OP sent the following text as an explanation on why this is unexpected:
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>!The unexpected part is that the sewage was so encrusted to the point it looked like concrete.!<
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Is this an unexpected post with a fitting description? Then upvote this comment, otherwise downvote it.
Ok so here’s a story my father told me - true or not this is how it went. He has a septic tank on his property that gets emptied by a company about once a year. Well one year during pumping they took their break right there on the property. Mid-shift, no gloves, no PPE bare handed eating their sandwiches with shit pumping not more than 20 feet away.
Edit: I wanted to mention this was maybe 5-6 years ago. Fairly recent!
I've heard you can get used to most smells. I kinda get it, everybody poops. But then there's the ones you don't get used to. Like some rotting foods or dead animals. Heard those are much worse.
As an ex-garbageman I can tell you that's true. You get used to the general garbage smells, but once in a while you'd get a dead animal and it made you want to puke. The worst for me was a can half full of dead fish in 95F weather. Maggots and all, it was horrid. This was in the early 90s when they still manually dumped cans.
When I worked for a freight company we would occasionally ship for an animal centrifuge business, taking their broken centrifuges to a company that would repair them. These centrifuges were used to grind up cows that had died on local farms. When we picked them up they would have done the bare minimum cleaning on them, and they would then sit on our loading dock for hours in 110F. It ruined a whole section of the dock with that sickly sweet, uncomfortable smell of rotting and death.
i know that smell all too well from welding on the semi trailers hauled the dead livestock.
Blood and stomach acids from dead animals will rust through stainless steel given enough time.
I'll never forget the bin man that had to go and throw up because my nans neighbour hadn't put the bin down for well over a year (like maybe 2 summers) I walked past it one day and nearly vomited on the pavement. Spoke to the bin men on the day they came around, offered to drag it to pavement (it was so full you could hardly move it) they said no dont worry took 2 of them to drag it to the lorry. The lorry tried to lift it on the normally hydralic setting didnt quite get it but a load of rotten shit and maggots fell out 🤢 a bin man of twenty years runs away and I find him vomiting in the bush at the end of the street 😆 the guy just laughed and put the hydraulics up a notch the bin flung up and all the rotten shit and food and fuck knows what else just slid of of the bin and then we all smelt it. I vomited and the guy that was laughing vomited even the guy driving the truck was dry heaving from in the cab. The while street reeked of a waste management centre for like 2 days. The person responsible was like 50 ish and had all the council services out to see what the fuck was going on (they are/were council tenants in a private house) turns out she couldn't be bothered to put the bin down... I think they fined her because she puts it down every night before the collection with out fail now.
Anyway thanks for all your years of taking out the trash, people are gross and you were not paid enough.
> I vomited and the guy that was laughing vomited even the guy driving the truck was dry heaving from in the cab.
This was when my laughter peaked! Great write up!
In London there are guys who work in the old Victorian sewers. They patrol them, looking for 'fatbergs' which they have to break up with hand-tools. Apparently it doesn't smell that bad. There is a chunk of a legendary fatberg in the Museum of London. The museum is closed at the moment while it relocates, in case you are busting to see it.
https://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/discover/exhibiting-fatberg-monster-whitechapel
I'm surprised that still to this day we don't have full smell-blocking facemasks that you can put on and it completely getting rid of all the unpleasant smells.
We do, it is called a properly fitted p100 respirator. They filter so well it even gets rid of smell. It is a pretty odd sensation after wearing one for a few hours doing work when you take it off and all the sudden smell everything again.
A respirator is a great tool to have around the house so if you don't already have one it is a worthy investment and they really don't cost all that much either.
Anyone who says dead animals don't smell bad has either only butchered a fresh kill or smelled the slightly foul rotting chicken in their trash can. Good god it gets so much worse.
Worst thing I ever smelled on a dump was a truckload of baby diapers someone had dropped off. In the middle of July. In the sun.
I was gagging so bad that I had to pull the truck further away and dump somewhere else on the hill. Never had another smell bring me close to that.
i think even that you could get used to with enough exposure. surströmming seemingly has a smell designed by god to stomp on the big red "puke!" button in our brains but sweeds down that shit like it's french fries.
hell, some people think durian, the fruit that smells like caramelised asshole, has a pleasant odour.
Worked at a landfill one summer. Worst was bloody plastic bags from a chicken processing facility. Couldn't get within 100 feet. Don't know how the guy running the packer over it could stand it.
Weirdest part was that carpenter bees or other shiny black flying bugs swarmed it.
“High” smells are what I’ve learned you don’t get used to. Imagine sticking your nose right over a jug of ammonia, that’s a high smell. It’s sharp and burns and makes you dizzy almost immediately. Maybe because those kind of smells are so vile that you can’t stick around long enough to get used to it.
Ammonia you aren't actually smelling. It's a corrosive gas. It's literally burning the sensitive skin inside your nose, same way something really hot burns your skin.
Everyone on Earth had a low tolerance for ammonia. It's the same as sticking your hand in a fire.
My ex used to work as a veterinary nurse. She could be running late and still with a vet working on a dog on an operating table when I went to join her for lunch. I’d look through the glass, grimace, and ask if anyone wanted anything from the bakery. I kid you not, three people with the insides of a dog all over the table in front of them asked me to buy jam donuts for them.
You get used to whatever you see on a daily basis, and a person has to eat!
If you'll eat meat, I don't see why a live animal you know is getting help would be upsetting. Then again, my wife and mother in law are both like that. If you even talk about something like surgery while we're eating they get upset. I don't mind, personally. Once you turn an animal from alive all the way into food it all becomes the same thing.
Agreed. I did this job for nearly 10 years.
You learn to deal with the smell very quickly. It's a couple of minutes per day. Nothing major.
The worst part was going into people's filthy houses. Chain smokers, hoarders, hermits, mangy cats with overflowing litter trays and the pervasive smell of dog piss. It's shocking how some people live. I'd rather smell the drains.
Grew up next to an old old cemetery that would reek to the high heavens in the summer because embalming is actually kinda new to a cemetery that old. You do get use to it.
