.) His authorization was approved right when covid started, and all doctor’s offices shut the fuck down for non emergent care. When he was able to reschedule his injections, the authorization had expired. His doctor sent in a new authorization request.

This should have been a cut and dry approval. During the pandemic 50% of the staff was laid off because we were acquired by a larger health insurance conglomerate, and the number of authorization and claim denials soared. I’m 100% convinced that most of those denials were being made because the staff that was there were overburdened to the point of just blanket denying shit to make their KPIs. The denial reason was, “Not medically necessary,” which means, not enough clinical information was provided to prove it was necessary. I saw the original authorization, and the clinical information that went with it, and I saw the new authorization, which had the same charts and history attached.

I spent 4 hours on the phone with this man putting an appeal together. I put together EVERY piece of clinical information from both authorizations, along with EVERY claim we paid related to this particular condition, along with every pharmacy claim we approved for pain medication related to this man’s condition, to demonstrate that there was enough evidence to prove medical necessity.

I gift wrapped this shit for the appeals team to make the review process as easy as possible. They kicked the appeal back to me, denying it after 15 minutes. There is no way it was reviewed in 15 minutes. I printed out the appeal + all the clinical information and mailed it to that customer with my personal contact information. Then I typed up my resignation letter, left my ID badge, and bounced.

24 hours later, I helped that customer submit an appeal to our state agency that does external appeals, along with a complaint to the attorney general. The state ended up overturning the denial, and the insurance company was forced to pay for his pain treatments.

It took me 9 months to find another 9-5 job, but it was worth it.

Working as a laborer putting in asphalt driveways in 100-degree summer heat. It’s backbreaking work even without the heat.

The upside was that I grew shoulders and back muscles, and my cholo Spanish swearing was fluent by the end of the summer. And like a fool, I went back for two more summers after that.

Pro tip: kerosene gets asphalt off your skin. E45 replaces the skin oil the kerosene strips out.

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

Was doing pager duty support and there was a bug in a pipeline which was preventing a vital report from being generated. It had to exist by 8AM UTC and finally got it working at 5:30AM. My company would have lost its license to operate in a certain state if the report had not been generated.

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.

Just out of uni I couldn’t get a job in IT so I went and did labouring. It was the lowest money ive ever made and the hardest ive ever worked.

I’d get up at 4:30am get ready and catch the train in. Then wait and hope to get selected for a decent job if I didnt j go home with nothing. One day I got picked to do a plank replacement on a pier. We jumped jin the van and headed out. started at about 6am and finished at 6pm. We had to walkout on these metal beams above the sea and lift these giant rotting wooden beams similar to railroad beams but longer they must have been over 100kg each and carry them to a pile then grab a new beam and carry it out. Each one was a 2 person lift which made it slow and by like hour 6 my strength was giving out on me and by hour 8 my fingers could barely hold on so I kept having to rest the beam on my leg or shoulder. Also I was the only one who spoke English so communicate was hard. At the end of the day the builder the builder asked me to come back and help the next day because i spoke English. I said fuck no.

I made $120~ for that and i was to sore to work so I lost the next 2 days of work which means I basically lost money. My legs, shoulders and arms were so bruised uo from resting the planks on them. The company that I worked for also later ended uo scamming me 3 days of wages and i was to young and naive to fight it. Fuck you allied workforce most dogshit place ive ever worked.

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.

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

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.

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.

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…