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…

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.

Roofing in August

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.

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.

Cleaning up a dead relative’s house after they were hoarding.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Hardest as in struggliest: 9 hours hand-removing render from a garage interior. Then i rode home on my bike. It was fucking freezing despite the work and ride. And subsequent hot shower. Then i took a test and found out i had covid

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

the day my work friend got so mad at me that he cut me off. to keep it short. there was a traumatic few weeks after that where he was taking out his anger on me.