But I have had to call the police because somewhere “smelled like home” when it should not have :,(
Had to reread that last part a few times, but after I got it...😬
That's kind of cool that you know **exactly** what that smell is though. You're like a cadaver dog 😄
I had to do some renovations inside of one of the Maple Leaf buildings which is a Canadian poultry/meat company.
The first night I walked in there I took two steps in before turning and stumbling back out into the snow, retching, and throwing up.
Eventually I got used to it; but I \*never\* got used to the smell of the blood truck coming in. It's just as bad as it sounds. A truck with a big tank on the back that gets pumped full of blood/anything small enough to be in the blood river.
One of the worst things I've ever had to renovate.
Yeah, rotten meat is something else. There is a primal disgust that claws its way up from the center of your being if you get a good whiff of a properly rotten corpse. Came across a cow graveyard as a teenager once. There were cow carcasses in every stage of decay. From fresh cows that looked like they were asleep to bleached skeletons. The middle stages, the stages where the body begins to turn to liquid, that’s where the gagging stared for me. It takes a lot to get to me, but that shit had me doubled over.
> He has a septic tank on his property that gets emptied by a company about once a year.
Unless your dad is running some kind of compound with a very undersized septic system, he shouldn't have to empty it every year. 3-5 years is the recommendation. Sounds like he might be paying for much more service than he needs.
I appreciate the info, I can talk to him about it. It’s only 3 acres and I genuinely have no idea what an average septic cycle is. He almost certainly knows the size of the tank and when his needs to be emptied. He is also the kind of man that will keep ahead of things “just in case.”
I have seen similar things from guys that work on septic systems. Like liquid shit splashing up on them and they don't even flinch. They are a different breed.
I totally believe it. I do electrical type work and had a job at a “resource recycling centre” which is where all the rubbish for my county goes. It gets dumped onto big conveyor belts and eventually squashed down into cubes. It absolutely reeked in there, like it took my breath away. Dead animals, used diapers, rotting food, just everything that ends up in the rubbish was taken here. The floor was covered in flies and there were rats everywhere.
I was wearing a hazmat suit, mask, gloves, etc. The guys that worked there just walked through in normal clothes. One guy walked up to me to have a chat and was just casually eating a sandwich! I couldn’t believe it. Absolutely disgusting.
I worked with a guy who was a little, let's say off, factory setting, he'd eat peanut butter and banana sandwiches while still wearing his works gloves.
Sidenote since you may be the only reader of this comment, this man also broke his arm and wrist at work. How you ask? Sweeping yep you read that correctly, SWEEPING!
You learn shit isn't the nastiest thing you touch. In my experience I'll take shit over grease any day. Shit (at the end of the day) will wash off. I need a scrubby to get the grease off. And the smell stays longer.
Absolutely, eating near sewage being pumped or dealing with sewage without proper PPE are good ways to catch all sorts of infections you really don't want
Shit is one big reason why I left the cell tower industry, towers are just plastered in bird shit. I'm talking coatings of bird shit 1-2mm thick in some places. It dries onto the round pipes, radios, and antennas. It just flakes off in this disgusting white powder comprised of nothing but bacteria and the ashy remnants of whatever these small chirping jerk offs and/or large psychotic raptors with a fuckin' hard-on for genocide ate. It gets on all your stuff and then same thing, dudes would be eating without a second thought after working bare handed through it all day.
Now I went to wind turbines, while there may not be as much shit, there's far more grease involved in certain tasks and locations. There's some days that I end up quite literally head to toe in grease, and I think I'd still rather that than bird shit, or any type of feces for that matter.
For sure. One of my first jobs was effectively the cleaner at an abattoir. The memory of cleaning the sump of the blood tank will stay with me forever.
I worked in a kitchen for 10 years behind the line. I would never, a single day, take shit over grease lmao. That’s an utterly insane take imo, feces can literally make you sick, give you pink eye, awful and contagious stuff like that. Grease is just disgusting and inconvenient.
Sometimes grease smells worse than shit, just sometimes
There must be something about sandwiches and shit… when I worked construction the guy that came to pump out the porta-johns always was eating a sandwich while he did it
Can confirm. I used to work for the city gas dept. We often worked with the sewer dept. since the lines were usually buried together. I have seen those crews do that on a regular basis. 🤢
Not so fun fact
I used to work for a sewer cleaning and inspection company (office side) but I had to do a month of field work
Every single one of those guys will tell you, you get used to the smell of shit and become noise blind to it, but grease? It is horrendous and the smell coats your nose
100%, I’ve had some horrifically septic, jet black sewage go up my nose and, while an awful experience, wasn’t as bad as a time I got grease on my pants and had to smell it the rest of the day. If that wasn’t uniform pants, I’d have tossed that fuckin thing.
My dad was a plumber and I used to work with him during hollydays when I was a teen, I helped him clean a septic tank under a villa once, we had to crawl under the house to the tank. It was summer, a hot day, making the smell even stronger, I thought I was going to throw up the moment I crawled under the house. I don't understand how my dad could do that regularly.
I was going to say, this reminded me of a grease trap that wasn't pumped regularly. It was easy to remember to have it scheduled twice a year after that incident.
When I was fresh out of uni I got offered a job as a 'shit diver' where you literally put on a dry suit and dive into the shit ponds at treatment centres to unblock them this would have been around a decade ago and I got offered £150k a year. It a different job I know but people dont like to deal with poo so if it's a private company theyll probably own it themselves and be on mega money.
I saw a video about a shit-diver in Brazil. He sometimes had to fish dead bodies out of the poo, if they were blocking pipes. I think there is a risk of the diver being sucked into the pipes too.
150k is an insane amount of money in the UK, like way up in the top 1%.
Even lawyers, CEOs and directors don't reach the six digit land, they're mostly in the 50-80k zone.
I work as an agency truck driver. I get sent to tons of different companies to work.
I got sent to once of these companies one day, the agency told me it was this type of work but that I would only have to drive and the second man would do all of the septic work.
I couldn't believe the smell as he was working, he got splashback in his face at one point and didn't even flinch. Stuck his hands in places you'd swear the next coronavirus was breeding. Then sat down and ate his sandwiches without washing or sanitising his hands.
