Ask Lemmy

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

House removals. 17hr day. 37 degrees celcius. Moved two three bedroom houses.

Used to load shipping containers in the Aussie sun but we'd start early. 32 ton in 25kg bags, 3x week.

Worked as security at a Serbian nightclub. It was not good. Violent, capable coked up Serbs.

I used to work at a really shitty metal factory as an engineer. I'd have to help get the lines going again after our weekly shutdown, and it was always a 24-30 hour work day, once per week. So 5 am until 5-10 am the next day. Very little for breaks (though they did feed us), almost never any sleep. That drive home after was harrowing. It probably would have been safer if I was drunk

For all my hard work and dedication I got rewarded with fucking nothing because that's how capitalism works

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.

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.

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 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 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...

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.

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.

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.

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 worked at a bank at the time. We were moving to a new system and running recons against the old system to check the behaviour was the same. I had to run a manual recon of the old system vs the new 4 times per day. There was a lot of focus from management and users on the new system.

The week leading up to Christmas, I was the one person not on holiday yet, and also the most junior person on the project. I found that week so stressful, as I had to run these recons and quickly decide whether each break was real or not before reporting to the users. Despite having worked on that system, I had very little confidence and didn't have the same intuitive mental model of the system my colleagues had. I had to dig into each break case-by-case, but they seemed much more able to understand what was going on via a few simple queries.

Anyway, I get through the week and left for the holidays on Thursday evening. I'm just grateful that I've gotten through it. Then, around 3pm on the Friday, I see a missed call from the tech lead. I log in, and everything's on fire. I join the incident call, and it turns out that we hadn't processed a single trade in the new system that whole week. I discover that it was thanks to a config change I'd made several weeks before, that had just made it to production. No-one (neither the users, nor I) had realised! But we missed several hundred million pounds worth of payments in that week as a result.

It was so jarring, having been relieved that I made it to the holiday, then joining the incident call and struggling to work out what to do. I completely dissociated and my mind was blank. I remember being on the call and really passively and calmly walking around my room. I kept thinking "I need to do x, I need to do y" but my mind couldn't focus and I was just staring at the screen. At some point I just lay in bed with my laptop while on the call.

There had been a total failure of process: my change had been approved by two people, the nonprod environment was configured differently in a way that didn't expose the bug, the recon failures looked very similar to the false positives, and there were so many false positives that it was impossible to dig into all of them. Meanwhile, we didn't have basic queries monitoring that trades were flowing in, and the users weren't paying much attention either, until they realised that it was broken.

Still, I made a lot of mistakes. I should have just escalated that there were breaks instead of trying to figure it out myself. I shouldn't have been afraid to call the tech lead and bring them out of their holiday. And I shouldn't have been afraid of the confrontation with the users.

Anyway, that experience really messed me up mentally for a long time. I lost so much confidence and became so much more scared of production (not in a healthy way). It really was not the right environment for me.

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

I did deliveries for the postal service one summer 20 years ago. They always had you load up with just a little more than you had time to deliver, yet expect you to do it all. This one particular day it was scorching hot, and in addition to the regular small packages I had a fridge, a bike and a couch. All packaged to make them hard to grip. All to be delivered to the door, on the 4th, 5th and 3rd floor respectively. After ringing the doorbell with the bike in a box on the third floor and the Karen chewing me out for not leaving it downstairs by the garage I broke. Our supervisors at the time did call around to make sure people would be home, and check about floors, help to carry, and such. Such a request would've been noted on the package slip.

That job served as good motivation to stay in school and get a cushy SWE career.

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

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.

I was fresh out of college before finding my first job. A friend worked at a company that sets up large fancy decorations for all sorts of events and helped me get some overflow work. I was brought on as a freelancer for a 30 hour shift on a new year's block party where we started that morning by making multiple trips to and from the site to bring our gear.

The first 12 hours went fine as we went to three different sites around the block but one of my new coworkers was a bit unstable to say the least. I must've rubbed him the wrong way because as we were sitting around eating dinner among some tables set up during the celebrations I mentioned I was so tired I couldn't taste the food. Somehow that triggered the guy and he got up directly from me, shoved me off my chair, and just said "I don't like you" then casually walked off. Mind you, this all happened in a large crowd so it caused a hell of a scene. My buddy and I were just left dumbstruck while a security guard came by and demanded to know who we were working with to report on the guy. We didn't want to get into trouble so we just made up some info and got the hell out of there ASAP.

The last few hours were tense as my assailant and I avoided each other while we started tearing down the decorations an hour after the countdown. My boss saw some blood on my hand where I fell and I had to make up a story that I just scratched it against a post somewhere. I never went back to work at that company again. I later heard from my friend that the same guy ended up knocking down someone else at another job. I often wonder if he eventually got his ass kicked or end up in jail for assaulting the wrong guy.