h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Some 20 years ago, at uni and unemployed I was looking for a night job which wouldn't interfere with study or my social life. A friend of my mother's worked at an inner city hospital and said they were looking for someone to work the "graveyard shift" (ho ho) in the morgue.
Accepting new 'clients', washing bodies, general cleaning up and so on.

"Cool", says I. As a young punk with plenty of goth friends, this job was going to have real street cred. And it did....

....but.
Without going into detail;
85% of the time it wasn't too bad - occasionally gross but mostly boring.
10% of the time was pretty nasty - but you got used to it.
5% of it was horrible! Really disgusting.
Less than 1%: unimaginably bad.

I applied for a similar job when I was at College. They asked me on the form why I wanted the job & I wrote "I like meeting people". I didn't get called for interview.

That <> makes me think I had a lucky escape.

But c'mon, dish the gory details

Don't say you weren't warned.(If you don't want to know, look away NOW).
You don't need the intimate details, but some of the really nasty stuff....


A woman who lived by herself was found in her flat 3 weeks after she went missing. Mid-summer, temperatures had been up to 44 degrees the previous week.

Baby not in a baby capsule thrown out of a car wreck.

Burn victims.

A biker who had come off at over 100 mph (turned out to be one of my friends).

And some were just emotionally crushing: the toddler who drowned in a swimming pool, or the 12 year old girl who committed suicide.

Did you get any emotional support from anyone when you had to deal with the distressing ones? My guess is that you didn't. It often appears to me that counselling and emotional support is for management more than ordinary staff in these situations.

Support was "available" I was told. What this meant was that there was a staff chaplain who worked 9-5 (while I worked midnight 'til 8) and spent most of his time tending to bereaved families etc. I could make appointments to see him, but it was difficult to get one and certainly at a time when it would suit me - and like most young males I thought I was tough enough to deal with whatever came my way.

Fortunately I *did* deal with it fairly well. However looking back I really do think that the hospital should have been much more proactive in their staff welfare. Not just for morgue staff either - I always felt that cleaners, orderlies and other peripheral staff were essentially ignored. At least the nurses had a fairly powerful union....

I think you're right. I had to deal with some horrendous stuff as a hospital porter and these are the jobs that receive the least training and support.

I have a relative who's college job was removing the brains from dead people before they were autopsied.

Not my idea of fun.

Some of the horrible ('somebody has to do it') jobs. Is the pay really good or something? Apart from med students, what was your motivation. Like many I would have been tempted to the easier options (selling icecream or something, cleaning...)

No, pay was about the same as working in a petrol station.
Not many med students on the graveyard shift - although there *were* a few cute nurses.

I used it to fair advantage with the goth girls (not quite as much cache' as grave-digger, but less hard labour)...


... but honestly, the best thing about it as a student was that there was really only a 3-4 hours work in an 8 hour shift and you could spend the rest of the time doing homework/assignments so you effectively got paid to study.

I didn't realise how nasty the really bad bits could be until abot 2 months in.