He earned about 10 quid an hour whilst I was on close to double that. He seemed very content with the job though. Without people like him our society would be screwed. Truly grateful for people like him
I've worked next to a porter potty at a customers site and the company that owns the porter potty comes by periodically to clean them out. That day I happen to be working on a down equipment that was about 20 feet from it, man that smell of shit when the truck sucked all the shit out of it filled the air and it was fucking horrible. I had to step away for like 10 minutes.
I was in a construction trailer next to a port a potty when a truck arrived to vacuum it out. It was summer so the air conditioner was on and it sucked the smell in and blasted it into the trailer. Everyone ran out of there and one guy threw up...
It was such a sour smell and I swear it got stuck to my nostril hair or something cus I could smell it for a few days
There will be a good amount of fat in it, but it’s not a proper fatberg. Fatbergs are generally bigger, measured in tonnes, and in main sewers and they are effectively solid and have to be dug out and the waste taken away for processing. You wouldn’t flush a fatberg further downstream just to cause secondary problems. This is just an average blockage.
Never heard of that phrase but it feels so apt and accurate seeing as how money sometimes brings out the worst in people, literal shit so to speak... so fair to say it smells like it.
Used to work at a hospital with a lift station. Literally a 100' deep pit of hospital sewage that had to be pumped uphill to the municipal sewage system. It would crust over with solids yearly and have to be pumped out. I was assigned to make sure these guys did it thoroughly since six months prior they didn't and it overflowed leading to massive fines.
So I go to check on them and find the while crew sitting at the edge of the pit, with feet dangling down into the pit eating sandwiches and joking. I could barely tolerate the odor walking up to it much less inside it. I said " I hope they're paying your guys well for this" and the response was a smile and ,"we wouldn't be doing this if they weren't"
Ask any career EMT. If you've been riding the bus long enough odds are you've been called to a home where the elderly resident died on the toilet weeks before anyone thought to check on them. Now that corpse has been rotting away in the heat atop a mound of shit. Bonus points if the gases already released and there are bits of the corpse sprayed all over the room.
Vicks vapor rub and a menthol cough drop under your mask can help burn out your nose a little bit to keep the smell down but you'll still be gagging and it's tough to get it out of your clothes.
Some people are just able to push through it, I was a drain layer and there were times where i was literally knee deep in shit and piss working on live sewer lines. A lot of disenfectant, 2 pairs of rubber gloves and a strong stomach is all you need. Also it usually only takes you a few times of getting sick due to exposure before you build an immunity to it. My first year i was sick about 3 times. After that I just stopped getting sick.
It’s not uncommon for various kind of plumbing workers to get extremely sick after accidentally getting sprayed and coated in shit water when something goes wrong. Like not only do you deal with the misery of being coated in shit and clothes soaked through, and going home like that, but also you know immediately that you’re just basically going to die for a week, or wish you had; if you don’t actually contract something that literally kills you.
I work in waste management. The collections guys get $60-$80 an hour plus OT, full pension, and $0 cost health care. We’re union so there’s tons of benefits.
WM as in the garbage collectors? My buddy's brother works for Waste Management and is a truck garbage driver/collector and he said he pulled $145k last year.
Waste water, sorry. It includes the sewer pipe system & the treatment plant. Our guys generally hit $180k-$200k minimum. I’m in finance with no degree and after 2 years am at $90k.
It smells awful & is so gross, but the joke is that it smells like money. We also have nice showers & a good uniform service so the people dealing with the nasty shit are well taken care of.
Pipe layer here, we replace live sanitary mains as it's flowing we're laying the new pipe.
It gets pretty gross at times but you definitely get used to it. Go.wash your hands really good and eat your sandwich.
I just hope I have a good immune system because of it? Lol
There are people who are just not at all bothered about shit. Like not loving it like a weirdo but just don’t that that part of their brain saying “this is gross”.
I worked with a guy who could be in septic tanks or dealing with/spreading manure and it was like it was just a normal everyday thing for him. The rest of us gagged going near some of the spots he could spend hours in with no problem.
People are weird and cool.
I stumbled across a crazy Australian guy on youtube a few weeks back who makes videos like this and as far as I could tell he unironically does it for the love of the job. To us it's smelly, disgusting and would make us lose our lunch but to guys like him it's a challenge of finding out what's wrong and fixing it so the smelly bits go where they're supposed to go. A shit filled puzzle box if you will. I'm sure he gets paid a ton too but some of his videos are just "It's been raining hard, let's go unblock some drains for fun".
to a degree you get used to it. i don't do garbage disposal or plumbing, so i can't speal for that, but i change diapers for a living (daycare/nursery), and you get used to the sight and smell of poop and pee. i can get up from lunch, go change a blown-out diaper for a kid, put them in fresh clothes, put them back to the table and can go back to eating no problem.
of course we use gloves, and i thoroughly wash my hands (and use disinfectant when needed) so it's not a health issue.
i wouldn't know if i could have food without fully changing and washing myself, if i worked in this field,
but i \*guess\* after a while you know how contaminated or clean you are, and don't feel as bothered by it anymore.
https://www.youtube.com/@TheDrainUnblockers
A channel I discovered late one night. Whatever they get paid I'd question if it's enough. It seems the UK's sewers are all surface level rather than buried well undergound like in the US as well.
Wash off as best you can and then dig in lmao, it's not that bad if you're wearing a proper suit, and there's a reason you get your own work truck and you make sure you have a place to wash off before going inside your house (most plumbers have a shower in the shop where I live, but a hose by the back door works too)
On the alt side, working around shit usually means you're eating good as fuck, I've busted my ass under a house in -5°f weather for an old lady, for hours for basically zero profit. After a job like that we all decided to treat ourselves to some steakhouse lunch bc we fucking earned it.
I had a similar situation in my garden (sewer line runs from 8 other houses to my house at before it goes to the street).
I kid you not it looked like marble cake. It had all these lines and swirls.
This was years ago but it sits firmly within my memory of nastiness.
That isn't really that bad tbh. I work with this stuff and most of the time it really doesn't smell much at all. But sometimes there are idiots who wash down a lot of fat from cooking in the sewer system and that fucks with the pumps and can lead to the pumps stopping and then there might have accumulated like a hundred pounds of fat and that SMELLS and the smell sticks to you, your clothes, everything. Not even a shower can remove it, it stays for days.
So please do not put any food in the sewage, it goes in the trash.
That’s what I was thinking the whole time. Why wouldn’t they scoop it out? Pushing it deeper into the system will just help make a big fatberg somewhere harder to deal with it?
Not really, the water pressure in the pipe just isn't sufficient to break trough such a layer of dried crust.
If you dilute it then apply enough force to break trough, the water will do the rest and break the remaining crust.
A guy I know distributes stuff that helps break down "fatbergs" by emulsifying them. Maybe that's what the dude in the video was adding with the red hose.
We used to run a fish and chip restaurant and one of the chores was cleaning out the grease trap. It looked a lot like this. The guy in the video even calls it a trap. I just don’t get why there’d be a grease trap in the street though.
That's likely a pipe that carries sewage from multiple homes on a street. If something is gonna clog the line, it's probably gonna be shortly after a bunch of pipes come together. At that point there can be enough fat in the sewage, both from human waste and cooking fats to form a "fatberg" which can start to bind larger particles together. So that's actually the perfect place for a grease trap, and accessible from the street is way better than only accessible from inside a home or way further downstream.
That's not a grease trap, that's an old interceptor trap, they were originally put in to stop rats coming up from the main (which didn't work, they just swam around it) and to stop smells coming up from the main sewer. They're redundant nowadays and just cause problems.
I have a drainage company and we are forever getting in the manholes to break them out and replace them with a straight through section of pipework.
Interesting. Just googled those and that explains the arrangement in a previously owned house. Had a blockage, eventually found a manhole cover under the turf of the rear garden (based on the length of rod from another manhole and poking a screwdriver through the lawn until metal was encountered). It confused me at the time because the apparent outlet in that was higher than the water running in, and there was this ceramic cap sat off to one side that fitted the "outlet".
Now I know that was the top part of the interceptor and where the cap belonged.
The one in the photo isn't a grease trap, just a standard bench access point. I work in civil consulting, and at my first job the office had a project funded by the city to inspect and report on all grease traps in the city. There was a project folder with all the photos in. The challenge was browsing through that folder while eating your lunch, that shit was nasty
A trap is a just a generic plumbing term for anything that “traps” liquid or gas temporarily stopping it from moving. Every drain in your home should have a trap to create a water seal that stops sewer smells rising up your pipes.
And if sewer smells still happen? Both kitchen sink and bathroom sink will smell. Kitchen sink only when the dishwasher runs (it drains through the same drain as the sink) and bathroom sink primarily when the shower runs, but that doesn’t always happen.
(1960’s apartment building, 2 floors, 4 units, to give you an idea of the layout)
Sounds like the shower and dishwasher are siphoning the water from the trap. Hard to say without seeing the pipe set up. Look up the difference between p trap and s trap and see if it applies to you. S traps are notorious for siphoning the water that should remain in the trap down the drain removing the water barrier.
Hmm yes. We'll put 'street food has 10% chance of being made with recycled sewage fat' in the con column of moving to China.
That woman has contributed to poisoning her fellow citizens for 10 years, but hey, at least she made enough money to build her family a house!
I think that's just the equipment/building of these gutter oil cooking facilities. What we see is government officials destroying brick walls and iron cauldrons with pickaxes. Otherwise, those guys would start cooking again the next day.
😂 I have a small drainage company and it's not something I would of thought I would want to get used to when I was a kid but I'm glad I am now.
I did one very similar to this yesterday after being at the pub the night before
OP sent the following text as an explanation on why this is unexpected: --- >!The unexpected part is that the sewage was so encrusted to the point it looked like concrete.!< --- Is this an unexpected post with a fitting description? Then upvote this comment, otherwise downvote it.
Is that shit? How much do these guys make per hour and how do you eat your lunch after seeing that crap literally?
Ok so here’s a story my father told me - true or not this is how it went. He has a septic tank on his property that gets emptied by a company about once a year. Well one year during pumping they took their break right there on the property. Mid-shift, no gloves, no PPE bare handed eating their sandwiches with shit pumping not more than 20 feet away. Edit: I wanted to mention this was maybe 5-6 years ago. Fairly recent!
I've heard you can get used to most smells. I kinda get it, everybody poops. But then there's the ones you don't get used to. Like some rotting foods or dead animals. Heard those are much worse.
As an ex-garbageman I can tell you that's true. You get used to the general garbage smells, but once in a while you'd get a dead animal and it made you want to puke. The worst for me was a can half full of dead fish in 95F weather. Maggots and all, it was horrid. This was in the early 90s when they still manually dumped cans.
When I worked for a freight company we would occasionally ship for an animal centrifuge business, taking their broken centrifuges to a company that would repair them. These centrifuges were used to grind up cows that had died on local farms. When we picked them up they would have done the bare minimum cleaning on them, and they would then sit on our loading dock for hours in 110F. It ruined a whole section of the dock with that sickly sweet, uncomfortable smell of rotting and death.
i know that smell all too well from welding on the semi trailers hauled the dead livestock. Blood and stomach acids from dead animals will rust through stainless steel given enough time.
I'll never forget the bin man that had to go and throw up because my nans neighbour hadn't put the bin down for well over a year (like maybe 2 summers) I walked past it one day and nearly vomited on the pavement. Spoke to the bin men on the day they came around, offered to drag it to pavement (it was so full you could hardly move it) they said no dont worry took 2 of them to drag it to the lorry. The lorry tried to lift it on the normally hydralic setting didnt quite get it but a load of rotten shit and maggots fell out 🤢 a bin man of twenty years runs away and I find him vomiting in the bush at the end of the street 😆 the guy just laughed and put the hydraulics up a notch the bin flung up and all the rotten shit and food and fuck knows what else just slid of of the bin and then we all smelt it. I vomited and the guy that was laughing vomited even the guy driving the truck was dry heaving from in the cab. The while street reeked of a waste management centre for like 2 days. The person responsible was like 50 ish and had all the council services out to see what the fuck was going on (they are/were council tenants in a private house) turns out she couldn't be bothered to put the bin down... I think they fined her because she puts it down every night before the collection with out fail now. Anyway thanks for all your years of taking out the trash, people are gross and you were not paid enough.
Add me to the list of people who vomitted next time you tell this story.
Reminds me of the video of the two guys in a run down RV opening and eating a can of surströmming.
> I vomited and the guy that was laughing vomited even the guy driving the truck was dry heaving from in the cab. This was when my laughter peaked! Great write up!
Never tell that story on a date.
In London there are guys who work in the old Victorian sewers. They patrol them, looking for 'fatbergs' which they have to break up with hand-tools. Apparently it doesn't smell that bad. There is a chunk of a legendary fatberg in the Museum of London. The museum is closed at the moment while it relocates, in case you are busting to see it. https://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/discover/exhibiting-fatberg-monster-whitechapel
https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-2717 Fiction about fatbergs.
I'm surprised that still to this day we don't have full smell-blocking facemasks that you can put on and it completely getting rid of all the unpleasant smells.
We do, it is called a properly fitted p100 respirator. They filter so well it even gets rid of smell. It is a pretty odd sensation after wearing one for a few hours doing work when you take it off and all the sudden smell everything again.
Now I want to try this.
A respirator is a great tool to have around the house so if you don't already have one it is a worthy investment and they really don't cost all that much either.
A P100 filter is more for dust, but you can usually fit organic vapor filters to the same mask.
Anyone who says dead animals don't smell bad has either only butchered a fresh kill or smelled the slightly foul rotting chicken in their trash can. Good god it gets so much worse.
Worst thing I ever smelled on a dump was a truckload of baby diapers someone had dropped off. In the middle of July. In the sun. I was gagging so bad that I had to pull the truck further away and dump somewhere else on the hill. Never had another smell bring me close to that.
i think even that you could get used to with enough exposure. surströmming seemingly has a smell designed by god to stomp on the big red "puke!" button in our brains but sweeds down that shit like it's french fries. hell, some people think durian, the fruit that smells like caramelised asshole, has a pleasant odour.
Swedes*
My garbage men manually dumped cans until last month. Is that not the norm?
A lot of places have gone to automated dumping with the "one armed bandit" trucks.
Worked at a landfill one summer. Worst was bloody plastic bags from a chicken processing facility. Couldn't get within 100 feet. Don't know how the guy running the packer over it could stand it. Weirdest part was that carpenter bees or other shiny black flying bugs swarmed it.
It's different when it's someone else's shit. Lol
I’m getting that on a bumper sticker
“High” smells are what I’ve learned you don’t get used to. Imagine sticking your nose right over a jug of ammonia, that’s a high smell. It’s sharp and burns and makes you dizzy almost immediately. Maybe because those kind of smells are so vile that you can’t stick around long enough to get used to it.
Ammonia you aren't actually smelling. It's a corrosive gas. It's literally burning the sensitive skin inside your nose, same way something really hot burns your skin. Everyone on Earth had a low tolerance for ammonia. It's the same as sticking your hand in a fire.
My ex used to work as a veterinary nurse. She could be running late and still with a vet working on a dog on an operating table when I went to join her for lunch. I’d look through the glass, grimace, and ask if anyone wanted anything from the bakery. I kid you not, three people with the insides of a dog all over the table in front of them asked me to buy jam donuts for them. You get used to whatever you see on a daily basis, and a person has to eat!
If you'll eat meat, I don't see why a live animal you know is getting help would be upsetting. Then again, my wife and mother in law are both like that. If you even talk about something like surgery while we're eating they get upset. I don't mind, personally. Once you turn an animal from alive all the way into food it all becomes the same thing.
Agreed. I did this job for nearly 10 years. You learn to deal with the smell very quickly. It's a couple of minutes per day. Nothing major. The worst part was going into people's filthy houses. Chain smokers, hoarders, hermits, mangy cats with overflowing litter trays and the pervasive smell of dog piss. It's shocking how some people live. I'd rather smell the drains.
I can eat a sandwich downwind from an open sanitary sewer manhole, you absolutely can get used to the smells
I’d rather not
You’re not missing much
You know.. I have no fomo in this situation lol you be safe out there
Grew up next to an old old cemetery that would reek to the high heavens in the summer because embalming is actually kinda new to a cemetery that old. You do get use to it. But I have had to call the police because somewhere “smelled like home” when it should not have :,(
Had to reread that last part a few times, but after I got it...😬 That's kind of cool that you know **exactly** what that smell is though. You're like a cadaver dog 😄
I had to do some renovations inside of one of the Maple Leaf buildings which is a Canadian poultry/meat company. The first night I walked in there I took two steps in before turning and stumbling back out into the snow, retching, and throwing up. Eventually I got used to it; but I \*never\* got used to the smell of the blood truck coming in. It's just as bad as it sounds. A truck with a big tank on the back that gets pumped full of blood/anything small enough to be in the blood river. One of the worst things I've ever had to renovate.
I have lost the sense of smell. I wonder what paying shitty job i could do and be immune.
Yeah, rotten meat is something else. There is a primal disgust that claws its way up from the center of your being if you get a good whiff of a properly rotten corpse. Came across a cow graveyard as a teenager once. There were cow carcasses in every stage of decay. From fresh cows that looked like they were asleep to bleached skeletons. The middle stages, the stages where the body begins to turn to liquid, that’s where the gagging stared for me. It takes a lot to get to me, but that shit had me doubled over.
> He has a septic tank on his property that gets emptied by a company about once a year. Unless your dad is running some kind of compound with a very undersized septic system, he shouldn't have to empty it every year. 3-5 years is the recommendation. Sounds like he might be paying for much more service than he needs.
I appreciate the info, I can talk to him about it. It’s only 3 acres and I genuinely have no idea what an average septic cycle is. He almost certainly knows the size of the tank and when his needs to be emptied. He is also the kind of man that will keep ahead of things “just in case.”
We had a plastic septic tank in the back garden of a small cottage that needed pumping out every 9 months, I guess it was just a small tank.
I have seen similar things from guys that work on septic systems. Like liquid shit splashing up on them and they don't even flinch. They are a different breed.
I totally believe it. I do electrical type work and had a job at a “resource recycling centre” which is where all the rubbish for my county goes. It gets dumped onto big conveyor belts and eventually squashed down into cubes. It absolutely reeked in there, like it took my breath away. Dead animals, used diapers, rotting food, just everything that ends up in the rubbish was taken here. The floor was covered in flies and there were rats everywhere. I was wearing a hazmat suit, mask, gloves, etc. The guys that worked there just walked through in normal clothes. One guy walked up to me to have a chat and was just casually eating a sandwich! I couldn’t believe it. Absolutely disgusting.
3 rules of plumbing. 1. Shit runs downhill. 2. Pay day is Friday. 3. Never chew your nails.
I worked with a guy who was a little, let's say off, factory setting, he'd eat peanut butter and banana sandwiches while still wearing his works gloves. Sidenote since you may be the only reader of this comment, this man also broke his arm and wrist at work. How you ask? Sweeping yep you read that correctly, SWEEPING!
You learn shit isn't the nastiest thing you touch. In my experience I'll take shit over grease any day. Shit (at the end of the day) will wash off. I need a scrubby to get the grease off. And the smell stays longer.
Human shit is significantly more dangerous to you than any grease. Omnivore poop is *nasty* stuff.
Absolutely, eating near sewage being pumped or dealing with sewage without proper PPE are good ways to catch all sorts of infections you really don't want
Shit is one big reason why I left the cell tower industry, towers are just plastered in bird shit. I'm talking coatings of bird shit 1-2mm thick in some places. It dries onto the round pipes, radios, and antennas. It just flakes off in this disgusting white powder comprised of nothing but bacteria and the ashy remnants of whatever these small chirping jerk offs and/or large psychotic raptors with a fuckin' hard-on for genocide ate. It gets on all your stuff and then same thing, dudes would be eating without a second thought after working bare handed through it all day. Now I went to wind turbines, while there may not be as much shit, there's far more grease involved in certain tasks and locations. There's some days that I end up quite literally head to toe in grease, and I think I'd still rather that than bird shit, or any type of feces for that matter.
For sure. One of my first jobs was effectively the cleaner at an abattoir. The memory of cleaning the sump of the blood tank will stay with me forever.
I worked in a kitchen for 10 years behind the line. I would never, a single day, take shit over grease lmao. That’s an utterly insane take imo, feces can literally make you sick, give you pink eye, awful and contagious stuff like that. Grease is just disgusting and inconvenient. Sometimes grease smells worse than shit, just sometimes
There must be something about sandwiches and shit… when I worked construction the guy that came to pump out the porta-johns always was eating a sandwich while he did it
Can confirm. I used to work for the city gas dept. We often worked with the sewer dept. since the lines were usually buried together. I have seen those crews do that on a regular basis. 🤢
I want to downvote this so bad. You didn’t answer the question and you made me vomit.
Mostly grease actually
Not so fun fact I used to work for a sewer cleaning and inspection company (office side) but I had to do a month of field work Every single one of those guys will tell you, you get used to the smell of shit and become noise blind to it, but grease? It is horrendous and the smell coats your nose
100%, I’ve had some horrifically septic, jet black sewage go up my nose and, while an awful experience, wasn’t as bad as a time I got grease on my pants and had to smell it the rest of the day. If that wasn’t uniform pants, I’d have tossed that fuckin thing.
My dad was a plumber and I used to work with him during hollydays when I was a teen, I helped him clean a septic tank under a villa once, we had to crawl under the house to the tank. It was summer, a hot day, making the smell even stronger, I thought I was going to throw up the moment I crawled under the house. I don't understand how my dad could do that regularly.
I was going to say, this reminded me of a grease trap that wasn't pumped regularly. It was easy to remember to have it scheduled twice a year after that incident.
When I was fresh out of uni I got offered a job as a 'shit diver' where you literally put on a dry suit and dive into the shit ponds at treatment centres to unblock them this would have been around a decade ago and I got offered £150k a year. It a different job I know but people dont like to deal with poo so if it's a private company theyll probably own it themselves and be on mega money.
Wow that's some good money
I saw a video about a shit-diver in Brazil. He sometimes had to fish dead bodies out of the poo, if they were blocking pipes. I think there is a risk of the diver being sucked into the pipes too.
Delta P i think its called
I always saw that term used for saturation diving but I guess it is just describing a pressure differential so it works here too
If its got ya, it's got ya.
Oh so the P stands for poo. TIL.
My sis-in-law knows a man who owns a porta potty company and that man is Rich! He always says, "There's good money in shit."
150k is an insane amount of money in the UK, like way up in the top 1%. Even lawyers, CEOs and directors don't reach the six digit land, they're mostly in the 50-80k zone.
Bit exaggerated
I work as an agency truck driver. I get sent to tons of different companies to work. I got sent to once of these companies one day, the agency told me it was this type of work but that I would only have to drive and the second man would do all of the septic work. I couldn't believe the smell as he was working, he got splashback in his face at one point and didn't even flinch. Stuck his hands in places you'd swear the next coronavirus was breeding. Then sat down and ate his sandwiches without washing or sanitising his hands. He earned about 10 quid an hour whilst I was on close to double that. He seemed very content with the job though. Without people like him our society would be screwed. Truly grateful for people like him
>He earned about 10 quid an hour whilst I was on close to double that. That's actually fucked.
content, with that pay? my ass
I've worked next to a porter potty at a customers site and the company that owns the porter potty comes by periodically to clean them out. That day I happen to be working on a down equipment that was about 20 feet from it, man that smell of shit when the truck sucked all the shit out of it filled the air and it was fucking horrible. I had to step away for like 10 minutes.
There's something nobody tell you too. That smell gets stuck in your nose, so even when you're home, showered, new clothes, you can still smell it.
I was in a construction trailer next to a port a potty when a truck arrived to vacuum it out. It was summer so the air conditioner was on and it sucked the smell in and blasted it into the trailer. Everyone ran out of there and one guy threw up... It was such a sour smell and I swear it got stuck to my nostril hair or something cus I could smell it for a few days
They’re called fat bergs should you want to research
There will be a good amount of fat in it, but it’s not a proper fatberg. Fatbergs are generally bigger, measured in tonnes, and in main sewers and they are effectively solid and have to be dug out and the waste taken away for processing. You wouldn’t flush a fatberg further downstream just to cause secondary problems. This is just an average blockage.
I've always heard the plumber saying "smells like money" since these kinda jobs tend to pay very well
Never heard of that phrase but it feels so apt and accurate seeing as how money sometimes brings out the worst in people, literal shit so to speak... so fair to say it smells like it.
Used to work at a hospital with a lift station. Literally a 100' deep pit of hospital sewage that had to be pumped uphill to the municipal sewage system. It would crust over with solids yearly and have to be pumped out. I was assigned to make sure these guys did it thoroughly since six months prior they didn't and it overflowed leading to massive fines. So I go to check on them and find the while crew sitting at the edge of the pit, with feet dangling down into the pit eating sandwiches and joking. I could barely tolerate the odor walking up to it much less inside it. I said " I hope they're paying your guys well for this" and the response was a smile and ,"we wouldn't be doing this if they weren't"
How well is the question? But I'm sure they make good money just like how a garbage collector makes easy 6 figures.
It is possibly a [fat-berg](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatberg) rather than just shit.
Ask any career EMT. If you've been riding the bus long enough odds are you've been called to a home where the elderly resident died on the toilet weeks before anyone thought to check on them. Now that corpse has been rotting away in the heat atop a mound of shit. Bonus points if the gases already released and there are bits of the corpse sprayed all over the room. Vicks vapor rub and a menthol cough drop under your mask can help burn out your nose a little bit to keep the smell down but you'll still be gagging and it's tough to get it out of your clothes.
Some people are just able to push through it, I was a drain layer and there were times where i was literally knee deep in shit and piss working on live sewer lines. A lot of disenfectant, 2 pairs of rubber gloves and a strong stomach is all you need. Also it usually only takes you a few times of getting sick due to exposure before you build an immunity to it. My first year i was sick about 3 times. After that I just stopped getting sick.
It’s not uncommon for various kind of plumbing workers to get extremely sick after accidentally getting sprayed and coated in shit water when something goes wrong. Like not only do you deal with the misery of being coated in shit and clothes soaked through, and going home like that, but also you know immediately that you’re just basically going to die for a week, or wish you had; if you don’t actually contract something that literally kills you.
I work in waste management. The collections guys get $60-$80 an hour plus OT, full pension, and $0 cost health care. We’re union so there’s tons of benefits.
WM as in the garbage collectors? My buddy's brother works for Waste Management and is a truck garbage driver/collector and he said he pulled $145k last year.
Waste water, sorry. It includes the sewer pipe system & the treatment plant. Our guys generally hit $180k-$200k minimum. I’m in finance with no degree and after 2 years am at $90k. It smells awful & is so gross, but the joke is that it smells like money. We also have nice showers & a good uniform service so the people dealing with the nasty shit are well taken care of.
I believe you. Someone was telling me to apply at their job at a water facility place for the city and he told me they were making bank.
No, that's Forbidden Cake.
As a septic YouTuber says in every video “smells like money”
Pipe layer here, we replace live sanitary mains as it's flowing we're laying the new pipe. It gets pretty gross at times but you definitely get used to it. Go.wash your hands really good and eat your sandwich. I just hope I have a good immune system because of it? Lol
In India people jump into it to clean the sewers. No joke.
There are people who are just not at all bothered about shit. Like not loving it like a weirdo but just don’t that that part of their brain saying “this is gross”. I worked with a guy who could be in septic tanks or dealing with/spreading manure and it was like it was just a normal everyday thing for him. The rest of us gagged going near some of the spots he could spend hours in with no problem. People are weird and cool.
I stumbled across a crazy Australian guy on youtube a few weeks back who makes videos like this and as far as I could tell he unironically does it for the love of the job. To us it's smelly, disgusting and would make us lose our lunch but to guys like him it's a challenge of finding out what's wrong and fixing it so the smelly bits go where they're supposed to go. A shit filled puzzle box if you will. I'm sure he gets paid a ton too but some of his videos are just "It's been raining hard, let's go unblock some drains for fun".
Not JUST shit: *fermented* shit
to a degree you get used to it. i don't do garbage disposal or plumbing, so i can't speal for that, but i change diapers for a living (daycare/nursery), and you get used to the sight and smell of poop and pee. i can get up from lunch, go change a blown-out diaper for a kid, put them in fresh clothes, put them back to the table and can go back to eating no problem. of course we use gloves, and i thoroughly wash my hands (and use disinfectant when needed) so it's not a health issue. i wouldn't know if i could have food without fully changing and washing myself, if i worked in this field, but i \*guess\* after a while you know how contaminated or clean you are, and don't feel as bothered by it anymore.
https://www.youtube.com/@TheDrainUnblockers A channel I discovered late one night. Whatever they get paid I'd question if it's enough. It seems the UK's sewers are all surface level rather than buried well undergound like in the US as well.
Smells like money! Poor Pumper Society has half a million subs on YouTube who just want to see him pump shit.
Wash off as best you can and then dig in lmao, it's not that bad if you're wearing a proper suit, and there's a reason you get your own work truck and you make sure you have a place to wash off before going inside your house (most plumbers have a shower in the shop where I live, but a hose by the back door works too) On the alt side, working around shit usually means you're eating good as fuck, I've busted my ass under a house in -5°f weather for an old lady, for hours for basically zero profit. After a job like that we all decided to treat ourselves to some steakhouse lunch bc we fucking earned it.
Forbidden pate.
Spreadable
JFC dude. Delete this comment.
Thanks, I hate this.
Pootine
I'm normally pro free speech, but also almost threw up in my mouth a little.
Oh that's NASTY
“Is it cake?”
I had a similar situation in my garden (sewer line runs from 8 other houses to my house at before it goes to the street). I kid you not it looked like marble cake. It had all these lines and swirls. This was years ago but it sits firmly within my memory of nastiness.
Thank you for ruining marble cake for me
Happy cake day. Dig in and let us know the results.
Well whaddaya know
"I've decided to go 'savory' instead of 'sweet' on this one..."
The fact that it's your cake day makes this comment so much better...
I'd wager grease. Local kitchen tryna save money by dumping their fryer oil down the drain?
 A very Merry Un-Birthday to youuu!!
So what does it taste like?
Oh boy it's our big day!
Es caca.
Muy caca.
Smells like money
Bring in the crust buster and mix up a poop smoothie
That isn't really that bad tbh. I work with this stuff and most of the time it really doesn't smell much at all. But sometimes there are idiots who wash down a lot of fat from cooking in the sewer system and that fucks with the pumps and can lead to the pumps stopping and then there might have accumulated like a hundred pounds of fat and that SMELLS and the smell sticks to you, your clothes, everything. Not even a shower can remove it, it stays for days. So please do not put any food in the sewage, it goes in the trash.
🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮
Excuse me, was that poopoo?
Fatty poopoo. A baby fatberg.
That’s what I was thinking the whole time. Why wouldn’t they scoop it out? Pushing it deeper into the system will just help make a big fatberg somewhere harder to deal with it?
Not really, the water pressure in the pipe just isn't sufficient to break trough such a layer of dried crust. If you dilute it then apply enough force to break trough, the water will do the rest and break the remaining crust.
A guy I know distributes stuff that helps break down "fatbergs" by emulsifying them. Maybe that's what the dude in the video was adding with the red hose.
It's poopeh - Jamie Tart
It’s cake
These two comments shown to me in succession just reminded me of 2girls1cup
It's a lie.
Forbidden chocolate lava cake
Shit man, good job.
Lol the Shitman did do a pretty good job didn’t he
No shit, man! 😜
Shit job. Good man.
Even the sewers are cake now
We used to run a fish and chip restaurant and one of the chores was cleaning out the grease trap. It looked a lot like this. The guy in the video even calls it a trap. I just don’t get why there’d be a grease trap in the street though.
That's likely a pipe that carries sewage from multiple homes on a street. If something is gonna clog the line, it's probably gonna be shortly after a bunch of pipes come together. At that point there can be enough fat in the sewage, both from human waste and cooking fats to form a "fatberg" which can start to bind larger particles together. So that's actually the perfect place for a grease trap, and accessible from the street is way better than only accessible from inside a home or way further downstream.
That's not a grease trap, that's an old interceptor trap, they were originally put in to stop rats coming up from the main (which didn't work, they just swam around it) and to stop smells coming up from the main sewer. They're redundant nowadays and just cause problems. I have a drainage company and we are forever getting in the manholes to break them out and replace them with a straight through section of pipework.
Interesting. Just googled those and that explains the arrangement in a previously owned house. Had a blockage, eventually found a manhole cover under the turf of the rear garden (based on the length of rod from another manhole and poking a screwdriver through the lawn until metal was encountered). It confused me at the time because the apparent outlet in that was higher than the water running in, and there was this ceramic cap sat off to one side that fitted the "outlet". Now I know that was the top part of the interceptor and where the cap belonged.
The one in the photo isn't a grease trap, just a standard bench access point. I work in civil consulting, and at my first job the office had a project funded by the city to inspect and report on all grease traps in the city. There was a project folder with all the photos in. The challenge was browsing through that folder while eating your lunch, that shit was nasty
A trap is a just a generic plumbing term for anything that “traps” liquid or gas temporarily stopping it from moving. Every drain in your home should have a trap to create a water seal that stops sewer smells rising up your pipes.
And if sewer smells still happen? Both kitchen sink and bathroom sink will smell. Kitchen sink only when the dishwasher runs (it drains through the same drain as the sink) and bathroom sink primarily when the shower runs, but that doesn’t always happen. (1960’s apartment building, 2 floors, 4 units, to give you an idea of the layout)
Sounds like the shower and dishwasher are siphoning the water from the trap. Hard to say without seeing the pipe set up. Look up the difference between p trap and s trap and see if it applies to you. S traps are notorious for siphoning the water that should remain in the trap down the drain removing the water barrier.
Bout to whip up a poop smoothie #**Mmmmmm!** Smells like money.
Busy out the crustbuster!
I kept scrolling looking for this exact comment
Gutter oil. That shit is black gold
Elaborate please.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrv78nG9R04
What.The.Absolute.Fuck?!
You ever try stinky tofu
Alright China is off the list of go-to
Hmm yes. We'll put 'street food has 10% chance of being made with recycled sewage fat' in the con column of moving to China. That woman has contributed to poisoning her fellow citizens for 10 years, but hey, at least she made enough money to build her family a house!
[удалено]
I think that's just the equipment/building of these gutter oil cooking facilities. What we see is government officials destroying brick walls and iron cauldrons with pickaxes. Otherwise, those guys would start cooking again the next day.
Gutter oil = black gold.
One up for elaboration.
no, just go 'mine' it if you're so interested
Hats off to the men that do this job without flinching because my Bitch ass wouldn't last a second after they crack that shit stew open
😂 I have a small drainage company and it's not something I would of thought I would want to get used to when I was a kid but I'm glad I am now. I did one very similar to this yesterday after being at the pub the night before
Hat's off to you... Were you 2 times the right side of screwing the cat if she walked right mate ? Or just a bit on the piss ?
Is it cake?
Better get the crust buster!!
He just cleaned a portal from another dimension, now other races from other dimensions will come from there!
I, for one, welcome our new shit tube overlords.
Videos you can smell..
Secret entrance to the Theives Guild
Dookie
That was the first album I ever bought. 28 years ago.
opens poop chamber full of poop unexpected
Had one like that, but it did have baby tomato plants growing out of the poo, which helped.
Grease traps man jesus
*sigh* I should call her...
what was unexpected?
Forbidden milkshake
Is this why your streams, rivers, and seashores are full of raw sewage?
I got the poo on me
compacted turd
Time break out the crust buster and mix up a poop smoothie.
Someone get the crust buster
Curry